The malaise within Australia’s two major political parties has been on regular display in recent times.
The latest chapter is being written by New South Wales (NSW) state MP Tania Mihailuk who has left her former political home of 11 years in the Labor Party to join One Nation.
One Nation is clearly a more conservative political party than Labor and it has been attracting disaffected Labor voters.
Voters who are disappointed with the woke-left dominance in what had traditionally been a party looking after the interests of the worker, whose aspirations were that their children get good health care, a good education, and a good job to follow so they, in turn, could start a family.
Instead of looking after their children’s fundamental needs, they are seeing their children being told they can choose their gender and other issues that occupy the minds of the idle, yet wealthy and undeservingly influential, inner-city elites who largely exist off the workers’ taxes.
Similarly, One Nation and other minor parties are attracting disaffected Liberal voters.
Having won the unwinnable election in 2019 on policies of not setting CO2 targets, not increasing funding to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and promising religious freedom legislation, the Liberal Party brains trust delivered a CO2 target, increased funding to the ABC, and failed to deliver religious freedom legislation.
And they are still scratching their heads as to why they lost support to more conservative parties and didn’t win the “woke” vote either, as witnessed by the independent “Teals” gain traction and sweep several key seats from them.
Mihailuk’s move will be a blow to Labor and a boost to One Nation.
The motivations are undoubtedly varied. One suspects One Nation’s current NSW leader Mark Latham’s was because he had an epiphany and saw the damage and corrosion of the role the Left played in his party and Australian society generally.
Others may be motivated by the need for a political vehicle with which to run to have any success of re-election.
In Mihailuk’s case, it seems that dissatisfaction had been brewing for some time, with allegations being made by her about personnel and manipulations within the party machinery.
Major Parties Bleeding Voters
Mihailuk was from the Right faction, who has had amongst its luminaries the convicted MP Eddie Obeid. She had spoken out about corruption within Labor, for which she was demoted from the frontbench, having previously held the natural resources portfolio.It seems the good ship Labor may have some rot in her hull and not just below the waterline.
Following the South Australian tactic, Labor in NSW has a clean skin and a seemingly non-threatening leader with a pleasant disposition, but whose team is a rabble of far-left woke operatives who would not know what a day of manual labour is, let alone experienced it.
Mihailuk’s expressed concerns about a future Labor government are well founded.
But turning to the Liberals in NSW, we see preselection decisions being made on gender and not on merit, with intervention seeing three males removed in favour of three females. And that was the sales pitch. Gender.
The Liberal Party previously prided itself on being a meritocracy with equal opportunity as the foundation. Equality of outcome and identity politics has never been the Liberal approach. That approach has correctly been condemned as both unfair and divisive.
Yet that is what is being witnessed by the electorate. And one suspects they won’t like it.
The replacement for the late and great federal Liberal Senator Jim Molan in NSW is now already being played out in the media by factional warlords who do their damaging background briefings under the cover of anonymity. And this is before the great Australian’s funeral service. Respectful? No. Untidy? Yes. In short not a good look.
Molan was not a nobody senator. A major-general and the holder of the highest military ranked individual finding his way into federal Parliament since World War I. Yet the public squabbling as to which faction the seat belongs to is apparently more important than finding the best replacement to serve the people of NSW.
At the last federal election, Labor received an exceptionally poor primary vote of 32.58 percent—not even one-third of the vote. The Liberals didn’t do much better with 35.78 percent.
The Mihailuk malaise is besetting both parties, and people are being turned off by the genuinely honourable calling of public service through our democratically elected parliaments.
Parliamentary service should be exactly that—service. Not personal vanity projects or factional dealings, or vacuous virtue signalling.
We have a wonderful democracy that is deserving of the best and brightest, not the weak and wokest.
