The changing polarity of Australian politics

And how it might sideline the Coalition for a generation

Over the last few months—years really—I’ve been trying to put some substance into an analysis of why our politics is changing in the way that is. Rather than present the rise of the independents as an aberration or a novelty, as most legacy media have been doing, I’ve dug back into the history of two-party politics and tried to explain that what is happening has historical roots and is part of a longer-term trend.

Two Fools D. A. Rovinskii 1881

I’m beginning to see reporting that better reflects this sort of understanding, and that’s good. Welcome aboard!

But there is still one key point I think many people are missing.

In reading back through the history of Australian federal politics, I’ve been struck by how central one particular idea is. Namely, that traditionally, our political establishment has divided into a two-party system that consists of a Labor side and a non-Labor side. This understanding forms the basis of discussion put forward by everyone from historians and political scientists to journalists, and with good reason.

From the very beginning of the federation, as organised labour first entered the political and parliamentary fray through its creation of the Australian Labor Party, the challenger to that—no matter how it has organised itself in terms of parties—has always been described in terms of the non-Labor side of politics.

As recently as this week, in an excellent piece in The Conversation, historian Frank Bongiorno wrote:

In 1909, there was a “fusion” of the Liberal parties. This meant that in 1910, for the first time, the choice voters faced was between Labor and Liberal. Labor – now with a wide base of working-class support supplemented by farmers, small business interests, a growing number of Catholics and some middle-class people – won majorities in both houses of parliament at that election. It seemed to have the country at its feet. The party’s split in the first world war over conscription became the first of three such fractures over the next 40 years. As a result, Labor has governed for about a third of the time since 1910, the non-Labor parties for about two-thirds.

(Emphasis added, and the expression is used several more times in the article.)

Put simply, once the Labor Party existed and became viable, indeed successful, the interests of capital organised themselves in opposition, and this was regularly described in terms of there being a Labor and a non-Labor side of politics.

The delineation made sense right up to the Second World War, and in her incredible multivolume history of Australian media, Sally Young writes about the role the media barons had in the formation of Robert Menzies’ reinvention of the Liberal Party and she, too, uses the Labor/non-Labor distinction:

…When Menzies had taken up the leadership of the UAP again in September 1943, it was on condition that his colleagues give him the right to develop a new party. Menzies recognised the UAP was discredited beyond resurrection and he set about uniting the non-Labor side of politics under a new banner. Politically active businessmen had also assumed responsibility for transforming the depleted conservative forces into a new party. (Emphasis added.)

What I want to suggest, however, is this well-established distinction between Labor and non-Labor no longer applies. It is this change that people are missing.

I’ll go so far as to say that the traditional division has, in effect, been reversed, and I’m wondering if it doesn’t make more sense today to speak in terms of a Coalition and a non-Coalition division in our politics.

Let me explain.

That traditional dispensation of Labor and non-Labor represented the sort of social/political division common throughout the western world, that between capital and labour. It arose in an era of mass politics, mass media, and mass industrialisation, where politics organised into mass parties in a community that accepted the validity of that sort of political organisation. The recent shift away from two-party support, as represented in the falling primary vote of the major parties over the last thirty-odd years in Australia, and the rise of community independents and smaller parties, is part of broader rejection (or undermining) of that sort of mass organisation.

This shift has a material basis, built around changes in technology and methods of communication, a fragmentation that has happened across all sectors of work. Its influence is being hyper accelerated with the rise of AI and the sorts of implementation of that at state level currently being enacted by President Musk and his DOGE crime gang. But we won’t get into that here.

The point is, such fragmentation has led to calls for, and enactments of, different sorts of solidarity—we are social creatures after all—and it is worth noting that the success of the community independents has been built on the sort of community organisation that used to belong to the major parties, particularly the Labor Party. But this sort of community organisation happens, paradoxically, in a much more individualistic social environment. The binary separation of labour and capital is muddled and complicated by the rise of a work environment that no longer cleaves to that sort of two-pronged division.

