Australia's new democratic majority

A New Year and new starting points

A dose of Covid over Christmas—my first ever—has kept me away from writing longer than intended. I didn’t get super sick, fortunately, but I did test positive for a full 12 days, and even now I feel like my brain is on dial up rather than optic fibre.

But let’s see how we go.

Since the 2022 election I have been speaking about the ways in which Labor has failed to recognise and capitalise on the changed political landscape. And while their blindness to what is happening is understandable—as it involves them thinking outside the box of the two-party system to which they belong—it is fatal nonetheless.

Politics doesn’t reflect some pre-existing majority already cohering within a society. The job of politics is to create that majority, and that is what they should be focussed on.

But not in the usual way.

In the traditional idea of the two-party system creating a majority has meant getting people to vote for your party, but in the three-party system we now have in Australia—where the third “pa…