We interrupt this relenetless optmism for a reminder that the old is dying and the new is struggling to be born

And sometimes things go horribly wrong

This is just me taking a beat from developing a basically positive account of what it will mean to move past the dominance of the two-party system of Australian politics and remind myself that we live in unpredictable times; that the received wisdom—even the received marginal wisdom—of the current paradigm has no particular guarantee attached it.

‘A torpedo ambush’ from Albert Robida, Le vingtième siècle: la vie électrique (Paris: La Librairie Illustrée, 1893)

Let me first remind you of a piece by Osmond Chiu, Research Fellow at the Per Capita thinktank, which I published in 2023 and that sets out a very plausible scenario in which Peter Dutton sneaks the L/NP back into power through the manipulation of minority government.

In that piece, Chiu notes that Newspoll had already moved to 50/50 2PP, a figure that has consistently shifted in favour of the L/NP ever since. This past Sunday, Newspoll sat at 51/49 against Labor. Even more concerning from a non-Coalition point of view was the publication of an MRP poll put together by YouGov.¹

Full results here

Crikey correspondent Rachel Withers, writing on Bluesky, summed it up succinctly, and correctly, I think, noting first that “YouGov MPR [is] underselling indie/minor party chances in a few seats (eg Bradfield) [because] it doesn't account for circumstances on the ground,” then adding, “But if these really are the numbers after the election, Labor needs to rethink its entire strategy. Being a centrist small target ain't fuckin working.”

She is right about their failed strategy.

It is hard to think of a government that has squandered more first-term goodwill in the name of a poisonous addiction to a small-target strategy aimed at getting the establishment to like them than that presided over by Anthony Albanese.²

Take a breath. We would be foolish to lay all of this at the (clay) feet of the prime minister.

Like any Labor leader, he is up against an Australian political class, including a political media, which is relentlessly anti-Labor. Peter Dutton is being cut the sort of slack no Labor leader—prime minister or opposition leader—would ever be accorded, cruising through on an almost non-examined, non-agenda of thought bubbles and bluster.

There is also the fact that the times have put the political winds of good fortune at Dutton’s back. The Trump ascendency has rewritten what rightwing politicians can get away with, resetting expectations of even the most unlikely and unlikeable of rightwing leaders, creating an environment of democratic undermining that works to the advantage of wannabe authoritarians everywhere.

Internationally, we are going through a paradigm shift in our politics, the sort that resets all the received wisdom. So, as analyst and researcher Scott Steel (@pollytics.bsky.social) observed the other day on Bluesky: “The problem with the ALP almost across Australia is pretty simple and boring. They govern in a way that the public expected 20 years ago. But expectations have changed - good housekeeping is not enough now, even though it was then. People want things to change now, not just [be] better managed.”

Or as former editor of The Monthly Nick Feik wrote on his Substack:

[I]t’s hard to point to any Labor achievements that haven’t been incremental, minimal, indexed or unavoidable. They haven’t completely wrecked anything yet; their managerialism has done little more than maintain the status quo. And this is Albanese’s big problem.

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Albanese’s approach is infuriating.

Not only is all this stuff obvious and reasonably easy to rectify, but the PM is also the beneficiary of a tectonic shift in our politics away from the primacy of the Coalition that has (or had) reset the rules of the game. He was gifted a crossbench—the largest in our history—that not only wiped out the heartland of his main political opponents in 2022, but that is inclined to line up with Labor on key issues.

Instead of seizing the opportunity, Albanese has simply seized.

In a period where Labor’s primary vote (like the Liberal’s) has collapsed, and in which, more than ever, Labor will rely on preferences from the Greens and independents to remain remotely competitive, Albanese has not only shat on hand that pushed him over the line in 2022, he has openly declared that he will not govern with the Greens’ help in the event of Labor not getting a majority in 2025.

His approach is frankly suicidal.

