Seriously - don't f*ck it up

(First published in The New Daily on 5 May)

(Photo: Mike Bowers)

*Written on the morning of 4 May. Count still occurring in many seats

We are about to see who the Australian Labor Party really is.

The Coalition is done. As far as repudiations go, it doesn’t get much more brutal than what the nation delivered on Saturday night.

The worst result for the Liberal party since Menzies. Its leader turfed out of the Parliament along with most future leadership candidates. Swings against the party in every jurisdiction and most seats, including crucially, the outer suburbs that were supposed to be the new pathway to electoral relevancy.

There is no need to ask the Coalition, or its supporters in the political landscape such as News Corp, what it thinks needs to happen about anything in the future.

As the result became apparent, commentators from within the Coalition and its media arm were arguing that Dutton lost because he didn’t embrace Trump enough.

It’s hard to tell at this point whether this isn’t just some long term embedded espionage project coming to fruition. Voters didn’t just reject Dutton and his ilk, they consigned them to irrelevancy.

But will Labor? Because we are about to find out whether Labor has the bravery to govern without the approval of right-wingers.

This victory isn’t a thumping endorsement of Labor – it’s a rejection of mask-off, hard-right politics. But history tells us Labor won’t see it that way, and that’s not good for anyone.

Labor deserves credit for a disciplined campaign. Party Secretary Paul Erickson was right to advise the parliamentary wing to hold its nerve and to let inflation and cost of living pressures appear to ease, to get Albanese out in electorates from January – and to let the inevitable flow on effects from Trump’s policies to turn flirtation into revulsion.

But just because there is now just one major political outfit in this country capable of actually running a disciplined and professional election campaign doesn’t mean Labor has a mandate to stick to its middle of the road mediocracy.

Throughout the campaign, Albanese’s net approval rating stayed in negative territory – it just wasn’t as bad as Dutton’s.

In the final Newspoll before the election day, Albanese rated -10 per cent and Dutton -27 per cent.

Combine Dutton’s unpopularity with the most disastrous election campaign in modern public memory and you have voters flocking to the least worst option.

How Trump’s protectionism and fossil fuel advocacy are setting back global progressIndependents will not help form government – but they will be vital in holding it to account

Dutton was the inevitable end point of the Liberal party that John Howard nursed into the electorate.

Avaricious, grasping and elitist, he embraced the worst of what Howard promised. There’s a certain irony that having dog whistled for white supremacy, his entire political career – and he himself – has been replaced by a white woman born in South Africa.

But don’t be surprised if you never hear from Dutton again. A multi-millionaire many times over, Dutton has never cared for public service beyond the power it gave him personally.

His politics was cruel and brutish and he fought against inclusion, tolerance and generosity with fervour. He spent the last week of the election campaign elevating a culture war started by self-confessed neo-Nazis.

The 2022 election was a harbinger of doom for the Liberal party which it deliberately ignored. It remains unclear whether Labor will do the same.

Labor spent the past three years pretending its hands were tied on issues of integrity, religious protections, climate, sanctioning Israel, tax reform, poverty, inequality and housing because it didn’t have bipartisan support.

It was bullshit then. It is even more so now. Voters did not overwhelmingly endorse Labor.

The cratering of the Coalition makes this seem like a massive Labor win when the party barely saw an increase in its primary vote. But minor parties like the Greens did see an increase, as did independents.

It’s continuing a modern trend where third parties are emerging as bigger challengers – so much so that psephologists are finding it harder to determine who should be in the top two for electorate contests.

It would be a mistake for Labor to take this result and see it as an endorsement of more of the same. If Labor does not do something with power this time round to materially improve people’s lives and reform the country, it is heading down the same path as the Coalition.

Albanese will probably head to Washington in the next week or so to state Australia’s case to the White House. That will be one of the first indications of whether Labor has actually decided to change course and set Australia on a new path.

If May 3 delivered “a new hope” (another Star Wars reference for those who missed it) then May the Fourth be with those who have given this government one more chance to be the hope it promised for more than a decade.

Australia has very real issues. Our tax system is entrenching generational inequality. Secure housing depends on luck and wealth. Fossil fuel vested interests rank higher than a burning planet. Speaking against a live-stream genocide has been treated as worse than the genocide itself. Poverty is treated as a photo opportunity and not something government has any real power to change.

And if the conservative political party Australia said no to is against any changes, well then, the so-called progressive government’s hands are tied.

Australia said no to what Dutton. Murdoch and co tried to shove down their throats. Will Labor do the same, or will it continue to ignore the will of voters and bypass progressive senators in order to curry the favour of those it claims to be diametrically opposed to?

A small swing has delivered a huge opportunity. But also a message. Will Labor listen?

Amy Remeikis is chief political analyst for the The Australia Institute. You can read more from her and the institute here.