CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
The Liberal Party is staring down the barrel of a possible extinction, as Australian voters realise that endless wars and Christian righteousness really doesn’t improve living standards.
The Howard-era playbook of stoking racial division and xenophobia also appears to be less effective than it ever was, especially when elections are now decided by an increasingly multicultural population who aren’t really drawn towards a party of old white men who can’t even bring themselves to recrruit a proportionate amount of women into their ranks.
But it’s not just them Australia’s historic two-party system is facing an existential crisis – with their respective bases shrinking rapidly as minor parties and independents surge in popularity.
This is mostly due to the fact that Australia’s media has degraded itself to the point where most voters are well aware that Rupert Murdoch and Peter Costello would prefer the Liberals are in power, and everything they print should be taken with a grain of salt because nothing is subjective.
Without any real information provided to voters in the lead up to a campaign, social media and grassroots campaigning has far more cut-through. With the Greens scooping up three seats in Queensland and the Teals snatching six former Liberal safe seats across the nation.
This reckoning for the major parties began to rear its head at the 2022 election, when Labor won a majority of seats with a record low primary vote of 32.8%
Even with Albanese pitched as the ‘turn the page’ candidate after Scott Morrison’s dismal leadership during the black summer bushfires and subsequent pandemic, almost one in three voters cast their ballot for minor parties or independent candidates in the 2022 federal election, the highest number in almost 100 years.
With the next election 12 months away, both major parties are polling even lower than they were leading into 2022.
This has all but assured a minority government, most likely lead by Labor, who will have to form a coalition with a smorgasbord of Independents – or maybe even the increasingly frustrated Nationals.
It is not yet certain what Peter Dutton has up his sleeve to correct the erosion of the Liberal base, but it seems after his success campaigning against the Indigenous Voice referendum, he has convinced himself he has the mandate to keep doing exactly what he’s been doing.
