As the washout of last weekend’s Australian federal election continues, more and more interesting facts are emerging from the post-poll entrail-reading. The most obvious takeaway from the election result is that a great many Australians walked away from the two-party system in disgust. For the moment, this has favoured the left, mostly because the independents on the right are still too fractured to offer a coherent, focussed alternative.
But the election has exposed the falsity of even more cherished beliefs held by Australia’s media-political class. The first is that the Liberals are the “party of the rich”. In fact, it was the very rich who did the most damage to the party.
The causes of the defeat in Kooyong to the ‘teals’ can be applied across Australia, indeed it’s a global phenomenon that wealthy inner-urban elites are voting for the Left.
Which means that traditional Liberal heartland seats — the rich, inner-city suburbs of Kew and Hawthorn in Melbourne, and the Harbourside in Sydney — are now a green no-go zone. But there’s a whole new world of opportunity in the very places the teal-voting elites of Kooyong never deign to park their Range Rovers.
It is now time for the Liberal party to reset, stop obsessing with the woke causes of inner-urban elites, and focus on the true forgotten people in the middle and outer suburbs as well as rural and regional Australia. Swings at this election against Labor in their working class heartland prove this is where the Liberal party must focus. These are the Australians who will bear the brunt of what the ‘teals’ are demanding in terms of emissions reductions by 2030. The people of Kooyong, Wentworth, Goldstein, North Sydney and Mackellar aren’t forgotten or quiet. They are loud, entitled, and privileged.
The Liberal party has always triumphed when, in fact, it remembered that it was never meant to be the party of the Top End of Town. Robert Menzies, the party’s founder, pitched himself squarely at the “forgotten people”, and dominated the political scene for decades. Three decades later, John Howard appealed to the Battlers, and became the second-longest serving PM after Menzies.
The Tories worked this shift out in 2019. Boris Johnson broke the ‘red wall’ by winning dozens of seats in working-class northern England […] Inner-city elites are the embodiment of post-material politics and they are voting left.
Spectator Australia
That unambiguous shift of the ultra-rich to the ultra-left is playing out in another truism demolished last Saturday: the interplay of state and federal politics. Federal Labor improved its West Australian vote substantially, largely in a hangover from Premier Mark McGowan’s sweeping victory last year. And in Victoria, “Brand Dan” was so toxic that Anthony Albanese avoided the premier of that state like the plague.
With good reason. Andrews is viscerally hated in Melbourne’s working-class, migrant outer east. Even his own seat is starkly divided over the premier — largely on wealth lines.
Of the 20 booths in the Victorian Premier’s southeastern Melbourne seat, 16 recorded primary vote swings against Labor, including seven with double-digit swings.
The swings were more pronounced in the poorest, most multicultural part of Mr Andrews’ seat, in the suburb of Noble Park North, and lowest in the northern, more affluent area around Wheelers Hill.
Chisholm, won by union official Carina Garland from Liberal Gladys Liu on Saturday, is the third of the three federal seats overlapping the Premier’s electorate.
The Australian
Which brings us to another myth — this one minted in the aftermath of the election — that stands to be demolished by facts: that Chinese-Australians voted against the Liberals because of their hard line against the Xi regime.
This oversimplification of Chinese-Australian voters is the classic narrative fallacy and exposes the lack of cultural understanding of my community by those commentators. Once a story is established, it becomes difficult to overwrite. But I am going to try […]
Many Chinese migrants such as Taiwanese-Australians like me, Vietnamese refugees, Uighur dissidents, those from Southeast Asia and Australian-born Chinese whose families have been here for so long that even their grandparents don’t speak Chinese have little affinity with the Chinese government.
I came across a range of opinions within the Chinese-Australian community. Some lamented the loss of business opportunities during the pandemic lockdowns and many cared little about Sino-Australian relations, while others applauded Peter Dutton’s tough stance.
One took offence at the use of the People’s Republic of China flag on media reports about Chinese-Australians.
Imagine being a German immigrant in the 30s, seeing the Swastika emblazoned on reports about German immigrants. If Chinese-Australians were so offended by the anti-CCP stance, why was Gladys Liu, widely seen as pro-CCP and who defended Xi Xinping in past remarks, so unceremoniously booted?
Wang instead points to a very pragmatic reason why so many Chinese-Australian voters turned their backs on the Libs: abandoning the sound economic management that was characteristic of the Howard era, and for failing to uphold the Menzian values of liberty.
Chinese-Australians are very often shrewd observers of Australian politics. The irony of Anthony Albanese as Prime Minister maintaining the hard stance on China is not lost on them. Neither are they naive enough to believe the Labor government will suddenly start practising responsible fiscal management.
Chinese culture has a very long-term orientation; one Chinese-Australian Liberal supporter said to me that we must vote out the Liberal government to guarantee future prosperity at the expense of short-term pain.
The Australian
To end on a lighter note: BFD readers may have the misfortune to recall Jane Caro. A classic left-media luvvy, Caro gushed endlessly about Your Cindy, loudly pining as ‘ow she wished she could ‘ave a Cindy of ‘er very own. Well, if the socialist bint wouldn’t come to Australia, Caro decided it was time for Australia to have home-grown socialist bint. So she stood for the NSW Senate.
So far, AEC results record a whopping 24 votes for the Jacinda-hugger. Which is one vote less than One Nation’s Kate McCulloch.