Wouldn’t it be nice, as the Beach Boys sang, if the US midterm election results represented a return to kindness?
It would be a fitting closing of the circle, given that Hillary Clinton campaigned on a “love Trumps hate” platform in 2016. It certainly didn’t back then, and I doubt it did two weeks ago despite the Democrats being quick to claim the results as a return to civility and care.
The brutal reality is that Trump and his Republican backers were slapped with a hard backhander from Americans, resentful that his self-indulgent economic and foreign policies have hit them in the back pocket and at the gas pump.
Australians are not immune to the consequences of his reckless adventures, but our predicament is also of our own making, not totally the result of Donald Trump’s ill-thought-out war in Iran.
Forthcoming Australian elections will test the theory of niceness over hip pocket.
But the dynamics are somewhat different.
In the US, voters have a simple choice between red and blue. We now live in a multipartisan environment, whether Anthony Albanese and Angus Taylor like it or not.
Casting around for an alternative to Trumpism, be it due to his mean politics or economic mistakes, the only alternative for voters in the United States was to vote Democrat or not vote at all. They were able to blame the White House for both. The choice was clear-cut.
Not so here, or across the ditch as the New Zealand election results foreshadowed last weekend. Australians have more options and the political environment is fluid.
In New Zealand, the incumbent, centre-right Luxon government is clinging on at best, blaming the global impact of the war in Iran on cost of living. As in Australia this has fed voter rancour and for the first time neither of New Zealand’s major parties got more than 30% of the vote.
The new centrist Opportunity party, explicitly inspired by the success of the community independents in Australia, won an extraordinary seven seats from a standing start, while the libertarian ACT won 13 and the populist, anti-immigration New Zealand First won 12.
There is no simple path to power for either major party and neither coalition bloc has a majority. Those in the centrist Opportunity party may be the kingmakers.
And while the media will frame this as uncertainty, it arguably reflects exactly what the public is looking for in uncertain times: more accountability in government.
The landscape across the Pacific may be different, but what brings the threads together is this: voters will go where grievance takes them, unless provided with politicians who are prepared to level with them.
In Australia we have seen the rise of One Nation, despite some of its standard-bearers. In Victoria, ahead of its election this month, one candidate was dumped when it was revealed he was a Holocaust denier who lauded Hitler as the “GOAT”.
Even its Victorian leader, Warren Pickering, sees nothing extreme about the “great replacement theory” when tested by Rafael Epstein on ABC radio in Melbourne.
One Nation has made inroads into Labor heartland in the South Australian election and seized the blue-ribbon Coalition seat of Farrer in southern New South Wales.
What will happen in Victoria, as both Labor and Liberal attempt to be a smaller target than a wormhole?
If mainstream politicians are to regain trust, they won’t do it by the steady drivel of “announceables” so flimsy they fall over like the set of a western movie when somebody touches the swing door to the saloon.
Even Anthony Albanese’s midweek response to the OpenAI Medicare portal breach failed to include the full findings and text of the rapid review that forced his hand.
Likewise, economists note that Angus Taylor has yet to account for the budget impact of costly promises to cut fuel excise, increase defence spending and repeal the negative gearing and capital gains tax changes.
We are at a “banana republic” moment and only a prime minister, treasurer and finance minister working as a team to come up with a courageous reset of economic and social policy will give Labor any hope of getting out of the rut.
We do need savings and spending.
In the midst of an aged care crisis, for example, it is insanity to cut the private health insurance subsidy for over 65s and imagine there will be public support, if not applause.
There’s an argument for reining in electric vehicle subsidies from a budget point of view, but any means testing should avoid locking essential workers and lower-income earners out of the market.
And properly taxing the multinational gas exporters for the privilege of making money out of public assets is long overdue and would support both budget and debt repair.
All need to be right-sized.
New Zealand demonstrates what socially progressive, economically responsible newcomers can achieve if the electoral system gives them a fair go.
The US reminds us that ignoring the hip pocket is a grievous mistake.
Australia is already showing us the power of grievance. Those of us who like to think we have a national culture of looking to the “better angels of our nature”, as Abraham Lincoln put it, had better start looking again – hard.
And meanwhile, we have two major parties that are seriously lacking mojo.
This is not a moment for the ascendancy of Australian mediocrity.
