Like everyone else, I expected a Labor victory in the election. I expected good things from that, and I see lots of bad consequences from the actual outcome.
Still, my personal disappointment is muted by the fact that I found the campaign so utterly depressing. The shift to positivity I noted a couple of weeks ago only lasted for a day. I saw the positive ad I wrote about only once. By election day, like the majority of the Australian public, I just wanted it to be over.
The lesson I draw from this election, and from Clinton’s failure in 2016, is that negative campaigning doesn’t work for the left. It hardens the resolve of the other side, and obscures the fact that most people agree with you on the issues.
But that’s not the lesson that the political class, (for whom the two sides are always interchangeable) and especially the hardheads who ran the campaign, will learn. They will conclude that the small target strategy has been vindicated once again.
John Quiggin 
Albo was obviously wrong. Deposing Kevin Rudd in favour of an operator from Victoria without a lot of policies destroyed three, not two, Labor leaders.
The conclusions I draw are;
(1) We, the Australian public, have decided wittingly or unwittingly (there is overlap and sub-setting in the list(s) below for the purposes of emphasis);
(a) to destroy the ecology;
(b) to destroy the climate;
(c) to destroy the great barrier reef;
(d) to destroy our river systems;
(e) to destroy our farming and grazing lands;
(f) to destroy many species (iconic and non-iconic); and
(g) to destroy ourselves.
(2) Humans are incapable of enlightened self-governance.
(3) Elites are even less capable of the enlightened governance of others (if that were possible).
(4) The human race will go extinct relatively soon in historical terms.
Of course, Australia on its own cannot cause all of the above. But Australia is a good litmus test. It’s a relatively affluent, relatively educated, relatively enlightened and relatively representative-democratic nation. If, as a litmus test, at this late stage of near climate emergency, Australia cannot make the right decisions, how much less so is it likely that other middling and great nations, without all our (pure luck) advantages, will make a wise decision? I will answer my own question. It is highly unlikely. Indeed, the chances of any good outcome now is vanishingly small. The year 2020 rapidly approaches. Nothing substantive have been done. CO2 levels are still rising. The 6th mass extinction is still accelerating.
Global civilization is now near-set on the path of unavoidable self-destruction. Australia was and is a test case in many ways, as I said above. I had pretty much assessed that this election was our last chance (as a single, middling nation with more than middling coal reserves) to change anything substantive. We have clearly decided that we are not going to change our ways (until forced by nature). If we won’t change our ways at this late and desperate stage it shows we simply cannot. Nature must force us, and it will, and the outcomes will be far worse than if we had started preemptive changes ourselves. Finally, we will deserve what comes in both moral and evolutionary terms – Extinction.
I also think that the failure of polling had allowed the ALP to feel relaxed about their policy mix. Had polling been more accurate they might have been able to better meet the expectations of the electorate, and make more effort to market their policies.
The hardheads are right, at least when it comes to tax. Labor went into in 1980, a winnable election, promising to introduce a capital gains tax. It was subject to ta scare campaign and lost.
The Liberals campaigned in 1993, an unloseable election, promising to introduce a GST. They were subject to a scare campaign and lost.
And now, 2019.
Does anybody see a trend?
Oppositions that promise to introduce new taxes or increase old ones will lose, every single time, even when every other factor suggests they should romp it in. It is all very well for Penny Wong to say “we were honest about the revenue needed to fund spending”, as she did last night, but she is not spending a cent from opposition, where she will be for yet another three years, at least.
Good? morning John,
I have lived in Australia for many years, and for most of that time I have been unhappy with the systems we inherited from the British – government, the law, industrial relations, and more – they are all confrontational. They are all focused on wnning, not on what is best for the country.
Yesterday’s election was a clear example.
In Europe minority governments are the norm, often with four or five parties in coalition. They have learnt to negotiate outcomes that may not be ideal for everybody, but that they all can live with.
To me the most memorable line in the whole campaign came from Penny Wong when she said: “Leadership is a team sport”. It ticks all the boxes: shared values, respectful relationships, trust, and power sharing. It is a near enough definition of a ‘responsible autonomy’.
The message to me was that Labor has done with neo-liberalism, and is embracing inclusive growth, as the Scandinavians have done.
The negative campaign here came mainly from the Coalition. Morrison was unimpressive as a campaigner – he assumed the role of an opposition leader.
