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Notes -
Party realignment in Australian politics?
Opinion polls and a few minor elections are showing a massive shift in voter party alignment here. A bit of previous discussion here.
What do these abbreviations mean?
For the non-Aussies, this is the basic breakdown of the parties:
The Australian Labor Party (ALP) is our centre-left party. Former member of Socialist International before they got kicked out for being too capitalist, member of Progressive Alliance, still wears communist red. Fairly progressive - started their victory speech last federal election with a land acknowledgment, to cheers, and were behind the failed referendum to Constitutionally enshrine an Aboriginal lobby group back in 2023 - but is still to a large extent a trade union party. And yes, they spell it the US way, as they incorrectly predicted that US spelling would take over and never bothered fixing it.
The Coalition (LNP) is, as the name suggests, not really a party but a coalition of two - the Liberal Party which amounts to centre-right low-tax urban elites and wears blue, and the National Party which amounts to rural Australians and wears dark green. They've been in a long-standing coalition against Labour, although exactly how much of a coalition depends on state - in the Northern Territory and Queensland, they've formally merged, in New South Wales and Victoria they're in coalition (they divide up the seats and each seat gets one of the parties contesting it), and in the other states they do contest the same seats (though the National Party is basically nonexistent in South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory, and the Liberal Party essentially does double duty). The National Party is quite conservative, as you'd expect; the Liberals, on the other hand, have very much tried to take a middle road in the culture wars (the Liberals were split on the aforementioned referendum, although the leader eventually came out against; the Nationals took a more unified stance against although one dissenter did quit to become an independent). Note that the National Party has become more and more marginalised in the Coalition as the population has urbanised over time and thus the amount of rural electorates has declined.
The Greens (GRN) can largely be thought of as the hippie party, and wear bright green. Originally a single-issue environmentalist party, they quickly fleshed out their platform with a bunch of other hippie policies like drug legalisation... and then got utterly skinsuited by Social Justice in the 2010s. As you'd expect, they poll well among urban-core youth. I used to be a Greens voter until the aforementioned skinsuiting - previously, they'd been very liberal (usually specified as "small-l liberal" in Oz, to distinguish from the Liberal Party), but now they're an outright threat to democracy insofar as they want to ban political parties from being far-right.
Pauline Hanson's One Nation (ONP) is our alt-right party, wearing orange, and the one the Greens would like to ban. One Nation is actually quite old compared to most alt-right parties; it started when Pauline Hanson was kicked out of the Liberal Party for criticising Aboriginal special treatment and Asian immigration... in 1996-7, though during the 2000s they languished in obscurity. They've eased off the specifically-anti-Asian part AIUI, but they're still anti-immigration, anti-social-justice, and anti-globalisation. They were the first party to declare open opposition to the referendum. And as you can see, they've recently had a meteoric rise in popularity. They got more first-preference votes (though less seats) in the recent South Australian state election than the Coalition did, and they won a federal House of Representatives seat last week for the first time since Hanson in 1996 (this wasn't a general election; the Liberal Party swapped leaders and the ex-leader retired mid-term, leaving her seat vacant and triggering a "by-election" off-schedule).
Note that One Nation is not currently subject to a cordon sanitaire; it was during its founding, but by the 2010s the Coalition were putting One Nation above Labour on their how-to-vote cards.
Voting system issues
So, first point - vote-split is not a concern here. We are not going to have a copy of Britain's farcical election from two years ago. Australia uses instant-runoff voting, which is clone-independent and thus lets parties rise and fall a bit more easily.
What we are starting to see is the Coalition getting centre squeezed. Essentially, when it comes down to three candidates (Labour, Liberal or National, One Nation), if the Coalition comes in last of those three it's eliminated and its preferences distributed between Labour and One Nation, even if it's the Condorcet winner. This is IRV's big departure from the Median Voter Theorem which otherwise holds for a compulsory-voting country like Australia (and which is why the Liberals were trying to take a middle road on the culture war).
Why is this happening?
For the most part, I dunno. I've been less attentive to domestic politics than I'd like the past few years, with my depression. I can name one thing that definitely pissed a lot of rightists off with the Liberal Party recently, which is the Bondi Beach shooting (a father-son pair of Islamic State gunmen shot a bunch of Jews in Sydney; the Labour/Liberal* bipartisan response included massively-broadening federal hate speech laws; while progressives do get hit for hate speech in Australia, usually for hoisting Hezbollah flags and such, conservatives still feel like they're being targetted and thus betrayed by the Liberals), but the rise in One Nation support started before that shooting. I thought it looked like Very Online youngsters swinging alt-right as an ongoing effect of the Twitter sale, but upon looking at crosstabs One Nation is getting most of this newfound support from millennials and Gen X. I'd like to know more about this myself, and would welcome info from our other Aussies.
*Note, not the Nationals; they broke from solidarity with the Liberals over this.
Is the Liberal Party screwed?
Maybe. The main thing keeping them safe from centre-squeeze until now has been the taboo around One Nation (despite the lack of formal cordon sanitaire - I'm talking about the informal social pressure exerted by SJ against voting for an "extremist" party), but that seems to have collapsed and would appear very hard to rebuild. They can pivot all they like, but it's not clear that there's currently enough room between Labour and One Nation to support a winning party (particularly since the Liberals in particular have... well, kind of a bad reputation as the party of the 1%; I've generally had a lot more time for the Nationals than the Liberals). Still, at the federal level this isn't an immediate problem for them; there's a Victorian state election later this year, and a New South Welsh state election early next year, but the next federal election's not until 2028. (And with world affairs being what they are, making predictions of anything that far out seems pretty risible; we could have had a nuclear war by then, or an AI rebellion.)
I will note that non-Labour parties in Australia do have turnover from time to time; the Liberal Party only dates back to WWII.
What does this mean for Australian politics?
Well, Labour's two-party-preferred vote against One Nation surprisingly doesn't seem to be all that dissimilar from its similar statistic versus the Coalition, so we might end up with a Liberal-One-Nation coalition in Victoria (it's an uphill battle, though; Melbourne's Labour heartland and has 75% of the state population). Would certainly be neat if I could stop being nervous about the state hate speech laws.
The bad news is that One Nation are the hardened culture warriors the Liberals refused to be, which means we're probably going to see politics heat up quite a bit here as the culture war takes centre stage. I'll certainly be tapping some of my sources to get a better read on the situation, as I'm a bit worried about the potential for Australian politics to get as hot as US ones.
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