What Australia Tells Us about Voter Outrage

A couple of weeks ago, Australia had federal elections.

The outcome was that the Australian Labor Party (the main center left party), or ALP, won enough seats in the country’s parliament to form a majority government. The coalition of the Liberal Party of Australia and the National Party of Australia (the main center right party) took heavy losses, not only to the ALP but also to the Australian Green Party and a large number of women running independently who are known collectively as Teals.

This election should teach one critical lesson.

Sometimes you lose power in a democracy because of things you can’t control but voters still blame you for.

Background on Australia

The country of Australia has a population of about 26 million people and has a landmass of 7.62 million square kilometers (2.94 million sq mi). Australia is divided into six administrative states with their own parliaments, kind of how states function in the United States.

The six states are New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia. The Northern Territory occupies the north central part of the commonwealth, and much like Washington DC, the Australian capital of Canberra is its own territory. Both of these regions are considered internal territories. Australia also has external territories off of its coast.

Of these states, New South Wales is home to a third of Australia’s population, making it the most populated. Western Australia is the largest state by land area.

In terms of demographics, the country is around 76 percent White, 14 percent Asian, 2.8 percent First Nations (the Native people of Australia; more about Australia’s shameful history will be below; I get the impression this is the correct term and not Aboriginal), and around 7.3 percent of other backgrounds.

Keep in mind that Australia does not track race like the United States does on a census. Instead, they ask about ancestry.

For many people, Australia represented either a criminal sentence (Australia did start off as a penal colony, after all) or a second chance for someone with nothing left to lose. Frequently, it was both. Even today, the commonwealth represents new opportunities, second chances, and safety for its millions of foreign-born citizens and residents. As a result of this multicultural atmosphere in part, Australia is one of the wealthiest, most innovative, and most productive countries in the world. Its citizens enjoy quite a high standard of living, and the country has achieved much in commerce, science, technology, and the arts. Australia has much to offer the world.

Unfortunately, Australia has an all-too-familiar history with race compared with the United States. Not only was there an official Whites-only immigration policy in effect from 1901 until 1973 called the White Australia immigration policy, the country was founded in part on the displacement and genocide of its indigenous people. Like many former British colonies, the process was a crime against humanity, both in intent and brutality. Not only did the colonists commit frequent mass murder against the first peoples of Australia, the First Nations people of Australia also endured government-sponsored mass kidnapping of their children, who were then adopted by White Australian families. The consequences of these atrocities are still being felt today in Australia, with First Nations Australians suffering from distressingly high rates of poverty, addiction, and other social ills. Just because the government-sponsored horrors stopped does not mean the effects did.

If this story sounds too close to home, there is a reason for it.

Australia has a parliamentary system of government, much like the UK and Canada. Despite Australia having a House of Commons and Senate, in practice the House of Commons holds the bulk of the power. To form a government, you must control the House.

The two big parties in Australia are the center left Australian Labor Party and a center right alliance called the Coalition. The Coalition is made up of the Liberal Party of Australia and the National Australian Party. The Liberal Party is the dominant partner in this coalition thanks to its far larger size. Traditionally, the Liberals represent urban centers in Australia, along with rich suburban voters, small-town Australians, Australia’s version of the religious right, and many other factions we would associate with the pre-Trump Republican Party. The National Party traditionally represents rural Australians.

Keep in mind that voting in Australia is mandatory.

However, much like the rest of the Anglosphere, coalitions are changing. People who were once proud supporters of the Australian Liberal Party have begun to abandon it, as shown by recent elections.

Think of the Australian Labor Party like Democrats here in the United States. They, too, have seen coalitions shift rapidly beneath their feet.

The Coalition had been in power since 2013 before it lost power in early May 2022. Like any party in power during the Great Recession, the ALP took heavy losses in 2010, only saved by the fact the Coalition did not win enough seats to outnumber the ALP, enabling enough crossbenchers to help the ALP form a government. The Coalition defeated an ALP weakened from persistent and brutal infighting and bad luck that would last for nine years.

