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The Australian federal election

Brian Leiter

The "Liberal" party (the party of the right, although as we 've noted before, they're basically Democrats in U.S. terms) was roundly defeated, while a Labor Prime Minister was elected, albeit without a majority in the legislature.   The Greens and the "Teal Independents" both showed an increased share of the vote, allegedly reflecting increasing anxiety about climate change.  (Of course, if Achen & Bartels are right, this explanation is too simple.)   At a time when some countries (the U.S., the U.K., Poland, Hungary) are veering to the right, it's nice to see another veering to something resembling the left.

It's not implausible, of course, that "climate change" was a key issue, since there aren't a lot of substantive policy differences on major national issues between the Liberal and Labor parties:  Labor will increase spending on child care support, Medicare, universities, that seems to be it–apart from climate change.  The irony, of course, is that Australia's civilized social democracy depends very heavily on the export of fossil fuels ($200 billion plus per year, accounting for more than 50% of exports).  And while Australia has a high per capita carbon footprint, it's total contribution to global climate change is not substantial.  So better climate behavior by Australia will have only a limited effect.

So I do wonder how this will play out:  too much progress on climate change in domestic policy may strain the financial resources of the country, given its dependence on fossil fuel exports.  Or so it looks to this amateur observer.  What do locals–or those well-informed about Australian politics and economics–think about the election results, the role of climate change, the likely priorities of a Labor government (in alliance, it seems, with the Greens), etc.?

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7 responses to “The Australian federal election”

  1. Kelby

    Labor took power this time around by jettisoning much of its progressive platform and running a "small target" campaign. This was due to their psychologically crushing defeat in the previous (2019) election, which they had been universally expected to win. In that campaign they had run on their most left platform for decades, proposing to wind back regressive tax breaks and upper-class handouts, and impose a meaningful cap on emissions. By contrast this time around, Labor substantially lowered their climate ambitions and actually supported the conservatives' massively regressive legislation to flatten the income tax rate — about as big a betrayal of Labor values as you can imagine.

    A saying in ozpol is that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them, and that's even more the case this time around than usual. The outgoing PM was absolutely loathed by a large chunk of the population; he was so toxic that there were many seats where he couldn't campaign for fear of dragging the local members' votes down even further (which happened anyway). So it's anyone's guess as to how the next election will play out with a different leader for the Liberals. Odds are, however, that the federal party will veer even further right; what with the election of the teals and Labor taking some traditionally Liberal seats, much of the supposedly moderate flank of the party has been wiped out. It seems, to say the least, *unlikely* that going further right will let them claim enough new seats to make up for the ones they've lost

    By far the biggest story of the election is the massive shift from the two parties to independents/Greens. This radically increases the chances of minority government in future parliaments, if not this one; at this stage, from what I gather, it seems likely that Labor will pick up enough seats to form a majority in the lower house at least. Labor nonetheless may need the support of the Greens to get legislation through the Senate, which will give them cover to move further to the left than they might otherwise have gone post-2019

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  2. Gregory C, Mayer

    As an American just reading the news, I have been struck by the record high temperatures and devastating fires that have struck Australia for the last several years. Although Australia may not have much impact on climate from a global perspective, climate change seems to have had a big impact there, and thus concentration on this issue may have had appeal to Australian voters.

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  3. Stephen Hetherington

    One of my main hopes for this new government, certainly in the immediate future, is that they will seek to rescue Julian Assange (an Australian citizen) from the hellish treatment being inflicted on him by at least the UK and the USA. Australia's conservative government during the past nine or so years has done nothing substantive, as far as I know, to help him. But the new Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has at least expressed publicly, a while ago, his criticism of this continued persecution of Assange.

    I do not know how optimistic to be, though. The previous Labor Prime Minister, Julia Gillard (a colleague of Albanese's at the time), publicly damned Assange, a decade or so ago, as having acted illegally — a depressingly 'pre-emptive legal condemnation' (to quote a journalist from the time: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-12-10/julian_assange3a_gillard27s_hicks_blunder/42082).

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  4. David Zimmerman

    Brian invited readers to suggest sources that can shed light on the current situation in Australian politics. I have no such expertise myself but, as a reader of Jacobin, today's article about Labour's victory struck me as insightful, especially on the general question Brian raised about where Albaneses's government will go on policies other than climate change…. It seems that that is a mixed bag, with a few modestly progressive policies, on the one hand, but a retreat on tax policy, on the other, with a planned cut in the rates of upper brackets.

    FWIW….Here it is. (I think that Kelby also drew on this article in offering his useful comment.)

    https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/05/australia-elections-left-labor-liberals-morrison-albanese

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  5. Kelby

    @David — nope, only now read it; we're just responding to the same set of facts from (what is probably) a similar ideological perspective and similar level of being a politics tragic. Convergence!

    Reply
  6. Will Moisis

    Here are a few comments that may be of interest especially to American readers.

