Spec 12: Election 25 Week One: Albo Takes a Fall, Dutts takes a dive, a teal goes all Indigo Girls, and Managed Dissatisfaction Takes To the Stage

'That was great and I didn't have to have sex with you' political class says to electorate

‘Australia is the last place on Earth with normal politics’ some Canadian remarked on Twitter/X. Lucky old us! The Canucks are coming to terms with the absolute, forced collapse of the relationship with their geographical continental former partner-ally, which is forcing a renewed attention on what their nation is, and what it should be. Britain is in uproar, and Europe ….

Here? This election may be the one which delivers the single most indeterminate result since non-Labo(u)r fusion pre WW1. Should it deliver more Teals and other independents, and the Greens hold, then the Australian parliament will live up to the bourgeois fantasy ideal of how government forms: that elected men and women turn up and apply their individual conscience to the question of who should rule. Should it happen the most interesting part will be what is usually tedious, the actual governor-general's invitation to someone to have a crack at it.

The most interesting part, the actual campaign is, so far, tedious beyond belief. That is usually an arch and cynical judgement on politics. This time it’s the politics that is arch and cynical, in the major party contestation, while the Teals and Brisbane Greens are in a slugathon to simply retain. Only the marvellous Nicole Bouie (subs - check name, oh thas me arggghh no time) , teal-running in Bradfield, leavened things, telling a female hairdresser who’d just washed her hair ‘that was great and I didn't even have to have sex with you!’, such a Gen X, share house, lesbian-until- graduation gag you could practically hear the Indigo Girls in the background. Great girl gonzo. Bouie has said she’ll try to do better. More better jokes we hope.

That Labor’s campaign would be tedious, self-satisfied, unresponsive to clamouring demands for action on housing, health, and much more, was always on the cards. No teal-equivalent has emerged on the Labor side, to light a fire under them in heartland seats. Without that, our individual seat preferential system has done what it was intended to do: round up strays and consolidate the major party vote. Even first past the post would give more hope of upset in such seats.

Without that challenge, Labor can use the election to extend its project of having no dynamic relation to a social base whatsoever. Throughout the suburbs and the regions it is running on grudging support, using powerless dissatisfaction of its voters, as a sort of perverse energy to groove on. It doesn't have much else. Over the last three years, it has done many small things which have improved people's lives, it has kept the Libs out, but it has utterly failed to grapple with the challenges of the era, that even the most modest social democratic party might attempt, and pursued a supine foreign policy. The latter has run aground with the arrival of Trump. The domestic lassitude became visible in Estimates, when Katy Gallagher tried to defend the benighted Housing Australia Future Fund, by claiming a hundred or so houses it had purchased as new construction. Pathetic, but no-one was paying attention, anyway. No-one except Labor hacks ever believed in it in the first place.

Were Labor facing a competent Opposition, this strategy would be a desperate one to hold the line against a Coalition onslaught. Against Team Dutton, by contrast, it’s winning. The Coalition started by deploying Trumpian populism in an inept fashion. It has since progressed to a campaign of generalised incompetence in every aspect. Some of it is frankly bizarre, the identikit application of US conservatism to a completely different cultural polity. Sacking 41,000 federal public servants? Lots of people bitch about ‘Canberra’, but there is nothing here like the persistent US fantasy of a government of zero expenditure, and the sense of public employment as parasitic.

Dutton's response to Trump’s tariff bonanza was to suggest ‘leveraging’ the defence relationship. This sounded like another left right crossover for a second, until it became clear that Dutts wanted to offer the US more than we are currently giving them. It's hard to know what this could be, apart from full annexation, fabled 51st state status before Canada gets there. This appears to have been walked back too. There has been more hurried walking back than someone accidentally entering the late Frank Thring’s dressing room.

What can explain this ineptitude? Any Liberal leader these days has to appease the right - amazingly, even Dutton is seen as a less than reliable rep by that faction - and Dutton is gambling that they may stick with him after a likely loss on May 3 - leaving him the much better chance of a win against a beset minority government, well before 2028.

But the campaign also has the character of being run by ‘Spads’, twenty something special advisors - often, on the right side, obsessed with US hard culture war politics, and hyperfast news cycles. The point of having very young advisors is to have a supply of audacious thinking and energy, which can be turned in a certain direction. Direction is the key word. Such ideas take judgement by senior figures in what gets deployed. This is especially so because right wing Spad youf are generally stupider than Labor ones. The latter are often Labor tragics who know what Scullin said to Anstey about Lang, while the right wing ones are people's private school mates, who might equally have been shoved into investment banking or PR.

Such observations are just handicapping. The more important point is that the Liberal campaign is being led as a small unit, isolated from the larger party, not particularly well-connected. Dialectically speaking, Liberals are often more united than Labor in such campaigns: anarchic capital needs unity in political representation to guard its rights. But Labor has smoothly inserted itself as the party representing capital (and labour - or labour's representatives). What is a right wing party to do? Reach for populism of course. But there is no political-cultural framework in which a Westminster system party can make a leap like the Republicans have. So the Liberals are caught in the middle, and that explains their muddled, atomised, reactive campaign.

Nor is it easy to see how they can extract themselves from it, in the 3 crucial weeks remaining (the last week is always a dud in 5 week campaigns, as general exhaustion descends). Hoping to recapture teal seats and Labor suburban seats, they have been too clever by half proposals, such as nuclear power as a green alternative, getting them out from under fossil fuel obeisance. If they'd run on coal and gas and cheap energy, and brazened it out, they would have Labor on the defence. Some things are true even though Rowan Dean says they're true: trying to hold on to culturally shifted teal seats has put the Liberals into the same impossible position as Labor has been in with the Greens for years. The sense of natural legitimacy dies hard.

That is all forced upon them by Labor’s determination, here and abroad, to not be tempted by any suggestion of reinventing the promise of social democracy - that we might live somewhat differently, better - for a new era. Labo(u)r now runs as a party of managed dissatisfaction. This is no longer a grudging admission; it is now deployed as a selling point. Very little is possible, and almost nothing will change; Labor will make it mildly less worse in selected contexts. It is a subtle shift, from the sort of minimal yield Rawlsianism of social market politics - help and empower the least well off, in steadily diminishing returns - to a sort of left Burkean conservatism: this is life. Student debt, small apartments and Netflix. If you’re lucky. Conform yourself to it, because the alternative is to fall out of the system altogether. With the new political style, comes a new leader approach, that Albanese and Keir Starmer have adopted, a sort of personification of grey grim hopelessness. In the UK, it has put Labour in trouble from the moment they were elected. In Australia, exhaustive preferential single seat voting will act as the good shepherd and herd the poor, the angry, the beaten down, and the precarious, to a Labor vote of the last instance and the last resort. The least normal politics? Perhaps. Lucky old us.

Alas we are still running on fumes. But next week! Next week! Hoo boy! Hoo boy!