The Labor campaign, on the other hand, was positive – abolish tax benefits to retirees from imputation credits they had paid for, deny the deductibility of interest costs when a class of capital assets is purchased, have the Federal Government determining wages across the economy, providing wage subsidies to certain selected workers and even restoring an Australian motor vehicle industry that produced electric cars.
Chris Bowen said the policies were not up for renegotiation. If you don’t like them don’t vote for us. We did not like these polices and hence did not vote Labor.
This was the unloseable election for Labor given the obvious earlier disarray in the Coalition. The positives were starkly posed and were rejected. I don’t think Australians will vote for an x trade union leader with a radical agenda that, at core, is based on economc irrationality, dishonesty and class hatred. You don’t have to agree with ths but that’s how 51.5% of Australians saw it.
rog
The polls also failed 6 months ago in Victoria when Labor got a much higher vote than the polls were saying. It can only be concluded that polls are unreliable. When they get it about right, like in NSW last month it is by accident.
Whether it’s all due to the demise of the landline telephone making it harder to get a representative sample or people increasingly just telling fibs to pollsters needs to be looked at pronto. The exit polls, which historically have been pretty accurate, were also way off, so it might not be a phone thing. Maybe the social media age has turned us into a nation of liars – and not just us.
Pr Q said:
That’s works, as “The Morning After” would imply a hangover payment for last nights revelry.
It works even better as a reference to the ballyhooed film of the same name, produced at the height of the Lefts hysterical opposition to Reagan’s strategic containment policy. But the expected disaster never happened. Although unexpected disasters always do.
I doubt that the LNP will do much more than use their bums to warm the Treasury bench seats. They will not clean house of Climate Change deniers or deferrers.
The ALP will probably dump their progressive tax policies (grandfathering negative gearing and scrapping scrapping refundable franking credits on dividends) which is a shame.
Neither party will do anything about the mega issues: absorbing the CO2 back to < 350 ppm and absorbing the massive pool of technological unemployment.
We will have to wait for the CCP to take the lead on these issues. And then follow the leader.
Personally I will not be affected by the election outcome, however:
– I fear for the Biloela family who will now rely on Dutten intervening, and
– I fear for the NDIS. The coalition have managed to turn it into a train wreck, damaging many thousands of people with disability for at least another three years.
I do wonder about the enormous pre polling numbers. How many people voted early and voted often? Has this election been subjected to significant election fraud? Can this be detected? Election fraud on a scale to affect the entire election seems unlikely and supposedly would be easily detectable by checks to prove or disprove such a thesis. I think such checks should be made in the interests of transparency. Until that is done we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that something extremely fishy has occurred in this election. Yes, I agree it is more likely that election was on the level, substantively speaking. But the massive pre polling aberration, along with the pre-election polling predictions aberrations, do require a full investigation.
Are you even remotely suggesting Iconoclast that the Coalition victory was assisted by electoral fraud? Possible: The dog did eat my homework.
Has this election been subjected to significant election fraud?
Falsifying one out of twenty ballots is a difficult task; getting them past the AEC tamper-evidence protocols is a difficult task. Recruiting enough people to do that without once getting one who’ll spill is another difficult task.
It seems unlikely.
Harry Clarke,
I am suggesting precisely what I said. “.. it is more likely that election was on the level, substantively speaking. But the massive pre polling aberration, along with the pre-election polling predictions aberrations, do require a full investigation.”
Whether that investigation commences first in the AEC, or in investigative journalism, remains to be determined at this stage, if it occurs at all of course. As a nation, we need to take a closer look at this. The shape of our society is changing. The simple assumption that we still all believe in democracy (if we ever did) is an assumption which cannot be made without checking the facts.
“The Australian Electoral Commission has revealed that over 18,000 people are being asked why they voted more than once in the recent election (2016). The Commission did not reveal which electorates are involved. This is of particular concern in those electorates where the candidate won by a handful of votes, in one case as low as 37. Moreover the government enjoys a majority of only one seat.
The AEC has also revealed that while there were just under 7000 cases of suspected voting fraud in the 2013 federal election, not one conviction was recorded for electoral fraud.
…
Electoral fraud remains rife in Australia. Given the indifference to this, the dismissal that it actually takes place and the strong opposition to any reform, it is reasonable to assume that some political parties regard electoral fraud as a useful campaign tool. How curious it is that the revelation that there were more than 18,000 instances of multiple voting in the recent election did not in any way cause much interest or comment in the Parliament. Surely this requires urgent action to counter such mischief.
” – David Flint, Spectator Australia, 24 October 2016.
