The latest Coalition scare campaign about Labor may scare itself more than voters
The latest Coalition scare campaign about Labor may scare itself more than voters
The Coalition scare campaign says the next election will deliver a Labor minority government — propped up by an unholy alliance of Greens and teal independents — and that it will be chaos. But does that stack up?
You need to only look at the modern crossbench, and the teals in particular, to see the prospect of a 2010 repeat is unlikely.
These modern independents aren't former Nationals blokes who have turned their back on their party.
They're modern women who couldn't see themselves in the party that once took their seats for granted.
"While the 2022 election might be heralded as a ‘breakthrough’ for the independents, the conditions for their election have been building over several decade," the Australian Election Study noted in 2022.
"Many of these changes are associated with voters being ‘less rusted on’ to the major political parties and becoming more independently minded in their political choices."
That's the problem with scare campaigns like the Coalition's. When you threaten voters with a minority government, that would require crossbench negotiations, some in the seats you're trying to win might be left thinking: "Oh, that sounds more preferable than you."
Don't threaten me with a good time. A so-called 'minority' government is actually a good thing, keeps the bastards honest.
I only just found out from this article that the majority of Teal voters were not actually teal voters at all, but rather former Labor and Greens voters who voted "tactically" to get an independent candidate in their electorate. All this talk of the Coalition winning those voters back seems pretty futile if they didn't actually lose that many in the first place.
I don't think that's a good read of what's happened given the "teal" voters I know about. Almost to a person, Teal voters are ex-Liberal voters. Pro Hewson, pro Howard, pro Turnbull. A lot of them probably excused Howard's "Stop the Boats" as the realpolitik of keeping the ONP vote down (something which didn't really pan out long term).
However, even at Abbott many were noping out. First because they could see how much trouble Turnbull was having, but also because Abbott really was the jerk they saw Howard pretending to be. The "minister for women" probably also hemorrhaged a bunch of women voters too. That I think would have meant the success of the Teals, but not a landslide, until Morrison.
The fact that he could just operate a kleptocrat government, no real skill, no real goals, just ill tempered and mean spirited. I think a bunch of Liberals were looking for a new home, and that was in the Teals. Those liberals aren't coming back because the LNP isn't going back to being the LNP. The nationals have taken over enough of the agenda that reactionaries are the only ones left in the Liberal party.
The reactionaries have thoroughly "won" the LNP, all the way over to being the alt-right. Brain-dead "young liberals" will keep the ball rolling over but no serious person is going to care about their stupid ideas. Over time the Liberal part of the coalition will lose votes as the coalition increasingly embodies the National Party agenda. At that point the Nationals might wonder why they are in a coalition with a party which has fewer members than them. What happens to the Nationals at that point is unclear, because Climate Change doesn't fuck around in 2040.
Surely that only worked because many teal voters were previously Coalition voters so presumably they're trying to win back those former supporters of theirs in the hopes it will be enough to defeat the Teal candidates.
Only 18 per cent were Coalition voters at the 2019 election. Again, you would think from some of the commentary and media coverage that the Teals got in off the back of massive amounts of disappointed Coalition voters but that's not actually what happened. The Greens lost more voters (24 per cent) to the Teals than the Coalition, according to the study.
Hi OP, when quoting the article in your post, it's helpful to use the quote formatting to show us you're giving quotes and not just supplying additional commentary.
Writing: > You need to only look at the modern crossbench
becomes:
You need to only look at the modern crossbench