Life
Australia’s election season seems decent and inclusive in comparison to the drama we see in America, but was this last one really a repudiation of far-right politics? By Jock Serong.
The real election grievances
First, disclosure. I am not a political pundit but an occasionally outraged amateur. And because I’m not a proper journalist I can tell you who I voted for: a talented independent.
In my electorate of Wannon, western Victoria, where the Liberal Party has had the gig for 70 years, our sitting member is Dan Tehan, who is quite affable, apparently. Not that we’d know. He once advocated bombing Syria, as affable people do. Anyway, when you’re represented by a string of cabinet ministers, a prime minister and a speaker of the House, surprise surprise, your roads start falling apart. Our independent got very close: Dan was forced to visit several times.
I voted absent, early, over in Rosebud. There was a similar stoush going on there: as in Wannon, the Liberals have had their mitts on Flinders almost continuously for 71 years until they were besieged by a young independent. The booth volunteers seemed very agreeable: I saw a Labor one handing a Liberal one a tray of takeaway coffees. You could be glass-half-full and see that as evidence of the civility of our politics, or glass-half-empty and call it a metaphor for major-party complicity.
I’m struck each time by the harmlessness of voting in this country, set against the very real harms that the resultant parliament might cause and avoid. The smiling crowds, good doggie and the confetti of bright T-shirts. Here’s a volunteer who wants me to vote against Welcomes to Country, to engage in a calculated snub to the peoples who offered the generosity of Makarrata. Here’s another one who’d back nuclear energy. She seems a nice person. Do I engage her about how nuclear reactors are fantastically expensive and due to arrive decades after we need them? Or do I save that argument for whoever’s touting AUKUS?
When I got to the booth, the Australian Electoral Commission official saw where I lived and commented what a lovely town it is. We had a yack – she wasn’t busy. Compare that tiny exchange to the ordeal of Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, the Georgia Elections Department employee whose life was made hell by some of the voters she served when the southern US state narrowly rejected the Republicans in 2020.
We grumble about voting as we grumble about jury duty – a roll of the eyes and how do I squirm out of this? Both things are seen as tedious, inconvenient and compulsory. One gets in the way of work and family: the other saps our leisure time. Yet as part of a jury, your vote could ruin someone’s life forever – or restore their liberty. These are ordinary, and, at the same time, massive responsibilities. Priceless things.
This year, as the results were rolling in, I was seated in the front bar of a pub in Margaret River, Western Australia. There was footy, not politics, on the TV. My company was crime writer Chris Hammer, whose years as a press gallery journo had rewarded him with a phone full of well-informed sources. Eyes up: a string of handballs on the members’ wing. Eyes down: Dickson might fall.
Among the young bar crowd, though, not a single person was looking at their phone. Every table was a raucous cluster of beery conversation. It’s encouraging to see no one staring at a device. It’s reassuring that we don’t identify ourselves by tribe, politically at least. But was no one interested in the outcome? Is the disengagement that profound now?
On the TV, Collingwood tried to run down a rampant Geelong, and the ever-reliable Jack Crisp, celebrating a record streak of unfussy excellence, marked on the siren within scoring range. He looked set to deliver a come-from-behind fairytale… and he missed. Despite being a lifetime Pie, I didn’t care, because I love a close contest – it gets the best out of everyone. Dominant teams take the foot off the pedal: they chip it around, rack up possessions. It’s not what we buy memberships for.
The election delivered a thrashing, not a kick on the siren. Landslides feed complacency, and complacency is our political default mode, just as hyperbole is the Americans’. We so often procrastinate about important things while obsessing about selfish trivialities. We have a vague idea as a nation that we should address something: the republic, January 26, the Voice, truth-telling... Can all of this just wait?
Do I think the May 3 result ushers in a new age of socially and environmentally courageous government? Not remotely. We punished a bad campaign and an erratic, mean-spirited aspirant. That’s about all we did. Election nights are merely the final act of a circus and life now proceeds outside the tent.
Nor am I convinced that we’ve joined a wave of Western democracies turning our noses up at Trumpism. It’s not that simple.
Were we truly offered Trumpism? A handful of dopey populists took a dab at our worst instincts and no one was impressed – the pitch was incompetent and fleeting. That’s a very different thing than having a dangerous, charismatic autocrat mount a sustained attack on civic institutions, backed by vast wealth, a substantial slab of the media and a citizen militia of armed bogans. We flatter ourselves if we think we held off that sort of pressure.
Trump himself appeared unaware of the Australian election and couldn’t name our opposition leader. So what hope is there of Washington understanding the topography of our hopes and frustrations? We remain a distant nothing – mercifully – in America’s convulsions. With, let’s face it, a better system.
This is why it’s so disappointing to hear Penny Wong, normally measured and thoughtful, crudely dismissing the Greens’ platform as “the politics of grievance”. In a democracy, politics is about grievance as much as it is about hope. When young Australians watch the dominant players waving through coalmines, guaranteeing that homes will keep getting more expensive, mumbling toothless platitudes about Gaza, backing corporate state capture in Tasmania… damn fucking right there’s grievance. What should people do with their grievances, other than seek expression in a political party? State governments around the country have eviscerated protest rights, so that’s off the table. Appeal to the media? What media?
The federal Labor government has wasted three years on the environment. The grievance I see is some unspoken grudge between Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek that paralyses climate action and enables ongoing extinctions. If anyone can tell me how the federal government justifies its position on Tasmanian salmon – morally, environmentally – I’m all ears. It’s indefensible. And after a bold opening on the Voice, they retreated back into their shells on First Nations policy as the gaps continued to widen.
I don’t see Labor as a force for change. As a centre-left party that has chased the conservatives out of the middle ground and away to the lunatic right, Labor starts to look more like that dreaded formulation – relaxed and comfortable. The pummelling of Adam Bandt and Zoe Daniel reveals an aversion to straight talkers.
What I wanted to see out of that Saturday night was an expansive cross bench nipping at the government’s heels, making them work for consensus. We’re a long way from that.
Of course I’m grateful to see neoliberal thugs dispatched to whatever gilded obscurity constitutes a Tory afterlife these days. The candidates who were named as possible opposition leaders were a talent pool so shallow it wouldn’t wet the tops of your feet.
Dan Tehan survived, though, and he won’t have to pretend to buy coffees here in Wannon for another three years.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 17, 2025 as "The circus leaves town".
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