    Australia has compulsory voting, with around 95% of the population turning out to vote. It has preferential voting in the House of Representatives. And it has a fused executive and legislative branch, like the UK, with the executive, including the Prime Minister, being drawn from parliament. These differences are important, because it means that certain trends, imported from the United States, can't gain traction in the same way.

    First, the Murdoch media has attempted to create a Fox News equivalent in Australia in the form of Sky news. Sky has a lot of the same style of culture war rhetoric as Fox. A lot of conservative MPs watch it. It's even on broadcast television in some rural areas of Australia. But it has had almost no influence! Why? There is no need in Australia to 'mobilise the base' to go out to vote. The base, like everyone else, already has to vote. So while it drives some people to the right, those people are almost certainly almost voting conservative anyway. The effect is to create a kind of echo chamber. This is evident in the conservative government creating a Fox-news style culture war issues that repelled a lot of middle-of-the-road voters, especially in wealthier electorates.

    Second, the big story of this election is the rise of the 'teal candidates'. To understand these, we must understand a little about the history of the main political parties in Australia. There is the Labor party, which is centre-left, and historically draws its support from working class areas, but increasingly from middle class, gentrifying areas. On the right, there is an alliance of parties known as the Coalition. This is made up of the Liberal Party (a misnomer) and the National Party. The Coalition has been in power about 2/3 of the time since World War Two. The Liberal party has historically won affluent and middle class seats, though has increasingly aimed for 'aspirational' voters in the outer suburbs. The National Party has a stronghold on many rural and regional seats. The Liberal party traditionally made up the bulk of the Coalition, so the Prime Minister, and most of the ministers of government, were drawn from the Liberal Party.

    Since its formation, the Liberal party has held a swathe of very wealthy seats in Sydney and Melbourne. These are the seats from which the party draws many of its brightest candidates, from which it raises the most money, and so on. But the voters in these areas have become increasingly concerned with issues like climate change, integrity in politics, and women's issues. The Coalition government, in the last term, were seen as paying lip service to climate change, with many voices in the Nationals essentially outright denying the existence of climate change, or that Australia should do anything about it. There were also high profile incidents including a rape of a staffer in a liberal minister's office, and a lack of representation of women in the Coalition, which were seen, collectively, to dissuade a lot of traditional Liberal voters away from the party. And rather than doing much about these issues, the Coalition was hamstrung a number of factors:
    a) Their Nationals partners, who wanted no action on climate change.
    b) 'Sky news brain' – a bubble of culture-war nonsense that did not reflect the real attitudes of the majority of Australians. A lot of Coalition MPs subscribe to it, as well some Coalition grassroots members, but very few real-world voters.
    c) A party that had grown stale and insular after 9 years of government and three different Prime Ministers.
    d) A prime minster who was very good at marketing but was seen to do nothing but market himself. He became deeply unpopular in the last couple of years for things like holidaying in Hawaii during Australia's terrible bushfire season in 2019, and a reputation for blaming someone else rather than taking responsibility.

    Enter the 'teal candidates' – these are women – and they are all women – who ran in those very wealthy Liberal seats in Sydney and Melbourne as independent candidates. Though they did not formally belong to a political party, they all shared strategy, donors and policies. They ran on policies that were the Liberal's weakness, against moderate liberals – policies like strong action on climate change, on integrity in politics, on better conditions for women and so forth. They also represented their electorates, in that they were very well educated, white, and wealthy – in short, they were the kind of candidates who would traditionally be Liberal representatives, but had become repulsed by the Liberal Party. These candidates won a bevy of seats against moderate Liberals. Although some did not win a greater proportion of the vote than the Liberal candidate, preferences from Labor and the Greens (due to the preferential voting system discussed earlier) meant they were elected.

    Finally, Labor ran a strategy of promising not to do much, other than some moderate action on climate change, installing an integrity commission and promising to be more competent. It wasn't much, but given how unpopular the Coalition was, it worked. Labor are set to (just) have an outright majority of 76 seats, a huge cross-bench of 15, with the remainder of the seats going to the Coalition. There is currently big debate in the Coalition about what to do now. Do they refocus on issues that matter to the affluent seats they lost, like climate change, to try to win them back? Or do they double down on culture wars and swing to the hard right? You can bet what Sky News want. https://twitter.com/MrKRudd/status/1528294370700455936

    Best of luck with that!

    Reply
  7. Matt

    While I'm an Australian permanent resident, I'm not a citizen, and so can't vote, and because of that follow local politics less closely than I might otherwise. But, while talking with colleagues who are fairly politically engaged this evening, my impression was that they were generally pretty happy with the election outcomes, though with some worry that they might push the Liberal/National coalition much further to the right. Peter Dutton, the vile new leader of the right, might well favor this. My only consolation is that Dutton is greatly lacking in charisma, even compared to Scott Morrison, and so one might hope that he'd have trouble solidifying his party and attracting new followers. For what it's worth, this all seems to me to be consistent with what Will Moisis (and others) say above.

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