Weep not for the two-party system, it is dead. By its own hand.
Is anyone really going to miss it?
Sure, it’s a tough time for the centre-right at the moment, because while the minority of left voters (the combined vote of the two left-wing parties in Australia is still less than 50 per cent) follow sheep-like after the Labor bellwether, the more fractious centre-right vote is splitting between a plethora of parties. We’re still at the back-end of the trajectory that can be mapped in other countries: Britain, where Reform is fast rising up as a third party (thanks to the UK’s first-past-the-post system; while Reform gained more votes than the Lib-Dems, they ended up with a bare fraction of the latter’s seats). And most notably Germany, where the AfD is so successful that the two-party establishment is literally trying to outlaw them.
Whether the Liberals in Australia can rebuild, or a viable third party rise up, is in the future. All that appears certain right now is that the two-party system is in its death-throes. Normiecons are wringing their hands in despair.
Westminster systems typically deliver more stable and coherent government than proportional systems […]
Western politics is in long-simmering crisis. Two-party systems are breaking down everywhere. The British first-past-the-post voting system even more heavily favours a two-party political culture than our preferential system.
Yet British voters apparently hate this and have imposed effectively a five-party system. Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Scottish Nationalists all have substantial representation at Westminster. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has only a handful of Westminster seats but has moved decisively ahead of the Conservatives as the second most popular party. It took a seat from Labour in a recent by-election and won huge gains in recent local elections, outperforming the Conservatives.
At the moment, the slow death of the two-party system is favouring the left. Like Keir Starmer in the UK, Anthony Albanese won a huge parliamentary majority with just one-third of the vote. But the sun won’t shine on the left forever. Indeed, in much of Europe, the trend is favouring the right rather than the left.
Alienation from the British political system is growing. Electors increasingly contemplate more radical ways to express their frustration with politics.
Two-party systems have collapsed across Europe. Traditional centre-right parties in France, the Gaullists, and in Italy, the Christian Democrats, have been displaced by more populist parties, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy in Rome […]
Crumbling two-party systems make it ever less likely that governments can confront structural issues such as chronic deficit, ballooning debt, out-of-control immigration and urgent defence needs. Increasingly, mainstream politics cannot adjudicate difficult policy questions and deliver coherent responses.
Which must be news to Argentines, where Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza has risen from its formation in 2021 to lead the debt-and-inflation-ridden country to a remarkable economic turnaround.
But the pearl-clutching normiecons might want to consider why voters are sick to death of the two-party system: because the political class has become so detached from the lived reality of voters. Because the political class has pissed whatever legitimacy it might once have had up against the wall of voter fury.
Because the political class pulls off bullshit like this:
The proposed tax on unrealised gains inside superannuation accounts could only have been invented in Canberra. Taxing profits people haven’t made is a testament to the dismal disconnect between the political and bureaucratic class from the productive parts of Australia.
Living in Canberra on big salaries, wielding power and enjoying defined benefit pension schemes, being insulated from productive hard-scrabble Australia will do that to you. Add in virtually permanent public service tenure and more or less unlimited work-from-home rights for the Treasury boffins who helped dream up this stuff, and you start to understand the cocoon that spawned a tax on unrealised gains.
That’s only the beginning. Only a political class as arrogant and self-serving as the Little Sun Kings of Versailles-by-the-artificial-lake could dream up something as blatant as this:
State MPs and high ranking officials will be exempt from Jim Chalmers’s tax on unrealised capital gains affecting superannuation funds over $3m under a defunct pension scheme […]
Dr Chalmers has previously said federal politicians would be exempt from the reforms, which will increase the tax paid on superannuation balances over $3m from 15 to 30 per cent to fund government programs.
But it would take a national referendum to get rid of exemptions for former state premiers, ministers, governors, department heads, judges and magistrates.
And they wonder why we hate them so.
