It’s not without reason that I hedged my posts last week on the then-upcoming Victorian state election by noting that “predicting election outcomes is nearly always a sure way to make a fool of yourself”. And so it came to pass: after noting that polls were indicating that Victoria would go to a knife-edge and that Dan Andrews was in deep trouble in his own seat, Labor surprised everyone by romping home.
I had warned that the bells of Victoria tolled for Jacinda Ardern, too. “If Andrews does indeed crater on Saturday, it will likely be nothing compared to the catastrophic impact that awaits his conjoined twin across the Tasman”.
As I cautioned: oh, how those words may come back to haunt me! And, in due course, they did.
Or did they?
Because the story in Victoria is a lot more complicated than it appears, and it does indeed hold a warning for Ardern – and an opportunity. And they toll even more ominously for Chris Luxon.
Although you wouldn’t believe it from the triumphalist left-media coverage, there was a massive swing against Labor in Victoria: -5.8%. In any normal election, that would be a government-changing swing, probably by a landslide. Like his federal counterpart, Anthony Albanese, Andrews won with a dismal primary vote: just 37%. Slightly better than Albanese’s 32%, but far behind even the 44% that spelt electoral disaster for Joan Kirner in 1992, let alone the 50% that John Cain romped in with in 1982.
More notably, in Andrews’s own seat, he suffered a massive swing of almost 9% against him, more than halving the safe Labor seat’s margin. But the Liberals suffered an even more devastating 12% swing. So, both the major parties (and the Greens) went backwards in Mulgrave. Where did the votes go? Almost exclusively to neophyte independent challenger Ian Cook who won an astonishing 20.5% of the vote. There was also a substantial informal vote, indicating that nearly 1 in 10 voters felt that no one was worth voting for.
So, what relevance does this have to New Zealand? As I wrote some time ago, Ardern and Andrews are the idiot twins of the Antipodean left. Not only do Victoria and New Zealand have similar populations and landmass, but they’re also both run by socialists with absolutely no experience outside politics and living off the public purse.
More importantly, both hung their political fortunes and fortified their cults of personality with pandemic despotism. Ardern was lucky enough to make hay while the pandemic sun was still shining and a great many voters were still blindly convinced that they had been “saved from Covid”. The question was whether, another year down the track, Covid authoritarianism has become a political albatross, rather than a gift horse.
From the election results: clearly. But not nearly enough to overcome a pathetic opposition. And that’s where the opportunity for Ardern, and the omens for Luxon, lurk.
For Ardern, there’s the comforting knowledge that, firstly, a wide enough margin can be a buffer against a normally devastating swing. A 6% swing would take down most governments, but Andrews had won a whopping +5% in 2018, building on the +3% swing in 2014. Ardern’s landslide win in 2020 is likewise a buffer against the swings and arrows of electoral fortune. That said, NZ’s MMP system means that Ardern would more likely be forced into minority government if she suffers a swing in 2023.
The Victorian result also shows that widespread electoral fury can, if dissipated enough across seats, not bite as hard as it should.
Like Ardern, Andrews is so hated by sections of the community that even during the election campaign, he didn’t do anything but the most tightly controlled public appearances. One suspects that the bronze statue he’s earned outside 1 Treasury Place (thanks to a law enacted, ironically, by Jeff Kennett) will be a target for vandalism for years to come. But all that counted for little on election day, when the anger wasn’t concentrated strategically enough to flip seats. Still, the lurking danger is that the anger will continue to seethe.
Andrews also laid down a depressing template for the left to win elections: outright bribery. Benjamin Franklin correctly noted that democracy contains within itself the seeds of a tyranny of the masses. Dan Andrews showed that, if you can convince the people that they can vote themselves money, you can pave yourself a golden path to office.
Andrews racked up a staggering tally of promises in the campaign. Including “initiatives” announced before the election, the bill for keeping Dictator Dan in 1 Treasury Place rounds at something around $160 billion. This, is in a state already $230 billion in the red and counting. Many of the promises are indistinguishable from plain bribery aimed squarely at what were once Labor’s core constituents, but who’ve been increasingly straying from the fold: Nurses (free midwife training, paying the HECS debts of nurses, bonuses for new applicants, free public transport for nurses), teachers ($3 billion in education spending), trades (free TAFE places, free car registration for apprentices) and women (free “period products” in public places).
Even, quite literally, free toys.
So, all Ardern has to do next year is promise, promise, promise. Billions on billions of spending. Promise the world to anyone who’ll listen.
It doesn’t matter that Ardern already has a list of broken promises as long as your arm – so did Andrews, including a promise, made on camera at the height of the pandemic, for 4000 new ICU beds. It never happened. In fact, Victoria’s hospital and emergency medicine systems have all but collapsed. But the leaners for whom socialism has such appeal don’t care. It’s the glitter of someone else’s gold that gets their vote.
That Ardern would get away with it, just as Andrews has, comes down to the really decisive factor in the Victorian election – and the one that tolls a death knell for Chris Luxon.
Put simply, Andrews won because the opposition was just hopelessly, pointlessly, irredeemably, pathetic.
Andrews’s record, especially of blatant corruption is so obvious that even Victoria’s catatonic justice system has run or is running something like six separate corruption investigations. Corruption so blatant that government ministers, en masse, simply ignore police summonses and get away with it. Given, all that, Andrews should have been toast for any halfway decent opposition.
What Victorians got, instead, was the modern-day Liberal party. A “conservative” party so dripping wet that they can barely hold themselves upright, let alone hold the government to account. Even conservative commentators unanimously agreed that the Liberal’s Matthew Guy let Andrews walk all over him at the leader’s debate.
Guy and his party singularly failed to attack Andrews’s weaknesses, out of a weaselly fear of “negativity”. So, the issues that polling showed were of most concern to voters in the outer suburbs of Melbourne – cost of living (by a long lead), inflation, health service and lockdowns – went completely unaddressed by the opposition. Instead, perplexingly, Guy and his party chased after Labor’s and the Greens’ tails, pushing nonsense like renewable energy targets, which polling consistently shows is a bottom-rung concern for the average voter.
The result was that conservative minor parties, parties who are unapologetically conservative and campaigned on grass-roots issues like cost of living, education – especially keeping rainbow-left indoctrination out of schools – and health, reaped an astonishing 17% of the vote. The only problem is that, as with the state-wide anger against Andrews, that vote was dissipated amongst a raft of micro-parties.
But the lesson is clear: conservative oppositions – in Victoria, in Canberra and in Wellington – need to wise up that Twitter is not the voice of the people. Neither is the press gallery. So long as they keep trying to pander to those bubbles, they will keep losing. So long as they keep running scared of what the media will say, not what voters in the suburbs and rural areas want to hear, they will keep losing.
As Ron DeSantis has shown in the US, as minor parties like Family First showed in Victoria, when conservatives remember how to be conservative, when they provide a clear and unapologetic alternative, they win votes.
This is the inescapable lesson from Victoria, ringing clear across the Tasman. You can be certain that Jacinda Ardern is listening – the question is whether Chris Luxon and National will keep sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting, “La-la-la-la”.