Four weeks on, and we’re almost there: the only outstanding matter from Australia’s federal election is the prolonged recount in Bradfield, now about three-quarters complete. (Read Ben Raue’s account of scrutineering there.) Teal Nicolette Boele is back in the lead, by 12 votes over Liberal Gisele Kapterian; a margin that narrow (if it holds up) may not survive legal challenge if the Liberals are minded to try it. The partial recount in Goldstein also confirmed, as expected, the victory of former Liberal member Tim Wilson.
But the big news has been in the Senate, where last week One Nation won not only the final apparently doubtful seat, in Western Australia, but also the sixth seat in New South Wales, which I – and most other observers – had assumed was safe for the ALP. That brings the far-right party to four seats in the Senate from 1 July, and three years later (if they can repeat their performance next time) it will be six seats.
Although the NSW result came as a surprise, it was consistent with much of the pre-election speculation, in which One Nation was seen to have a strong chance at seats in every state. (In the end it finished seventh in South Australia and Victoria and eighth in Tasmania.) In my preview I noted that the Coalition had adopted a strategy of mutual assistance with One Nation that would bring them into something like the relationship that the Greens have with Labor.
According to Kevin Bonham’s analysis, preferences from the Coalition were not actually critical to the One Nation win in NSW, because the Coalition’s surplus was not big enough to make a difference. But a better performance on preferences in general was the key thing; notably, as Bonham points out, from the joint “Libertarian”/People First/anti-vax ticket (discussed here in an earlier post) headed by former MP Craig Kelly. It drew 1.9% of the vote, which flowed overwhelmingly to One Nation.
And for this, the Coalition under Peter Dutton must take a share of responsibility. By bringing One Nation within the tent of its electoral strategy it bolstered its respectability, making it seem like a normal option rather than the pariah that it once was. The effect was twofold: voters who were not themselves extremists were more willing to give some preference to One Nation, and voters who were already committed to the far right came to see One Nation as the tendency’s leading representative, allowing it to consolidate votes at the expense of rivals like Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots.
We’ve discussed a number of times the Liberal Party’s embrace of One Nation, and particularly the way in which what can appear to be a tactical decision is driven by a sense of philosophical kinship. If Sussan Ley is serious about trying to change the Liberal Party’s direction this is one of the first things she will need to revisit – just as it has brought forth a whole treeful of poisoned fruit.
The more general issue, which is not confined to Australia, is also one that we’ve looked at before. More than a decade ago I wrote a Crikey story on the different ways that had been tried of dealing with the far right; I still think that its main message, that there is no single best approach and that different strategies work in different circumstances, is true.
But we’ve now had a lot of experience of one particular strategy: the one I labelled “Pandering to the extremists”, and for which I cited Nicolas Sarkozy’s France and John Howard’s Australia as examples. It’s been tried repeatedly since, as centre-right parties (and sometimes centre-left – hello Keir Starmer!) aim to draw the sting of the fascists by adopting their policies. It doesn’t work.
Sometimes the party that tries it gets a short-term boost, as Howard did, but in the longer term it just legitimises and emboldens those who are out to destroy it. Faced with rival parties telling them that dark-skinned immigrants are the root of all evil, voters tend, with a certain logic, to opt for the one that has been saying it most consistently and for longest. If evidence means anything, we know that adopting the far right’s policies is not the way to stem its growth.
What, then, can we do instead? That will be another post, coming soon.
The World is Not Enough 
I think deeper and longer-term forces at work, and they are also at work in Australia.
The most important of these is the decline of class-based voting, and its replacement by values-based voting.
For well over a century, the UK, Australia and most European countries have had class-based political systems. There has been a party or parties representing, broadly, the upper and middle classes, and advocating the retention of the capitalist system, and there has been a party or parties representing, broadly, the working class, and advocating some variety of socialism or social democracy.
It’s important to realise, however, that class is not the only axis around which democratic politics can be organised. In the US and Canada, political behaviour correlates only weakly with class. White Southerners vote overwhelmingly Republican, regardless of class. New Yorkers vote overwhelmingly Democratic, regardless of class. Every seat in Toronto elects a Liberal MP, regardless of class. In most Asian democracies, voting has no correlation with class at all. People vote according to region, ethnicity, language, religion or caste – because these things are the focus of most people’s loyalties, rather than economic class.
Over the past 20 to 30 years, we have seen a consistent drift away from class-based voting in many democracies, including the UK and Australia. Increasingly, affluent, urban, highly educated people vote for parties of the left, while poorer and less well-educated people vote for parties of the right. There is also a strong generational divide: since young people tend to be more affluent, better educated and more “values-motivated” than older people, there is a widening generational gap in voting behaviour.
This change has been slow and incremental in most countries most of the time, But sometimes an issue arises which precipitates rapid change. In Britain, it has obviously been Brexit. Millions of working-class voters have abandoned Labour over the past decade, because Brexit’s appeal to English patriotism and anti-immigration sentiment has overwhelmed their previous sense of class solidarity. Simultaneously, in Scotland, the working-class voters of Glasgow and the “Red Clyde” have abandoned almost overnight a century of class loyalty and embraced Scottish nationalism.
Australia has not seen anything quite this dramatic, but the same trends are at work here. For more than 20 years the middle-class left’s enthusiasm for illegal immigration, under the guise of “asylum seeking”, has been driving working-class voters into the arms of the Liberal-National Coalition. More recently, the left’s rhetoric around the climate emergency has had a similar, if more localised, effect, as working-class voters have reacted badly to attacks on the coal industry.
These issues have been less damaging for Labor in Victoria than they have been in NSW, Qld and WA. But this also consistent with the wider pattern – as we see in the US with dramatic regional differences in voting. Victoria is becoming Massachusetts, while Qld is becoming Texas.
One striking feature of the 2019 British election was the Tories’ abrupt abandonment of Thatcherism. Johnson campaigned on a platform of higher government spending on state services, increases in pensions, state intervention to support failing industries, and a strict timetable for achieving carbon neutrality.
This partly reflected Johnson’s lack of core belief about anything except his destiny to be PM, but it was also a calculated and successful Tory strategy. These progressive-sounding policies were bait for working-class voters to come over to the dark side.
Johnson recognised one of the fundamental new rules of this emerging political era – that it is easier for the right to move left on economics than it is for the left to move right on questions of identity and culture.
This is an important insight. Most Tories were happy to jettison 40 years of Thatcherite ideology in order to get back into power, because Tories are by nature cynics whose main concern is power.
But the British Labour Party cannot act with the same cynicism. If it defies its supporters’ key values, they will abandon it, and the party will split.
The same is true for Australian Labor. As we saw in 2019 with Bill Shorten’s doomed efforts to keep everybody happy on Adani, and with Labor’s long-term divisions over illegal immigration, Labor’s leadership cannot take positions which contradict the values of either half of its electoral base – the affluent middle-class progressives and the traditional working-class – without paying an electoral price. This is made worse by Australia’s electoral system, which gives voters viable alternatives on both left and right – the Greens and One Nation, without wasting their vote as they do in the UK if they vote for minor parties.
I fear that the logical consequence of these trends is that social democratic parties in the western democracies are doomed. Progressive politics will have to find new forms if it is to survive at all, let alone defeat the forces of reactionary nationalism and populism which are now asserting themselves so strongly.
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