As you might expect, since the election on May 3rd, the Think-Piece-Industrial-Complex has kicked into overdrive, with every lukewarm-IQ politics-watcher with a keyboard (myself included) writing lengthy dissertations (without final count data) as to why the Dutton campaign ran aground. Some say it was Dutton’s problems with women, some say it was his insistence on strapping on his Sky News armour and battling in the culture wars, and some mention demographics. These things are all true to a certain extent, but they don’t tell the whole story.
You can read my analysis here, but we’re all just guessing at this stage.
Most annoying (to me at least) are what I like to call the ‘why didn’t you say anything then?’ pieces, which talk about how (only in the light of his loss) the Dutton campaign was (and always had been, actually) hopelessly adrift, with internal squabbles and poor leadership, destined to lose. These inevitable pieces always cite examples that the journalist must have collected during the campaign, that they bravely kept to themselves until the point where Dutton as a political entity was spent, and thus it was safe to dish on him without losing future access—accountability journalism at its finest: Speak truth to power, yaas queen.
These kinds of pieces also give some credence to a notion that I had during the campaign’s final weeks: that some in the media more or less knew that the election was probably going to be a Labor blowout. The conclusion being that many in the mainstream media were feeding the ‘slim Labor majority’ or (god forbid) ‘Labor minority’ government narrative to maintain interest in a horserace that was already over, for ratings. Who will mop up all those juicy clicks if voters think the election is all done and dusted? Won’t somebody think of the CPMs! I thought this idea was a bit ‘galaxy brain’ of me, but hearing former mainstream journalists Osman Faruqi and Scott Mitchell float the idea has given me some confidence in this perspective.
Something that the ensuing flood of think pieces claim boldly is that ‘Australia rejected the Dutton-Murdoch agenda’ and Australia ‘rejects division’ by choosing Albanese. I don’t know, have you met Australians? Many of us are seemingly up for some dogshit culture war nonsense, what with the ‘woke issue’ saturating the airwaves with nauseating ‘debates’ for more than a few years now. This has not been a winning issue for the Left in Australia for some time.
Peta Credlin was right (in her way) when she said that Dutton didn’t go hard enough on the culture war politics. Not morally right (of course, it’s Peta Credlin), but in the sense that Dutton didn’t go after the most politically beneficial culture wars he could have. You could easily see a scenario where, like Trump, Dutton was simply smarter about selecting which culture war issues to go after to whip up the voters enough to carry him to victory. If it was less about ‘welcome to country’ ceremonies and ‘woke agendas in school curriculum’ and more about “protecting” women in sports from trans-women (a la the Americans), it might be a very different story. We had John Howard as our Prime Minister for 12 years, followed by Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. We are not all of a sudden the Heroes of the Soviet Union that these writers seem to think we are.
Now that the dye is cast, reporters like to write about the outcome like it was pre-ordained, as though it was always going to shake out this way – but it wasn’t. Dutton and the Coalition were winning in February, with more or less this same platform of dogshit, divisive politics. Dutton has had a long (long) history of racist, incendiary politics over the last 24 years, and the voters of Dickson and the Liberal Party had no problem whatsoever electing, re-electing and elevating him to the front bench and eventually to Opposition Leader. The fact that he was a culture warrior wasn’t a downside; for many of his supporters, it was the point.
Ultimately, I think the Fin Review had it right (ew, hate that) when Associate Professor Paul Williams said:
“It was [Dutton’s] personal style, too small a policy platform, unpalatable policies and a shambolic campaign.”
There was a Trump Effect, but not in the way people are claiming – it wasn’t out of a rejection of divisive politics and ‘letting kindness win’ – it was simply a rejection of the kind of chaos that Trump (and by proxy, Dutton) have come to represent over the last few months. Labor ran a decent campaign and Dutton was an unlikable fuck up.
Lots of voters (unfortunately) like what Trump is doing (victimising deportees, arresting judges, mass deportations), it’s even gotten more popular over time, they just don’t like how he’s doing it. Hearing conservative commentators talk about it, you realise it’s not the substance of what he’s doing that bothers them, it’s the unconstitutional style in which he is doing it. Not enough to do anything about it, of course, but enough to publicly wring their hands on progressive podcasts, at least.
Australians are in many ways the same – they’re dissatisfied with the trajectory of our politics, and due to the cost-of-living degradation that’s occurred over the last few years, they’re right to be. Combine this with declining primary votes for the two major parties over the years, and it’s not hard to tell the story of an electorate that wants a significant shakeup in how their politics runs.
Voters want a shake-up – they didn’t want Dutton’s shake-up.
By not acknowledging this virulent, ugly side to our politics and proceeding forward by thinking that we’ve ‘put it all behind us’, and that we’re some kind of Star Trek post-racial, egalitarian society all of a sudden, is inherently misleading. Don’t forget, we’re the same nation that gave the People’s Elbow to The Voice 19 months ago—a non-binding, unpaid body that would provide ignorable advice to parliament on a small number of indigenous issues. Suppose we forget the existence of these strains in our politics. In that case, we leave ourselves open to the same kind of Trumpian politics in the next election cycle, as long as the salesman speaks like Malcolm Turnbull rather than Peter Dutton.
The right-wing populist backlash hasn’t been denied, merely delayed.