Waleed Aly, who is kind of Australia’s Bill Maher, though not as incisive or pragmatic about religion, has proclaimed that disappointed voters are flocking to Labor, while angry voters are flocking to One Nation.
Aly presumably operates on the assumption that Labor in its 2017 incarnation has enough to offer any undecided voter out in the wilderness. To court the undecided voter takes a degree of excellence, or at least something resembling a degree of excellence that the other major party lacks. Labor has none of this. Nor do the Liberals for that matter. The Liberal party isn’t attracting any new moths to the dimming flame. And Bill’s hollow unconvincing shop steward rhetoric went out of vogue decades ago.
The Project host holds a hopelessly obsolete view of Australian politics. Gone are the days when a protest vote was defined as a rusted-on Labor voter casting his ballot for the Liberals, or a diehard LNP supporter giving Labor a run. These parties are now the domain of the faithful or the apathetic. The swinging voter, the angry voter, or the disappointed voter have gone elsewhere. Labor and the Coalition must be exceptional for these swinging, disappointed, and angry voters to even think about scrawling a number one next to either of them.
Why would a jaded punter with a thirst go for a bland VB or Tooheys New that’s never going to satisfy, when the other taps are pouring more interesting options that at least offer a little flavour? The swinging, disappointed, and angry voters have hopped the fence into the other paddock where the likes of One Nation, The Greens, Liberal Democrats, NXT, and others are becoming restless, while the major parties graze oblivious to the threat to the status quo.
Waleed Aly and his Fairfax colleagues may not realise it, but we’re about to see several very revolutionary state elections regardless of what their doctrine-influenced, in-house projections suggest. These state electorates are tired of so-called conservatives who speak in mealy-mouthed politically correct superlatives, and a former workers party who threw their genuinely struggling grassroots support base under the bus, in favour of more fashionable special interest groups whose struggles are more esoteric and less tangible. And Labor aren’t extreme enough for the Cultural Marxist contingent who will be pathologically driven to the diametrically opposed policies of the Greens. The myth of the wasted vote is quickly being dispelled as we saw in the Orange Bi-election.
Majority Coalition governments may well be a thing of the past. In fact, it’s virtually assured. The Coalition seems to be a hold out Video Ezy in a sea of streaming services. Labor isn’t much more in step with an evolving electorate. Will either party correct their direction before they become entirely irrelevant in a majority government sense? One thing is for sure: it won’t happen before the political re-enactments of Little Big Horn and Dunkirk, otherwise known as the Queensland and W.A. state elections, that will mean ideological defeats for Labor or the Coalition, whoever cobbles together a hung parliament.
It’s your XYZ.
Photo by mdid 
