As I wrote for Insight yesterday, one clear lesson from Australia’s federal election is: rich people vote left.
The idea that the Liberals are the party of the rich is so fixed in the minds of the Australian left that they simply cannot, will not, countenance any suggestion to the contrary. Every time I’ve pointed out, over the last five years and more, that the Greens are the richest voting bloc in Australia, Greens voters in cafes from Fitzroy to Ultimo have spat out their smashed avos and reached for their new model Macbooks to tap out their disdain. I don’t THINK so — the Libs are the party of the rich, EVERYONE knows that!! Whereupon they’ve herded Poppy or Sebastian into the Tesla and driven them off to Methodist Ladies’ College or Sydney Grammar in a cloud of smug.
But the results of the 2022 election are so stark that they must surely penetrate even a Green’s inch-thick armour of un-self-awareness.
The Coalition lost the election, but not because voters flocked to Labor. In fact, Labor’s voters deserted them, too, leading to a primary vote at nearly its lowest ever — lower than many recent elections in which Labor was unceremoniously thrashed. Labor only won because even more Coalition voters deserted them. The biggest and most devastating Coalition losses were in what were once blue-ribbon Liberal seats (the Nationals were the only major party not to lose votes). Australia’s richest electorates, Warringah, Wentworth, Kooyong and Goldstein, all deserted the Liberals and flocked to the “Teal” (blue-green) “independents”.
These seats were always going to leave the column for any remotely conservative party. Many may not like that fact, but it’s already happened in Canada, Britain, and America. Our voting system merely slowed it down here. The truth is that the well-off rich (and I generalise of course) now vote solidly Left – maybe because they can afford to and like to virtue-signal? They vote more like Canberra public servants than anything else.
So in a losing election, it was good to lose these seats. Frankly, I don’t see them coming back for a long time.
It’s interesting to note just how many of the teal independents have inherited fortunes. Like their electorates, they represent generational wealth. In other words, people who’ve never built anything in their lives, let alone had to wonder whether they can pay a power bill that spirals higher by the month, mostly thanks to climate change politics. So, on Saturday, across the leafy suburbs and the harbourside mansions, they turned out in their Range Rovers and their Jimmy Choos and flocked, as Orwell once said of them, “towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat”.
It’s almost worth enduring a Labor government, though, to see the back of the Liberal “moderates”, like Tim Wilson, Trent Zimmerman and Dave Sharma. These dripping-wet clowns dragged a supposedly conservative party so deep into the mire of wokeness that, no matter what the legacy media would have you believe, they were indistinguishable from the Greens. The frivolous rich people who voted teal simply voted for their own, ultra-rich version of the real thing rather than a wishy-washy imitation.
I’m glad the Matt Kean-type faction of the Liberal Party has been decimated. Their one redeeming feature was supposed to be their commitment to freedom concerns (as the self-professed inheritors of the John Stuart Mill tradition), but the pandemic showed that to be a hollow lie. These moderates were at least as pro-lockdown and ‘we defer to the public health caste’ as the Liberal Party room’s conservatives. Make that more pro-despotism. And more big spending, big taxing, ‘let’s succumb to Modern Monetary Theory idiocies’. So good riddance to them all […]
If Morrison had refused to sign up to Net Zero and made rising energy prices and inflation an election issue, together with mining jobs, I think he would have won the election – this being the formula of Liberal wins since Tony Abbott took over as Opposition Leader. Instead, the Liberal Prime Minister, who seemingly had no core convictions and no strong commitment to freedom or to the presumption of innocence, let himself be pushed by the party wets into reneging on a promise made to Coalition voters at the last election in 2019.
By signing up to Net Zero, Morrison was snookered.
If the Liberals are smart (and that’s no guarantee, just ask National in NZ), they will finally put the Wets back in their soggy little box. Sure, the Liberals are a “broad church”, but they are also historically a conservative party. They need to remember that if they’re to be in any way relevant.
What we need now is for the Liberals to move a good ways to the right and to do so openly. Recant on the Climate Change genuflecting, admitting it was a mistake while pointing out the huge energy cost rises coming. Go back to arguing for sane budgets with surpluses (which will mean disavowing the Frydenberg uber-Keynesian, defer-to-Treasury approach). Openly commit to some sort of belief in freedom, one that will involve walking-the-walk not just talking-the-talk until you get elected into Parliament. And be tough against Woke shibboleths a la Mark Latham.
Spectator Australia
Yes, all of the above will send the legacy media into a screaming meltdown — but, so what? If the Liberals haven’t worked out that the legacy media will have screaming meltdowns, no matter what, they never will. They’ve spent the last three years trying to pander to the media, and where did it get them?
In fact, as Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro and Orban have shown, let the media have their screaming meltdowns. The louder, the better. Because the more they scream helplessly at the sky, the more voters quietly shift to the right.