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One thing the recent South Australian state election – and opinion polling across the rest of the country – shows is that the old paradigm of post-war Australian politics is completely broken. The Liberals are no longer either a conservative party, in any meaningful sense of the word, or the ‘party of the rich’. Labor, as if anyone still believed such self-serving bullshit, is beyond all doubt no longer the ‘party of the worker’, but the party of the inner-city elites who wouldn’t know a worker if they tripped over one while he was grubbing about doing… well, whatever it is that peasants do.
In the South Australian election, the trendies and snobs of the Adelaide Hills and inner-city voted Labor. The horny-handed sons of toil in the steel towns and farming districts voted One Nation.
Ignore the concerns of disenfranchised low-income voters and they will rise up as one and destroy you.
The scale of Labor’s thumping South Australian election win masks a confronting new political reality. Labor has strengthened its standing as the party of the middle class and lost its position as the natural home of the blue-collar worker.
It has done better in seats that are home to barristers and baristas than boilermakers.
Labor might well celebrate a landslide victory in parliamentary seats, but behind the TV cameras, number-crunchers will be sweating as they watch one formerly safe Labor seat after another swing heavily to One Nation.
Out north and down south and in the regions, Labor MPs and their supporters were drinking not out of celebration but because they had endured a near-death experience.
The seats where Labor soared on Saturday are those that have farmers markets, well-manicured parks, where people wear their moleskins and RMs to Auskick on a Friday night, then grab a glass of pinot at the local pop-up wine bar before walking through their crime-free neighbourhood to their solar-powered home. These seats are unaffected by the grit and bustle of immigration. They’re seats where rising petrol prices are a manageable inconvenience, while in One Nation’s new heartland, paying $2.69 a litre means you can no longer afford to fill up your car.
And the rich people who once voted Liberal now vote Labor. Unley, in inner Adelaide, was held by the Liberals for 40 years. It’s now a safe Labor seat. Elizabeth, the factory town – where all the factories are closed now – was the home to the “working-class man” himself, Jimmy Barnes. The Holden factory that once employed the city’s post-war migrants is being turned into an Australia Post parcel processing centre. Where South Australian workers once made things, they now have to import everything that’s made in China.
In Elizabeth, Labor suffered a 14.7 per cent swing away. The two-party-preferred vote in what was once unassailable Labor territory stands at 57 per cent for the ALP and 43 per cent for One Nation.
Remember, this is the same part of Adelaide that in the overlapping federal seat of Spence recorded the highest No vote in Australia at the Indigenous voice referendum.
These patterns were replicated statewide on Saturday night.
In Whyalla, where federal MP and Climate Cultist Craig Emerson did his cringey ‘No Whyalla Wipeout’ song and dance, to celebrate the Gillard government’s carbon tax, the workers are in the same ugly mood as anywhere else. Not even millions of taxpayer dollars in desperate vote-buying by the Malinauskas’ state Labor government could stop the swing to One Nation. Labor held on to the seat – but only just.
In the Iron Triangle seat of Giles, Labor was belted by a 14.5 per cent swing to hold the seat by a 55-45 margin over One Nation […]
In the outer southern suburbs and regional south, in seats such as Mawson and Reynell, Labor was rocked by five per cent swings away from sitting MPs – and again, all that drift went in the direction of Pauline Hanson.
Most dramatic of all, the Gawler-based outer northern seat of Light has gone from a rock-solid 20 per cent Labor seat to a possible One Nation gain as the ALP was belted by a 19 per cent swing to Senator Hanson’s party […]
the numbers show why the premier is right to have spent the campaign warning that One Nation is not a Liberal-only problem, but a problem for anyone in the political mainstream who is complacent to the threat.
A ‘threat’ to the two-party, left and further-left establishment, maybe. To the vast mass of centre-right working-class and mortgage-belt Australians, though, the ‘threat’ to the establishment looks a whole lot like an opportunity for the rest of us who aren’t in their exclusive little club.