Albanese began this term in parliament by cutting the staffing allowance for the “teals”, and ended it by joining forces with the Liberals to enact legislation designed specifically to make it more difficult for independents to be elected or reelected in all those leafy, formerly safe Liberal seats. At the same time, he has made it clear at every opportunity that he hates the “Greens political party” with a passion.

Yes, of course, he is trying to protect Labor’s primacy in the traditional two-party system. Of course he is cognisant of the fact that some Labor seats are likely to become vulnerable to independents. And double of course he sees the Greens as a legitimate threat to Labor seats, particularly in inner-city electorates.

But that’s the fucking problem.

That line of defence merely underlines how completely he—or anyone else who trots it out—has failed to grasp the changing paradigm and realise the opportunity it provides.

It is sort of hilarious to watch Albanese wrongfooted again and again by someone as un-nimble as Peter Dutton. Most recently, Albanese’s premature and unconvincing claim that he won’t govern with the help of the Greens has opened a space—yet another space—in which Peter Dutton has been able to outflank the PM. Dutton happily declared that he was very open to the idea of minority government.

In a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night, Dutton said he would have conversations with Le, Katter and teal MP Allegra Spender in the event neither major party wins at least 75 seats.

“I think there’s … at least a conversation to have,” he said.

See how Australia's new voting maps mean entire electorates are disappearing – video

….“We’ll talk with the crossbench but I can promise you that it’s clear from their voting pattern, Kate Cheney, Zoe Daniel, Monique Ryan, 80% of the time, they support the Greens,” Dutton told Sky News in an interview aired on Sunday morning.

“They will never come our way.”

Spender, the independent Wentworth MP, told ABC’s Insiders she would be open to helping either major party to form government but said it depended on the shape of the crossbench and what major party leaders were willing to negotiate.

“I’m very open to working with … a Coalition government, and I’m open to working with the Labor government, but that depends on what they’re actually going to put on the table and the seriousness, frankly, of what they’re putting on the table as well,” she said.

They say politicians campaign in poetry but govern in prose, and it is a universal truth with local characteristics. Anthony Albanese campaigned in public housing and has governed in landlord. Peter Dutton will campaign on the fringes of our great cities, but make no mistake, he will govern in Gina Rinehart’s lounge room.

There is more at stake than Labor’s role in a two-party system that a significant section of the electorate no longer wants.³

How many times must it be said?

Physicist Max Planck once noted that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” As academic analyst Nils Gilman has pointed out, the observation has some relevance to political practice too.

After the 2022 election, Australia’s political paradigm shifted in a not-quite decisive way. Support for the major parties collapsed in general, but Labor was left with the advantage. Had they recognised the opportunity they were presented, they could’ve pushed the nearly obliterated Liberal Party to the sort of generational death that Planck highlighted. But Labor was too smug, self-serving and timid to press their advantage and in so doing have breathed life back into the Liberal corpse.

Yes, the old is dying, but the new paradigm is still entirely up for grabs.

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1. Analyst Ben Raue explains that MRP “stands for multi-level regression with post-stratification. Basically they are polls with very large sample sizes which use data science to determine connections between various characteristics that predict how people are voting, and then use this to make predictions about the poll for each electorate, not just the national or state totals.” Read the whole piece here.

Note: Ben also has available a podcast with Shaun Ratcliff, who works on MRP polling, which is on my to-listen list (I haven’t had a chance yet).

And riddle me this: why does Australia produce such great psephologists, like Shaun and Ben, and also such great political cartoonists?

2. Labor under Kevin Rudd squandered theirs is a completely different way.

3. Let me say again: Since 2022, my argument has been that there is a floating third of Australia voters who are no longer strongly tied to any particular major party and that this floating third will land differently and unpredictably from election to election. In 2022, they ripped the heart out of the Liberal Party and voted independent in record numbers, allowing Labor to crawl into majority on a tiny primary vote. A continuation of that trend at the upcoming election would likely see Labor go into minority, and many are predicating this. But it wouldn’t take too much change in the voting intentions of that floating third for Labor to once again squeak across the line in their own right or even for the Liberal’s to secure pole position for a minority government.