In particular, the rise of the ABN class in Australia—people who would have formerly been tradespeople employed by a plumbing or building company, or graphic artists, computer programmers and the like who would’ve been employed by various tech companies—has created a sector of self-employed (or self-underemployed) workers that crosses and complicates traditional class divisions. Labor’s embrace under Hawke-Keating of neoliberalism, with its concomitant undermining of the power of organised labour, was a huge part of this process of unbundling.

It has all worked to undermine the legitimacy of mass parties and make the notion of independent representation more attractive. The rise of independents is a reaction against the very idea of organised politics, reflecting more complex social cleavages that sometimes manifest in discussions of identity politics but that nonetheless retain a material base.

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In his recent Quarterly Essay, George Megalogenis writes that the 2022 federal election was a “revelation...in the splintering of the conservative vote. The majority of those who turned against Scott Morrison’s blokey government created a new independent female centre in the cities…”

True enough, but I think we overread this splintering of the conservative vote and give too much credence to the protest aspect of what happened in 2022. It underestimates the positive embrace of community independents in those electorates and the collapse of Labor’s primary vote.

Megalogenis is closer to the mark when he outlines in interesting detail the way in which recent referenda have marked a particular division between conservative and non-conservative attitudes and electorates:

Placing the social X-ray of the Voice over the previous votes for the republic and marriage equality reveals the double edge of a politics centred in Melbourne and Sydney. The inner cities are becoming more socially liberal as young professionals move in, while the migrant suburbs are becoming more socially conservative. This divide within the capitals is relatively new, especially in Melbourne, which has traditionally been a more cohesive city than Sydney. The Voice also widened the pre-existing gulf between the inner city and the bush, which was first exposed in the republic referendum.

He then comes close to setting out the sort of new dispensation I am talking about:

Consider what the next parliament would look like if the Liberals reclaimed the four seats they lost to Labor in Perth and returned Western Australia to the conservative column alongside Queensland. Now let’s assume that no Coalition seats are lost anywhere else in the country. Dutton would still be sixteen seats short of a majority. This is why Melbourne and Sydney will most likely determine who forms the next government, whether majority or minority. The Liberals hold just eight of the forty-five seats to be contested across the two capitals, against thirty for Labor and seven on the crossbench. Dutton is unlikely to be prime minister while the Victorian and NSW capitals are voting Labor, teal and Green.

That last sentence describes the new division I am suggesting has emerged: Coalition and non-Coalition rather than Labor and non-Labor. It contradicts GM’s earlier point about the significance of the split in the Liberal Party vote. In fact, it is Labor’s primary vote that has collapsed more drastically and that continues to be under pressure.

This opens a demand on the progressive left for a representation that Labor no longer seems willing to provide, especially around climate action, tax and housing reform. And then, as the LNP goes further right, pursuing the anti-progressive conservatism they are sure exists in the outer suburbs and in rural and regional Australia, a space has opened up for a gentler, more socially progressive formation amongst the professionals of the inner cities, a space that community independents arrived just in time to fill. They supplemented the role that was already being played by the Greens, but in electorates neither the Greens nor Labor were ever likely to win.

If that is correct, then there is a rising bloc alignment between this sort of small-party and independent progressivism and Labor, while the LNP consolidates around the sort of electorates/individuals that voted no in the Voice referendum, the same-sex marriage plebiscite, and even going to back to the Republican referendum of 1999.

Under such circumstances, it makes more sense to talk in terms of a Coalition and non-Coalition division than one of Labor and non-Labor.

Or so I am beginning to think.

This is a lot to take in, and I’d be interested to hear what others think. If I am right, or at least heading in the right direction, it has ramifications for how we think about politics going forward. It challenges the dominant, contradictory narrative that the “teals” are just disaffected Liberals or, as per Dutton’s ridiculous claim, that they are really part of a “radical extreme communist movement”.¹

It is a sort of centrism all the way down.

If such a division is consolidating, it creates the possibility of a long-term, Labor-led minority government that would sideline the Coalition for a generation. The two-party system would have dissolved and we would have a bloc system based around Coalition and non-Coalition forces.

I will say more about that in future pieces.

1. Yes, he really said that.