By Joel Deane
The Australian political system rewards consensus.
We all vote. We all choose our most preferred candidate, rather than the most popular. And every state has the same number of senators, even Tasmania with a population an eighth the size of New South Wales.
What this system can give Australia – unlike many other democracies – is a critical mass of voter feedback on big issues.
That means that, although the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal Party have policy differences, once debates are settled, they have been like a Venn diagram on the governance of many major issues.
Take Medicare and compulsory superannuation.
Both policies were hotly contested, but since they were cemented into place by the Hawke and Keating Governments and accepted as a given by a consensus of the electorate they’ve become immoveable. Coalition Governments have only been able to fiddle around the edges of these big reforms and, at best, try to change their purposes incrementally over time.
My point? Compulsory and proportional voting are the systemic forces that have kept Australian politics to the middle of the road since Federation because they reward consensus rather than extremism.
Tony Abbott tried to change that.
Abbott took advantage of a Labor Government that overindulged in civil wars to win power, then tried to break away from the consensus.
He walked away from action on climate change – an issue John Howard had committed the Coalition to – and tried to create a divide-and-conquer US-style of politics that’s defined by cultural wars and witch hunts.
Abbott’s efforts was supported by a Liberal Party room that had become much more conservative during the Howard era and an Australia media that had become much more juvenile and reactionary as a consequence of the Internet.
When Malcolm Turnbull – by instinct a consensus-style leader – took over from Abbott he tried to steer politics back to the consensus approach.
We know how that ended.
That brings us to Scott Morrison.
Morrison was a more skilled politician than Abbott.
In the 2019 election, he was able to win by taking advantage of the lack of national consensus on climate change action.
Parts of Queensland were understandably worried about making the jump to a net-zero economy and Morrison ramped up the anxieties – with some help from Clive Palmer’s unprecedented advertising spend, confused Labor messaging, sports-style political coverage by the media, and a well-meaning but ill-conceived campaign in the sunshine state by the Greens.
What was different about 2022?
The gravitational pull of our electoral system.
It’s taken a decade, but the critical mass of the electorate have used our compulsory and proportional electoral system to correct the attempts to turn Australian politics into a version of Donald Trump’s America or Boris Johnson’s Britain.
The overwhelming majority of Australians – be they conservative or progressive – want action on climate change and a return to integrity in government.
The policies of the independents, Greens and Labor overlap on those areas. That’s why two-thirds of the electorate have shifted their votes to those teal, orange, green and red candidates.
I suspect a Turnbull-style Liberal Party would have had policies that placed the Coalition in that policy Venn diagram – and therefore in the middle ground where most voters stand.
What Scott Morrison did was walk away from the middle ground — and therefore walk away from the majority of voters.
Morrison thought he could shift the centre of political gravity – taking traditional Labor seats by embracing radical populism.
That approach worked for Trump and Johnson.
It didn’t work in Australia.
In fact, it couldn’t work. Not when the broad consensus of voters across the country – including previously outlier states of Western Australia and Queensland – had lived through droughts, fires, floods and plague and wanted change. Not when corruption was a national discussion point. Not when the likes of Grace Tame refused to be silent on gender inequity and violence. Not when people have jobs and still have to live in tents.
Scott Morrison tried to use this election to make Australian politics more like everywhere else. What happened instead is that a critical mass of voters used the electoral system to make Australian politics more like nowhere else.
Australian-style democracy is like Australian-rules football. Unique.
The Liberals tried to change the rules of Australian-style democracy – and were punished.
The new Labor Government needs to learn from that hard lesson or they will suffer the same fate.
