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As I wrote recently, a possibility that will be keeping Labor strategists up at night is the prospect of a conservative grand coalition emerging from the next election. While the Liberal-National coalition is polling at its lowest ebb in history, skyrocketing centre-right One Nation is still well behind Labor.
But add the three centre-right parties’ collective primary votes together and Labor is in serious trouble.
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson says the way forward for her party would be to join forces in a coalition with the Liberals and Nationals, though teed off on the leadership of the two parties claiming they were in a “shambles”.
Senator Hanson who recently announced Cory Bernardi as her latest recruit, set to run for the upper house in the South Australian state election, said One Nation could conceivably work in a coalition with the Liberal and National parties at the federal level.
This is the only sensible deal for both parties, if the coalition can only swallow their pride long enough to see it. The prospect of the Liberals, especially, overcoming their bitter divisions and re-discovering their centre-right purpose before the next election is vanishingly remote. If One Nation’s poll numbers carry through to the election, though, such a grand coalition may well succeed.
Most importantly, the Overton window has been well and truly smashed for One Nation. More and more, voters feel able to openly voice their support for the party. Labor’s challenge to the coalition to preference One Nation last will look more and more like the desperate gambit it is. If the coalition and One Nation agree to a preference swap, Labor will be in deep trouble.
For One Nation, the attraction will not just be bolstering its chances at government. An alliance with the coalition will go a long way to overcoming the problem of what will be, if their electoral dreams come true, an almost-completely inexperienced bloc of MPs.
The Liberals and Nationals get to position themselves as the steady, experienced hands. One Nation, as the centre-right change-makers. Win-win.
“Of course, that’s the only way to move forward, because I’m not going to be in government and by the looks of it neither is the coalition,” she told Sky News.
“The fact is I am a conservative at heart and I would work with them to give them supply. Would I join up to the rabble that they are at the moment? No.”
“But I have my policies that we need because they are doing nothing to address the important issues that the Australian people want.”
Hanson also has sharp words for the normiecon establishment finger-wagging One Nation for ‘helping Labor’.
“It is not my fault (that) Labor is benefiting out of this. It’s the coalition’s fault because they’ve failed to do their job. Have a look at their leadership, they’re bloody shambles.”
What’s worse, a shambles without even the most basic ideological compass.
The big question for the Liberal Party is not who leads it but what it actually stands for. Obviously, the unsettled leadership question must be resolved and the coalition with the Nationals re-formed, as quickly as possible; because, in politics, disunity is death.
But the deeper question is what sort of a Liberal Party, and what sort of a coalition, will it be, because for the first time in over a hundred years there’s the makings of a viable alternative to what’s always been the mainstream centre-right party. The Liberal Party isn’t just down. This time, if it’s not careful, it could be down and out.
The coalition’s big problem is that it has completely failed to grasp just how the nature of voting patterns in Australia – and the rest of the West – have changed. Most significantly, the long-threadbare narrative of ‘the party of the worker’ has finally been busted for all to see.
Nor are the Libs any more ‘the party of the rich’. Really rich people now vote Teal and Green and the upper-middle-classes solidly Labor. Labor, to their credit, quickly worked this out. Coalition strategists focussed too much on trying to win back the blue-ribbon inner cities, and ignored the vast swathe of the mortgage belt suburbs who didn’t want to vote Labor, but see only an omnishambles in opposition.
This vote displacement reflects a tendency, across the Anglosphere, for richer people to vote more left, while poorer people vote more right; yet because voters with “bread and butter” concerns will nearly always outnumber those with “luxury beliefs”, this could ultimately be to the coalition’s advantage, provided it can avoid mixed messaging and policy indecision; and can meet this new constituency with credible candidates that reflect their community rather than parachuted-in apparatchiks, as is the current failing model […]
Only this time, the votes that have been haemorrhaging away from the coalition haven’t migrated more or less evenly to other parties across the political spectrum; instead, they’ve largely coalesced behind One Nation.
The coalition would be even more stupid than they look right now if they fail to see the opportunity of openly allying with One Nation.
