LEARNING THE RIGHT VOTING LESSON

THE Wentworth by-election result seems to exactly capture the problem that the federal government faces as it sets out to win the ‘unwinnable election’.

Simply put, that in order to retain some of its safest seats in the country it has to promise to close down all the coal-fired power stations in Australia and replace them with thousands of wind turbines, solar panels and big Tesla batteries.

Albeit, not in their – lush and commodious – backyards.

But to retain all its marginal seats, especially in Queensland, it has to promise not only to keep all those stations open but to build one or two or three or more.

Now this diabolical challenge is not only all and only about ‘climate change’ – if you live in Wentworth or Kooyong – or ‘punishing power prices’ if you live in seats like Banks, Deakin and Petrie.

It’s also about refugees/ illegal immigrants and vibrant migrants/big citychoking blow-ins. But in every case the bifurcation is exactly the same. What Scott Morrison needs to promise the marginals could deliver more Kerryn Phelps’s.

Refusing to openly confront the challenge arguably got the prime minister to last Saturday night.

He clearly set out to go ‘softly-softly’ so as not to scare the pampered pooches of Wentworth by carrying around a symbolic lump of coal. He also grabbed for stunts like the Israel embassy ‘thought bubble’.

The tactical plan was to scrape though with a marginal win in Wentworth and then turn his and the government’s collective attention to the marginals running into a December mini-budget and beyond.

All it got was the waste of a very precious two months of his prime ministership. At most, he has six left.

The choice should be – and indeed, should should have been – relatively easy. There are far more of the marginals to lose, especially in Queensland, where voters are getting burned by power prices (and petrol).

He might be starting late but just maybe not too late.

The media are of course absorbed in ‘the game’; and not just the game but barracking for one side: the ‘virtue signalling side’.

Here’s a news flash: the overwhelming number of other Australians are just not that interested.

Apparently a near-record number of people sat down to watch the ABC’s Insiders on Sunday morning. I think it’d be fair to say that was the universe of those ‘interested’ in the nitty-gritty of the Phelp’s victory. The number was 720,000-odd. That means around 16 million eligible voters did not sit down to be told why it all meant that Morrison & Co had to embrace their virtuesignalling policies.

That is to say, 4 per cent of voters lapped up ‘their’ ABC’s message; around 96 per cent did not. They are up for grabs by a down under pollie doing the equivalent of ‘I’ll build not the wall but the station’.