One can only assume the position is worse in the current election. The pre polling numbers were absolutely extraordinary. Something very strange and possibly seriously damaging to our democracy could be going on. Our rolls are not accurate. Our rolls are not secure. People do not have to give ID to vote. Their names are not ruled off on the roll when getting a ballot. Any person could easily vote on two days or more during pre-polling and again on the Saturday. Going on past numbers, one can reasonably suspect that at least 20,000 to 40,000 have done so. It seems quite feasible that upwards of 100,000 false votes could have been lodged Australia-wide.
As the great Neville Wran said when addressing his caucus 40 years ago, “If those f***ing greedy c**** out there wanted f***ing spiritualism, they’d join the f***ing Hare Krishnas.”
This should be Bill Shorten’s epitaph.
Iko
Holy Mother of God, you’re citing David Flint as an authority now?
How depressing and awful this result is. My lack of faith in people is constantly reinforced.
David Allen,
Correct. There really is no hope for humanity.
David Allen
Yes, the people are always so wise when they vote as I do, so stupid when they don’t.
Pr Q said:
Does this mean that Pr Q is going to cancel his de facto membership of Get Up!
One good thing to come out of the 2019 election is the failure of Getup! to get up. It’s negative campaigns to unseat conservative hate figures – Dutton, Andrews, Abbott, Flint – mostly failed. Although even I think Abbott deserves time in the sin bin for his shameless opportunism on climate change.
Get Up! should get out. The cultural elites obsessive hatred of conservatives suggests that politics is, for them, an expressive art form – virtue signalling, designed to enhance social status. Their disconnect with the populace was evident in the way that Leave and Trump supporters were dismissed as “deplorables”. The same disconnect was evident in the metaphorical crucifixion of Folau for simply stating his creed in public. The populace will take every chance to smack down cultural elites. Queensland is bellwether.
As Harry Clarke pointed out, Negative campaigning seems to work for the Right-wing. But that is inevitable since the Right-wings essential positive message is conservative: the status-quo is not broke, so don’t fix it. That only leaves a negative message – the Left-wings “fix it” will break it – as it’s default campaign.
More generally, Left-wing Class War policies have mileage, but Left-wing Culture War politics have run out of gas. So maybe give the ornamental 3Rs – Republic, Reconciliation and Refugee – a miss and concentrate fundamental issues. I have been banging on like this since the late seventies, but who cares what I say.
Just on the “within the margin of error” talk:
If there are ten polls, say, and they’re all out in the same direction — without regard for magnitude, even — there’s, what, a one in a thousand chance that it’s all random error. There’s clearly some sort of systemic error of about 5%, one-in-twenty voters.
I’ve got some thoughts but I’ll let people offer theirs first, so’s we can get more independent perspectives.
Smith9,
People are wise when they vote on objective, scientific criteria re macro natural phenomena and unwise when they do not do so. It is wise to be concerned about the dangers of climate change and unwise to be unconcerned and proceed with a business as usual model. On that objective and scientific basis we can discern that the collective decision of the electorate was unwise, and discern that to a high degree of certainty.
Of course, we can never know what a Shorten Labor government would done or even would have been permitted to do by a hostile senate and many other powers arrayed against them (especially corporations, oligarchs and the general systemic bias in the capitalist system towards over-production, waste and pollution). Probably, not much is my guess. But on (policy) paper they claimed they were going to do something and they might have started doing a little bit.
To those unhappy with the election result, who think that things would be better with the other party:
Maybe things need to be properly broken (if there are any broken things), before they can be fixed (I am told that this is the way things often work here. Maybe because we live among anti-intellectuals/pragmatists; Maybe it is the efficient way). So just sit and relax, or maybe even enjoy the policies of the other party (especially if they result in a greater scope for change later) for a while.
Some doubts I know remain. But there is really nothing else to do.
on the polls Mark the Ballot is a genius.
I see 1998 all over again. what most people fail to see is Morrison is in a similar seat as Keating was.
Keating gave us a larger indirect tax increase than Hewson was promising.
Morrison on the other hand is promising large tax cuts on the promise of suspect treasury projections. Just remember in three years time they will be treasury forecasts not projections and if is likely GDP growth is less than 3/5% something will have to give..
Two other matters. Climate change will be a larger issue and Adani will be done and dusted.
That depends on who the ‘one’ is. If the one is you, Ikonoclast, then I’m not sure what limits there are on what that one can assume. Personally I try to be more cautious with my assumptions.
