Yesterday I wrote a piece foreshadowing the collapse of the Labor Party.
While I think Labor is facing a very serious identity and electoral crisis, there is still one constituency, and flicker of hope that the ALP has. This was brought to my attention after publish the initial article. This one constituency and flicker of hope the ALP has is with the ethnic vote.
Labor’s most solid support bases are in western Melbourne and Sydney which have among the highest concentrations of immigrants and ethnic voters in the country. While the ALP continues to haemorrhage votes to the Greens in inner city seats, the Green vote in the outer suburbs can barely summon a couple of per cent.
The power of the ethnic vote for the ALP explains their softness in areas such as speech suppression, their strong critique of the Western tradition, and their tendency to pander to Islam and other ethnic groups.
So it is with the ethnic vote that the sole flicker of hope for the Australian Labor Party lays.
Does this mean that the ALP may become the centre left party, especially catering to an ethnic constituency? Perhaps. But even here there are tensions. The ALP’s ‘progressive’ stance in relation to sex and gender politics puts itself strongly at odds with the traditional values of many ethnic cultures, and this could arise as a major point of contention.
Yet, just as the ALP now sneers are the ‘unwashed bogans’ that would have otherwise represented one of their core constituency, a cynical stance that Labor could take is this: When it comes to the ethnic vote, who else are they going to vote for?