The LNP and Labor must stop acting like petulant children and start paying attention to what the electorate is trying to tell them

Let's get through this period of transition

My favourite quote from the last few years of Australian politics is the statement made to the National Press Club in the wake of the Albanese Government’s slipping into power after the 2022 federal election. Labor National Secretary Paul Erickson said that “I don’t accept that we are in some new epoch or new era where everything is different.”

Oh, Paul.

The country had just delivered government to Labor with the smallest primary vote in a hundred-odd years¹; Labor lost their own safe seat of Fowler to right-of-centre independent, Dai Le; the Greens had picked up seats from Labor and Liberal in inner-city Brisbane giving them the most lower-house seats the minor party had ever had; Zali Steggall was returned for a second term in the seat of Warringah after defeating former Liberal Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, in the 2019 federal election; independent Helen Haine won Indi again, a seat the Libs used to hold with more than 60% of the primary vote; and five other independents, with no previ…