It is already the case that the Australian Electoral Commission investigates instances of apparent multiple voting. This is referred to in the source you cite yourself, so it borders on the grotesque that you haven’t picked up on it:
If you do a little more research you will discover that what the AEC investigates is instances of apparent multiple voting: that is, instances in which a voter’s name has been marked off the electoral roll more than once, so David Flint is (perhaps unsurprisingly) repeating a lie when he says that people are being asked why they voted more than once. The results of AEC investigations are that in most cases there is evidence to show that the apparent multiple voting is the result of error rather than fraud: a name has been marked off more than once incorrectly, when the voter did not in fact vote more than once.
Having investigated, the AEC is confident, on the basis of the evidence it has found, that electoral fraud is not a significant problem in Australia.
Why you imagine that pre-poll voting would make fraud easier is not clear: if you vote more than once, whether at pre-poll centres or on the day, you would still have to get your name marked off the roll more than once, and then the AEC would investigate, and the investigation would be no easier (or no harder) to handle in either case (if you actually had committed fraud).
The people who consistently complain about electoral fraud as a problem in Australia do so in order to justify recommending measures which would have the effect of placing more restrictive limits on access to voting (ostensibly in order to make fraudulent access to voting more difficult). This would reduce voting by the kinds of socially disadvantaged people who have lower levels of literacy, education, and information (along with, generally speaking, less official documentation), and that would almost certainly produce partisan advantages and disadvantages.
After all that, I don’t want to be taken as suggesting that electoral fraud is impossible in Australia. Anything’s possible. But I base my conclusions on evidence rather than assumptions, and (although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence) the evidence isn’t there to justify concluding that Australian elections are significantly affected by electoral fraud. Show me evidence (by which I don’t mean the pontifications of David Flint) rather than assumptions and I’m always ready to reconsider.
I agree that the cash rebate for dividend imputation is wrong but has been accepted as bipartisan policy for years and as such people have made their plans around it.
IMO imputation has proven to be a failure and should be dumped, not just for SMSF retirees, but for all shareholders. There are trade offs – lowering company tax – but such a policy move should be made during a parliament, not during an election.
I see the Dawson Deplorables rewarded Jabba the Christensen’s sterling representation with a 10% swing in his favour.
Hmmm… could it be that the Bob Brown caravan was a tad counterproductive? With friends like these …
During the past week I was blitzed with anti-Labor fear mongering ads by Clive Palmer and the Liberals while watching youtube videos. These ads outnumbered the Labor ones by approx 20 to 1. Was it the same on other platforms?
I have been looking at the deteriorating trust of others and democracy for some time and and unfortunately predicted some of the effects of trust deficits on democracies. From Weimar on the pattern of loss of policy attention to social fairness and lately the moves to customer individualism have exacerbated divides. It is time to stop complaining and protesting, we need to devise solutions,new ways of reclaimingsocialcohesion , with inclusive equity. To become responsible citizens in fair societies, we need to trust those in power to do more and ensure their brief is more than material growth, even with somefairer distributions.
We need clearly defined social goals that recognise externalities like ethics and emotions that make us more than selfinterest driven customers. Andlittleofthiswasdisplayed in the ALP,, shopping list of policies .
How do we prepare a real 21st agenda?
Sorry for the typing quality but have broken a legbone,
Eva cox
Yes and on the polls Mark the Ballot asks whether polls are guilty of herding, smoothing or just using a panel. For whatever reason we’re making important decisions based on polls that are not transparent.
@smith9 The Brown convoy was a disaster, like almost every convoy I can remember, but worse
Smith9 said:
smith9 has a point. The full list of recent Aus anti-tax scare campaigns, which caused an electoral backlash against the pro-tax party, is pretty long:
1977: “fist full of dollars”,
1980: “Labor will tax your family“
1993: “Fightback” lost “unlosable election”
1998: “Rollback” won the pop vote
2013: “great big new tax on everything ”
2019: “the Bill Australia cannot afford”
So, in the post-Whitlam era, 6/15 elections were fought by parties proposing tax increases. And 100% of those campaigns were electoral losers.
But that’s only the half of it. How many of Howard’s four election wins were made possible by larding his election bribes with tax concessions to ageing Baby Boomers? Surely at least two.
Meantime Baby Boomers have endlessly congratulated themselves on their courageous stands against racism-sexism-and-homophobia.
So the political conclusion is that Baby Boomers talk altruistic Left but vote egotistic Right.
No.