What to Keep in Mind

Although I definitely prefer the ALP to the Coalition, it is important to keep in mind that the Coalition is different from the Republican Party. For starters, when it was clear that he lost, Australian Prime Minister and Coalition head Scott Morrison conceded without claiming election fraud or attempting a coup.

Nevertheless, the far right has been gaining a worrying amount of influence inside the Coalition.

The most important thing to keep in mind, however, is that while there is racial polarization in voting in Australia, it is nowhere near as strong as in the United States. In Australia (and in Canada, New Zealand, and parts of the UK), immigrant communities often vote with the center right party. Also, one of the first First Nations politicians to get elected at the federal level in Australia represented the Liberals.

What is similar in Australia to the United States is the urban-rural divide, though, again, not as strong as in the United States. There are clear differences in preferences for urban, suburban, and rural Australians.

Why the Coalition Lost Power

I am happy that the Coalition lost power in Australia; it represents a defeat for far right populism in the world, and the Coalition had been abysmal at actually governing.

The previous Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, proved unworthy of the office when he decided to vacation in Hawaii while Australia was experiencing record bushfires and flooding. Even worse, his government played politics with those who got badly needed disaster relief, giving more aid to areas that voted for the Coalition than ones that had voted for the ALP.

Although at first Scott Morrison’s government did a solid job of containing the COVID-19 outbreak before any vaccine was available, it completely dropped the ball when it came to vaccine distribution. The Morrison government failed to procure enough vaccines in time and did an extremely bad job of distributing the vaccines it managed to get its hands on. The result of this grave fiasco was that Australia suffered from several more outbreaks of COVID-19, causing more lockdowns to contain the failure and many more Australians dying than need be.

In addition to catastrophes related to climate change–enhanced disasters and COVID-19, Scott Morrison’s attempts to handle multiple sexual assault scandals inside his own cabinet and party only served to anger women all across Australia. These women (especially upwardly mobile Liberal women), angered by the disregard the Morrison government demonstrated for their safety, would play a key role in giving the Coalition a serious defeat in May 2022 by helping to elect Teals in once-safe Liberal seats in wealthy inner-city centers in Australia.

All of these blunders were of the Coalition’s own doing that did grievous harm. But what ultimately cost the Coalition was out of its control.

It was inflation caused by a sudden increase in demand combined with supply chains that still needed to be rebuilt and exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Australia was not safe from this trend, and Australian voters took out their anger over higher grocery bills on the party that just so happened to be in power: the Coalition.

Lessons to Be Learned

The actions of fellow teammates in politics can do enormous damage to your prospects of getting reelected even if you yourself did nothing wrong. Just ask Republicans during the Trump years how his actions did grievous amounts of damage to them (though they often made a bad situation worse) or Democrats how the actions of Justice Democrats (not to mention Senators Manchin and Sinema) did unnecessary damage during the 2020 and 2021 elections, especially down ballot.

Considering how much damage Justice Democrats do and how little legislation they get through, the cost easily outweighs the benefits. Keep in mind the Democratic base is Black voters (and largely, with clear exceptions, other voters of color), metropolitan cores/inner rings, and college-educated women—not entitled and downwardly mobile White college students who are demanding a taxpayer bailout for their own bad decisions. Even if Democrats did forgive all student loan debt tomorrow (not going to hold up in court and a bad policy decision on its own), these voters would not pay back their political debts. President Biden’s polling tanked after pulling out of Afghanistan, even after he did what these Bernie voters wanted.

Sometimes events outside of your control doom your chances politically. In these cases, the best you can do is damage control.

The world is changing. Events in the United States regarding politics and government can find dangerous parallels across the world, especially in countries where the UK was a colonial master at one point and in the developed world.

 
Stay frosty, everyone.