It’s all over bar the Shouting
YOU don’t have to like him,” a member of ScoMo’s government said this week. “It is really a question of who is up to the job of being prime minister of this country.”
Let’s pretend I’m having an Albo moment and can’t quite remember who said that. It could have been almost anyone in the Coalition because hardly anyone there likes Scott Morrison. His deputy Barnaby Joyce was certainly not Robinson Crusoe when he described his boss as “a hypocrite and a liar”.
Though coming from Barnaby, some might see that as a character reference.
Having spent some enjoyable time down the country road with the Nationals leader, I couldn’t possibly comment.
If ScoMo doesn’t win an outright victory his own party will have no compunction at all about replacing him with someone more “likable”. I fancy the very decent Josh Frydenberg, but if ScoMo doesn’t get back it might be because Josh has lost his socalled “teal seat” of Kooyong.
In those unhappy circumstances Peter Dutton would be interesting. As the instructions said on the Chinese fireworks of my childhood: “Light blue torch paper and retreat to safe distance.”
In the Labor trenches, at first there was internal alarm at what seemed to be Albo’s early-onset Joe Biden Syndrome.
The polls this week suggest the voters don’t really care, but the ALP leader will surely not survive anything short of a clear electoral victory.
Both leaders claim they will not deal with the minor parties nor the independents if you, the people, fecklessly elect outsiders. True enough. In the event of a hung parliament, neither leader will still be around to do any deals. But a new leader will. That is what Westminster parliamentary politics is about: the prime minister is the person with the skill to negotiate a majority on the floor of the lower house by dealing with the elected representatives who voters in their wisdom have chosen.
Well, that’s the theory and it’s why around the world most democracies are coalitions, often of many parties and individuals. It is a dark and pernicious threat to democracy in this country whenever the two major parties tell us we must only vote for either of them. They threaten anarchy or, even worse, that like naughty children we will be sent back a second time to get it right.
Wouldn’t you be happy to see both leaders replaced in the event of a hung parliament? Jason Clare is my Labor choice. He is a political star, a comet really, who blazed into our ken only because Albo was stricken with the “China virus”. If not this next term, put your money on Clare as a future Labor prime minister. Standout candidates for that job emerge only once in decades.
When I had a national radio show, Australia’s most cunning commercial broadcast boss, the late Sam Chisholm, told me: “Never take time off, and if you do make sure you don’t fill in with someone better than you are.”
Albo might not have seen Clare coming, only because almost all of the shadow cabinet are better public performers than their leader. If the polls are right and Albo forms government after next week, we can only hope that his real strength lies behind the scenes, as a team leader. But if he fails to form government watch out for Jason Clare.
ScoMo said this past week that the election was “not a popularity contest”. In fact, he was wrong. For a long time
the Polling suggests a punters have picked landslide side and it’s a as we know to Labor. But time, polls can from last politics be so wrong. In earthquakes, you as in against an can’t insure act of God.
now, it has been a popularity contest in the American presidential style. I would not really be voting for a local candidate so much as for Morrison or Albanese or (in my case) neither. In my electorate of Lyons, I can hardly vote for Labor’s social media disaster, the sitting member Brian Mitchell, who once posted about “massaging boobies” and about women’s inability during protracted debate to control their bladders. “We are going to need mops,” he once said of an ALP national conference.
Nor am I likely to vote for the Liberal candidate Susie Bower, an unknown who doesn’t have a record of silliness, but who comes from the Meander Valley and has rarely if ever been down Dodge City way.
The point is again, like all of us I will be voting for Albo or ScoMo or against both. As a Dodge City local told me told me this week: “I don’t know the candidates and it doesn’t matter. I’m voting for the butcher, not the maggot on the block.”
In Nine’s debate at the beginning of the week, the politics drowned out the policies. Two blokes, whom we didn’t much like, yelled at one another for an hour, during which we learned nothing.
For most Australians, important issues such as national security, aged care, health, climate change and integrity in politics seemed to go unaddressed.
So, what can we do? Well, one sensible thing would be to vote below the line. Not to slavishly endorse either of the major party tickets, which were designed by faceless powerbrokers for whom you are the least of their considerations. Take the time to make up your own ticket. Vote across the parties if you wish and for independents and minor parties. For instance, my Senate vote will include the Local Party’s Leanne
Minshull, the Greens’ Peter WhishWilson, someone from the Shooters and Fishers, and Eric Abetz because I would miss him.
And Dusty the dog has drawn my attention to the Animal Justice Party.
Admittedly psephologists would be confused by such a messy and contradictory voting pattern. But surely my way, even if it brings the end of the world as we know it, is so much better than being lectured on how to vote by the major parties.
In contrast to Nine’s shout-fest, Seven’s midweek debate was civil and sedate, with a more sensible set that placed the moderator between the immoderate. It worked well, though perhaps it was not so entertaining without the shouting. But if we wanted to, we could actually hear what the leaders were saying — though so late in the campaign is anyone still listening?
Polling suggests the punters have picked a side and it’s a landslide to Labor. But as we know from last time, polls can be so wrong. In politics as in earthquakes, you can’t insure against an act of God. ScoMo had his “miracle’ in 2019, but surely this time God is too busy in Ukraine.
Well, He should be. The ratbaggery of Australian party politics is unworthy of divine intervention.
Having already made up their minds, this week millions will cast early votes in order to get away to somewhere quiet on election day and try to ignore the whole thing.
But they will wake up as always on the following Monday morning and know the truth of the wise old French saying, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”: the more things change, the more they stay the same.