This is why we can have nice things.

The Saturday Paper

Today is the Festival of Schadenfreude. I celebrated, as is my want now and then, by tossing Ruper Murdoch a couple of dollarydoos so that I might spend the day soaking in a warm bath of reactionary tears. The weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth today, especially in The Oz, lights up the deepest, darkest corners of my shrivelled heart with a supernova of malign exhilaration.

And frankly, I’d like to get back to it. So I’m not even going to attempt to pull together a coherent essay about the roasting of the Spud this weekend past.

But I do have some disconnected thoughts.

Allow me to throw them out, like the nation did with so many Liberal candidates.

• The Coaltion can never form government without those Teal seats. Albanese knows that and unlike last time he should do everything in his power to make sure those Teals are never dislodged from Parliament. Last time he cut their parliamentary funding, making it more difficult for them to do their jobs. He should increase it generously this time. Give them all the support they need to banish the Liberal Party from those seats until the Liberal Party learns its fucking lesson and starts offering candidates and policies that appeal to those voters.

• Supplementary note. When I originally penned this thought in bed in my hotel in Sydney, I added a rider that Albo should do this “even if it means increasing the funding to some fascist idiot from One Nation”. But that’s not going to be an issue now, because that band of grifting loons has been consigned to the outer darkness. For bonus points, it seems Clive Palmer’s wife has taken his mobile phone away and told him he can’t spend any more money on politics.

• You can look at the same thing two ways and they can both be right. You could say people hate the duopoly, which is why the primary vote of the two main parties seems to be stuck in the mid-30s, now. But if you look overseas at, say, European parliamentary democracies, scoring a vote in the mid-30s would be considered a crushing victory because their electorates are much more atomised than ours. (For what it’s worth, even in the US, a Republican or Democrat haul of say 45% or 50% is not in reality a vote of half the electorate, but of something closer to a quarter, because so many people don’t vote. What’s happening in Australia is that we’re finally catching up with the voting habits of the rest of the world.

• Another way of looking at the long-term collapse of the main parties’ primary votes, however, is to recognise that people like having options. The two main parties are often accused of being mirror images of each other and what minor parties of the left or the right do is give true believers the option of something they can truly believe in. Even if it’s nuts. The genius of the Australian political system is to channel those votes back towards the centre via preferential voting. It may be the single greatest piece of democratic engineering in the history of the free world.

• The primary vote collapse is routinely expressed as a threat to both major parties, but it’s only a danger to them if they refuse to learn from it. (Spoiler: Peter Dutton skipped that lesson) Dave Sharma, the Liberal member who was kicked out of his eastern suburban Sydney seat (based on Bondi) but who snuck back into the big house via the Senate warned his party that they can’t win government without winning the metro seats and you can’t win those seats if you campaign as a fascist nut job who wants to take a long hot bath in nuclear waste and racism. Similarly, the ALP‘s primary vote looks very sad in historical context but if you simply add the ALP and the green vote together, you’ll see that the combined progressive vote remains very strong. Almost a natural majority.

• We all love to complain about politics and politicians, but as individuals, we often really like our local reps. Andrew Gee the former National Party politician who quit the coalition over the Voice referendum has given it a real shake in the seat of Calare, while the independent Dai Le in Fowler has held on against a much better ALP challenger than they managed to put up last time (when they tried to parachute in the former New South Wales premier, Kristina Keneally.

• There’s been a lot of consolation wanking on the right about The Greens doing themselves a whoopsie by linking arms with Hamas and the CFMEU. Almost as if their vote collapsed or something. But it didn’t. They’ve lost seats, and coud yet lose Adam Bandt, but their national vote didn’t collapse. It went down a tick, but that’s all. They lost their Brisbane seats because the Liberal vote collapsed and Liberal preferences got distributed to Labor. This will be a pattern repeated over and over again in future: inner-city seats unpredictably changing hands in three-way contests.

• Malcolm Roberts versus Gerald Rennick for a final Senate spot is like the Godzilla vs King Kong match-up of this election, but only if the lizard and the big ape were tiny figurines carved from rancid tins of spam, fighting it out in a burning toilet.

• I might have been wrong about the importance of policy. Peter Dutton certainly was. I’ve always thought that politics was more driven by animal spirits than by programmatic specificity, as Kevin Rudd used to say. But it turns out people are kinda interested in policies, even if they only pay attention to them for 20 minutes on the way to the booth. You can’t just get elected on vibes. Then again Bill Shorten may disagree.

• The great die-off has begun. The boomers defined generational politics for decades after the Second World War but the boomers are now rejoining the food chain. This was famously the first election in which they were outnumbered by Gen X and Millennials, and massively outnumbered if you throw in the kiddies coming after them. Their influence going forward can only contract towards a vanishing point. The Liberal Party was the natural party of government boomers, and demographically, it has entered its twilight years.

• You know who else based his entire business model on boomers? Rupert Fucking Murdoch.

• The Voice referendum was a disaster that may have saved Albanese by causing the Libs to believe that everybody was as racist and cynical as them. When in fact people are mostly just fearful and greedy - a fact of human nature the Liberal party used to understand.

• Work From Home is now a permanent structural feature of the Australian economy and polity. This has profound implications for the future. I don’t know what they are. Maybe that guy who complained about young people spending all of their money on avocado toast might know.

• The talent in the Teals should be in the Liberal Party. But if they were, they’d never get anywhere because they’re mostly smart, accomplished women. Allegra Spender would probably be a great treasurer. Her energy transition policy was better than anything either party put forward, probably because she’s not beholden to the fossil fuel industry, and she’s a really smart businesswoman. Weird that.The more I look at the Teals the more they look like what a modern conservative party should be. But if you look at the coalition, why would any smart successful professional women submit herself to that bullshit?

Okay, that’s my thoughts so far. Please feel free to add yours below. But honestly, I’m going to spend most of today wallowing in delicious schadenfreude.