In some European countries the norm is a multi-party coalition government with a parliamentary majority: for example, in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Finland.
In some European countries, however, single-party governments with a parliamentary majority have occurred frequently (although not invariably): for example, in Spain, Greece, Sweden, and Ireland.
Many European countries have had some experience with governments (single-party, multi-party coalition, or both) without a parliamentary majority, but then so has Australia (and other countries outside Europe).
In several European countries there has been a tendency over the last decade or two to greater fragmentation of the vote, with more parties represented in parliament and the largest parties winning smaller numbers of seats: as a result in several countries either multi-party coalitions or governments without parliamentary majorities (or both) have become more common. However, this not a Europe-wide pattern: for example, the most recent Polish election was the first one in which a single party won a majority of seats in the Sejm (it also won a majority of seats in the less powerful Senate, but that was not a first-time occurrence).
Evolutionary and emergent history are now demonstrating empirically that the homo sapiens branch of evolution is an unsustainable and wildly eco-destructive dead end. It will soon have its natural denouement. There are no deus ex machina nor any “better angels of our nature” to save us. The problem has been the elevation of pure reason over consequentialist ethics. It was monotheism itself which gave rise to the deification of pure human reason (Urizen). Pure rules for action, devoid of empirical checking for the real value of the rules, exist both in the monotheistic religions and in that modern secular religion called “economics” before which all modern civilization bows low. But Urizen, your worship of our own rationality (assumed not real), leads you astray.
“His cold horrors silent, dark Urizen
Prepar’d: his ten thousands of thunders
Rang’d in gloom’d array stretch out across
The dread world, & the rolling of wheels
As of swelling seas, sounds in his clouds
In his hills of stor’d snows, in his mountains
Of hail and ice; voices of terror,
Are heard’ like thunders of autumn,
When the cloud blazes over the harvests” – William Blake.
Urizen clearly is “your reason”. More properly it is instrumental reason. Earlier lines refer to it as being;
” … unknown, abstracted,
Brooding secret… ”
and acting like this:
“Times on times he divided, & and measured
Space by space…
The invocation of dividing and measuring instruments fully implies instrumental reason.
The undisciplined application of instrumental reason has been our downfall.
@JohnQuiggin
Brown thinks he is the pope of the green movement, and therefore infallible. F*** me, wasn’t there anybody to tell him the convoy was (to use a well-worn tautology) a self-indulgent wank?
Bob the Pure, he who struck down the CPRS, has done it again.
I am not sure when the left will learn that consistently looking down on people, regarding them as intellectually and morally inferior; being haughty and dismissive of those who are less articulate but live in the suburbs, regional towns and rural areas, is. Or a recipe for winning government. They went negative. But they went negative by declaring that they would not rule for the whole country but for those who conflate their views with progress.
Albanese, Plibersek and Bowen are all running for the leadership.
How underwhelming.
I think Burke is the best option for the ALP
Brian Burke? Don Burke? They come with a certain amount of baggage …
Four more years! Four more years! Sorry, make that three, we’re not quite Americans yet…
“Together these factors explain why Australia has avoided the drastic increases in inequality seen in other English speaking countries. On the other hand, although we are a long way from the plutocracy that already characterises the United States, there is no room for complacency. Our relatively equal distribution of and wealth depends on a history of strong employment growth and a redistributive tax-welfare system. Neither can be taken for granted. If the decline of the mining boom is mishandled, we could enter a long period of stagnation or even depression, which would bear hardest on those at the bottom of the income distribution. And the political pressure to take burdens from the rich and shift them to the poor is never-ending. The 2014 Budget, the Intergenerational Report and the recently published Treasury tax discussion paper (Treasury 2015) have all proposed such shifts.”
https://johnquiggin.com/2015/04/21/waiting-for-the-fallout-australia-and-return-of-the-patrimonial-society/
smith9 said:
BB did the environmentalists a political and policy favour by breaking CPRS. By your own reckoning any kind of tax increase, including carbon price, is a political loser. And cap-and-trade is a dud policy, failing even before the USA pulled out and the PRC went on it’s break neck coal fired power plant construction program.
Let’s face it. The time for reducing emissions has come and gone. By the time the economy gets decarbonised, if it ever even starts down that path, the albedo from melted Arctic sea ice will be gone, Greenland ice sheets will be slipping into the sea and the permafrost covering Siberian methane deposits will be thawing.
