Last week I heard a commentator make a wonderful statement along the lines of if the NSW election was close then we may not know the result on the night.
Which is fine but it’s rather like telling us that unless a sporting team has an insurmountable lead with a minute to go, then the result is still up for grabs.
I guess that I shouldn’t be too hard on the mainstream media; after all they have to fill a lot of air-time and they frequently have nothing new to say, so the fact that they sometimes state the obvious should be no surprise.
I guess that I should be impressed by the fact that the speaker had the intelligence to use the word “if”. After all, various media outlets were telling us that the election was “neck and neck” and that there was a real question about whether Labor would be able to form government, even as a minority. Nobody was pointing out that the Perrottet government was already in minority, had a series of scandals apart from Gladys, as well as a series of questionable decisions such as knocking down stadiums and trains that didn’t fit in the tunnels.
But according to the Murdoch media, the Liberals lost – not because of any of these factors, but rather because they didn’t follow the agenda of Sky After Dark.
Like the federal election, it was all this woke nonsense about inclusivity and climate action and expecting a government to actually do something, that was their undoing. If only they were prepared to say that climate change is wrong, and if anyone is being picked on it’s their own fault for not being someone who isn’t the sort of person that people pick on, and if you don’t have enough money to afford a lawyer then you probably owe a Robodebt, then they’d be the sort of government that people could elect. Yes, people don’t want what Labor and the Greens are offering: People want cheap, reliable energy and low-interest rates and they’d rather a job than one that paid them enough to afford luxuries like food and shelter.
So the answer isn’t to change any policies to make the party more mainstream. The answer is to have the sort of platform that would make John Howard say, “Ah, are we sure that we want to go that far, it seems a little right-wing to me…”
In spite of the commentary, the fact remains that we now have wall-to-wall Labor governments in Australia… (I’m ignoring Tasmania because there’s no wall, but rather a gulf between it and the rest of Australia). This is in spite of the push from the media to ignore just about everything the Coalition do wrong and magnify every mistake the other parties make. And the push from people isn’t for nuclear power or for more Matt Canavan-powered electricity. People just want to feel that they’re going be under less pressure next year than this and that we’re not screwing up the world for the future.
Regardless of the truth, when the Coalition accuse Labor of doing too much, too quickly in relation to climate action and The Greens and the Teals accuse them of doing too little, then it has the effect of making many people think that it must be about right. Pushing for the wins of yesteryear in an election is only going to make the Coalition irrelevant to all but the people who already vote for them.
It’s not good for a democracy to lack a strong opposition, but the way the Liberals are going, it’s becoming increasingly likely that The Greens will end up being the main opposition party and the Liberals will be a fringe group who have their newsletter published by Rupert Murdoch.
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