On this blog, a Word power post is always an attempt to draw your attention to an essay, article, report, poem or book that is particularly worth reading.
This post’s title is in fact the subtitle of the current Quarterly Essay; Minority Report, by George Megalogenis.
If I could “prescribe” just one “essential” piece for every intelligent Australian voter to read before our next Federal election….
Minority Report is in part an unsentimental analysis of exactly how Federal elections and Referendums are “won” and “lost”, of how the key “drivers” of “success” and “failure” have shifted over the last several decades, and of how “shifts” currently underway could “play out” next year.
A few examples:
When the Liberals abandon the middle, they lose their progressive base and the ability to form either majority or even minority government. When Labor sticks too close to the middle, it invites a progressive backlash to its left, and minority government whose survival may depend on a rival party.
Only Queensland and Tasmania have a majority of their people still living outside the capital. The Liberals cannot afford to treat the teal electorates as an anomaly of inner-city wokeness that can be ignored in pursuit of a new mythical middle in the outer suburbs. The political centre has been moving towards the CBD, not away from it, and to voters who are being denied the Menzies dream of home ownership.
As an electoral competitor to Labor, the Greens have an interest in picking as many fights as possible.
Minority government would represent a form of success for Labor if the crossbench is large enough to deny the Greens the outright balance of power in the lower house.
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Megalogenis also offers shrewd, succinct portraits of key players, and of exactly how and why something “personal”/”private” can become very “public” and very damaging, politically:
The prime minister threw beach sand in the gears of the campaign in October with his private decision, not flagged to colleagues, to buy a $4.3-million home on a clifftop…it did draw attention to the great housing divide between the parliament and the people. One in three members and senators, across all parties, own at least three properties, compared to around 4 percent of taxpayers.
Labor has boxed itself into the corner of incrementalism, with a prime minister from its Left who carries himself more like Howard than Whitlam, Hawke or Keating.
Dutton is a graduate of a system that privileges political power above all. He has only known a world in which the public service is easily cowed by ministers and their staff, and the media are too weak and divided to perform their basic duty of scrutiny.
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More importantly, Megalogenis is centrally concerned with the actual public good, and with how it just might prove possible for an ethical, brave-enough, sufficiently-astute political party & PM to win office by effectively presenting good policies, and by seeking to unite electors, rather than to divide them or to be terminally averse to speaking plain truth..
The arguments over the Voice and Gaza reflect our times. Australians today are quicker to anger after the multiple shocks of fire, flood, plague and inflation. But the responsibility of leaders is to absorb that anger and address its underlying causes. What we have, instead, is an unthinking escalation from the right and left, and a government on mute in the middle.
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Correctly, I think, Megalogenis sees housing as…
the defining failure of Australian capitalism and politics in the twenty-first century. No other part of the economy has its distortions perpetuated by bipartisan policy
Housing policy – most especially where it intersects with taxation policy – is at once the key “difficulty” for Labor, and Labor’s best opportunity for electoral (and “good policy”) success:
The question for Albanese and Chambers is whether they are brave enough to use housing as the platform to rebuild trust in their government, and by extension the political system.
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Throughout this essay a key strength is its author’s astute use of data to demonstrate the oft-yawning gap between actual realities and commonly-held beliefs…and some of the so-called “rhetoric” peddled by our “major” political parties:
Both sides are taking a risk with the same New Australian community. Young Indian families typically settle in the outer suburbs. They are not responsible for the affordability crisis; on the contrary, their demand is adding to the housing stock, especially in Melbourne’s west and north-west. Indian students land as renters, not buyers, and they gravitate to the university suburbs of the inner city, where they are more willing than the local-born to live in shared accommodation. The finger of suspicion pointed by Dutton, and to a lesser extent by Albanese, is not just unfair on the Indian community. It undermines their faith in the political system, pushing a Labor-leaning voter into none-of-the-above.
New house prices, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, surged by 20 percent in 2021-22, before Labor took office. They rose by an additional 7.8 percent – just above the inflation rate of 6 percent – in the first twelve months of Albanese’s government, before levelling off. The punchline is that prices actually fell slightly in real terms in 2023-24 across our three most populous cities – in Sydney and Melbourne, the twin capitals of New Australia, and in Brisbane, the main destination for internal migration. A boom with the border closed, which eases when once the migrants come flooding back in.
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Minority Report: the new shape of Australian politics is on sale in most newsagents and bookshops, and from here.
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