The only way we are going to save the planet is by spend, spend, spending our way out in true Keynesian style. That’s by a launching into carbon absorption mega project, literally digging a big hole. The voters can then see there is something to show for their tax dollars
The main probkem with carbon absortion is not the economic cosr. Its the massive energy requirement.
So build nuclear power plants already. Just DO something already, rather than sit around theorising or staging more street theatre.
No doubt that is not “economic” at the moment. But it is “politic” and that’s what counts.
The Left needs to embrace mega projects like it did in the good old days in the Thirties
Jack Strocchi: Rollback was 2001, and Labor lost on 2pp as well as seats
Jack Strocchi
By my reckoning any tax increase proposed from opposition is political loser. The CPRS was proposed from government.
Pr Q corrected:
I stand corrected.. But the ALP did run an anti-GST campaign in 1998, and won the 2PP vote on it. So the 6/15 pro-tax party election loss point remains.
Public griping about GST, exploited by “Rollback”, was putting the ALP in a winning position right through 2001. The Parliamentary Library records:
Then in September 2011 something dramatic happened to flip the polls to LNP. And the rest is History.
But who can remember that far back?
Smithy,
Tony Burke possibly he ALP most formidable politician both inside and outside parliament. I do not like him but he is good.
Jack Ross Garnaut thinks so solar PV could well be $30/MWh by 2025.
Nuclear energy is quite easily the highest cost producer if you could build the plant anywhere which you could not
Nottrampis
Tony Burke might have the skills of Bob Hawke but no one has heard of him. Happy for him to be shadow Treasurer.
smith9 said:
The Rudd CPRS was formulated while the ALP was in opposition through 2006. Which obviously did not queer its 2007 electoral prospects..
But you are correct in that it was finally presented as a public policy from Government, in a much amended form, in the 2013 election. Where it was decisively rejected.
Proposing a tax increase from Opposition does appear to be electoral suicide. But doing one from Government is not much more conducive to political life expectancy. Obviously this went for the Howard GST in 1998.
My conclusion is that tax increase policies can only be suggested by a Government after winning an election. Not before, by either Government or Opposition. The “Budget Black Hole” tactic does have Machiavellian validity.
Jack Strocchi
The CPRS itself was put together by the first Rudd government. It might well be true that Labor went into the 2007 election promising a carbon pricing scheme of some sort. I don’t recall. In any case so did John Howard’s government.
If Howard had won the 2007 election his carbon pricing scheme would have been legislated in 2008 and the matter would have been settled.
Smithy, it doesn’t matter. He has ther skills and the others do not.
A huge irony here.
The ALP have a policy of broadening the tax base and making much more progressive where the expenditure would go to the very people who did not vote for them in Qld.
Therein lies the problem of this election. Surely this benefit was not spoken of very much
This post has been put in the wrong category — Oz Politics — when it should be in Boneheaded stupidity.
As for the claim often made, by some here and routinely elsewhere, that the left needs to stop being so elitist/snooty/etc on cultural/identity stuff — one especially frustrating feature of Australian politics is that (AFAICT) *zero* of that supposed snootiness comes from actual Labor MPs and Senators. (Maaaybe sometimes from the Greens?) You would never ever ever hear Labor on the record say what many of them are obviously, and justifiably, thinking right now, viz. “#$&@-ing stupid Queenslanders, too dumb to know who is genuinely offering the policies they want.” You would never hear a Labor MP piss on the concerns of Murray-Darling communities, or rural unemployment, etc. You would never hear them imply that rural or regional voters are somehow not true Australians. But you **constantly** hear the analogous nonsense from high-ranking conservatives like Dutton, Joyce and Abbott about inner-city greens, chardonnay-sippers, elites, etc. etc.
(All that said, I don’t disagree that the Australian left construed broadly could stand to knock it off. Pwning Angus Taylor on social media didn’t seem to depress his vote, for instance…)
Put it thus way: The local success of Phelps and Stegall show that a green policy is saleable to the Right-wing voters, but not by Green salespersons. It helps to be bossy and blonde, like Bishop & Thatcher.
A Right-wing green policy should be constructive as well as conservative. That is it should point to productions, not prohibitions. ie golf courses, huntingfishingandshooting reserves and resurrected species. And massive carbon absorption sinks that can double as carbon neutral fuels or quarries.
Right-wingers want something to show for their tax dollars. No one likes a diet, although a fat burning pill would fly off the shelf. Selling them a hair shirt and warm fuzzy feeling ain’t gonna cut it.
After all, a lot of Right-wingers have waterfront properties, or hanker after same. So they have more to lose.