The 2022 election saw both Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese play the same game—cling to the political centre and attack each other’s personalities rather than their policies. This meant there was little differentiation between the parties for voters to choose from.
Soon after, the results came in, with voters rejecting bland, centre-ground politics, which saw both the traditionally centre-right Liberal-National Coalition and centre-left Australian Labor Party (ALP) suffer historically low first preference votes.
Only 36 percent of voters gave the Coalition their first preference and 33 percent gave theirs to Labor. Although Labor did “win” government on the back of preferences from the left-wing Australian Greens, they should be deeply concerned, given only a third of the population actually supported them.
Curiously, neither major party woke up to the broader political shifts sweeping the globe, namely the widening gulf between right and left-wing voters.
So why did both Morrison and Albanese keep clinging to the centre despite the political headwinds?
Morrison did so because he inherited a divided Coalition being pulled left and right. So he focused on holding his party together by sitting in the centre and making concessions both ways. This “broad church” strategy successfully held the Liberal Party together but at the cost of irritating both (green ideology-leaning) left voters plus the Coalition’s right-leaning supporters. As a consequence, the Coalition bled votes both ways.
Albanese clung to the centre because he wanted to avoid being punished like his predecessor Bill Shorten for promoting clearly leftist policies at the 2019 election.
So Albo went invisible and centrist. Instead of clear policies, his spin doctors simply dished up two years of nasty below-the-belt demonisation of Morrison. Although this spin strategy made Albo look weak, the character assassination of Morrison paid off and lost the former prime minister a huge number of votes.
But curiously, the centrism of both parties ultimately failed to deliver a centrist-favouring 2022 election. Instead, we saw Australia catch up to the political headwinds sweeping the rest of the world and saw votes splinter left and right, but not centre.
The left’s success was encapsulated by millionaire Simon Holmes à Court’s Climate 200 group, who backed several “teal independent” candidates, eventually winning six inner-city seats from former Liberal Party heartlands. Climate 200 did this by building a message that mixed “climate change” hysteria with elements of the Labor Party’s demonisation of Morrison.
The group also cleverly plugged into the global mood of dissatisfaction with the two-party system and growing distrust of career politicians.
It was also a watershed moment for the shaking up of the Australian political order, with affluent inner-city voters moving left and less affluent suburban and regional voters moving right.
So what are the lessons for the country’s conservative-leaning parties?
Those on the right of politics must think more creatively about how to leverage the breaking up of the old two-party system and build future alliances among like-minded parties (the kind of thing that occurs in the Israeli Parliament).
Any future alliance will need to centre on the Coalition rediscovering its classical liberal roots. On this matter, the “teal independents” have done it a favour by ripping affluent inner-city seats away from the Liberal Party, making it difficult for any revival of Morrison’s “broad church” vision for the party—supposed to encapsulate both moderate and right-wing voters. In effect, Holmes à Court’s Climate 200 has pushed the Liberal Party rightwards.
The Coalition should also stop focusing too much energy on inner-city seats filled with progressive-leaning voters who inherently oppose socially conservative values and are not affected by issues like cost of living (rising electricity prices), housing affordability, declining public school standards, and living standards (congestion). Instead, the Coalition needs to focus on suburban, peri-urban, and regional electorates where Australia’s “battlers,” the working class or the socially conservative live.
If Peter Dutton leads the Coalition to the next election, they must develop counter-strategies to the Labor Party’s—assisted by media outlets—vicious spin campaigning.
Further, the next election will likely see Labor subjected to the same pincer movement that swept through Liberal Party’s heartland. The Climate 200’s achievements will empower left-leaning individuals to become “teals” themselves, re-energise the existing Greens Party, and encourage the woke-green wing of the Labor Party.
Labor leader and now-Prime Minister Albanese will face pressure from all three fronts to move progressively green. Yet, further moving to the left will create dissatisfaction with Labor’s right faction. This will create opportunities for both Dutton and the right-wing One Nation party to pull votes from Labor’s right flank in the battler suburbs.
Conservatives and classical Liberals must take this chance to review their party’s performance, examine the ongoing fragmentation of the political centre, and begin re-building for 2025.
