Australian politics has long afforded an almost mythical status to certain categories of voters – usually a large group that feels disenfranchised but in fact wields a lot of electoral clout. Robert Menzies, for example, spoke of the “forgotten people”, John Howard had his “battlers”, and Scott Morrison the “quiet Australians”.
Menzies initially referred to a “moral middle class” at risk of being ground between a working-class represented by organised labour and a self-sufficient upper class. Later adaptations of this myth under Howard and Morrison captured what had been traditional Labor voters in the outer suburbs. This encompassed workers who had felt left behind by Labor’s embrace of neoliberalism, and perhaps felt out of step with progressive values.
