Following yet another dismal election night on Saturday, the Coalition finds itself on the opposition benches in every Australian jurisdiction except Tasmania, with its combined representation in the nation’s federal and state lower houses having fallen to 190 at most from a peak of 359 seats in 2014.
As with all historical phenomena large or small, explanations vary between those that place human agency at the centre of the equation and those that prioritise underlying structural factors.
For enthusiasts of the latter approach, Saturday’s result can be readily understood as a case of voters trading in a government with well over a decade on the clock for a new model. However, prosaic explanations of this sort tend not to scratch the itch of journalists with compelling narratives to craft and culture war partisans invested in the ideological dimensions of the political contest.
To some extent at least, this is as it should be. There seems little doubt that Australian election results, since the onset of COVID, entail a national rejection of the populist and libertarian strands that have come to dominate right-wing politics internationally, and which have found an outsized voice in the Liberal and National parties and through the Murdoch media.
Many among the latter are plainly too deeply invested to draw the obvious conclusions. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Sky News, where talking heads are noisily attributing the Coalition’s predicament to its supposed embrace of woke ideology.
Such arguments were always hard to make sense of with respect to the defeat of the Morrison government, but in New South Wales they have found a semi-plausible scapegoat in the shape of moderate factional leader Matt Kean — or “green Kean”, as the demonology of the right would have it.
As the clock ticked down on the election last week, Sky went to town on polling conducted by an interested party in the NSW Minerals Council, which — alongside loaded questions as to whether respondents “agree that Matt Kean is responsible for pushing up energy prices” — contrasted negative personal ratings for Kean with positive ones for Dominic Perrottet and Chris Minns.
These polls further suggested that conservative disaffection with the Liberal Party meant One Nation had a big night in store, which failed to transpire (though in fairness, the party did double its modest vote in Kean’s northern Sydney seat of Hornsby, a pointed exception to its strategy of targeting south-western Sydney and the Hunter region).
The right must also reckon with the fact that the NSW Liberals largely succeeded where the Morrison government failed in warding off the teal independent threat, for which no one deserves more credit that Kean, who was the public face of the party’s campaign in the threatened seats.
On the subject of polling, it should be noted that those who went about it in a duly disinterested fashion had nearly as good a night as Labor.
The Australian‘s Newspoll, which has been conducted since 2019 by the local branch of international market research giant YouGov, appears to have repeated its feat from the Victorian election in landing within one percentage point of the primary shares of the Coalition, Labor and the Greens.
Whatever else might have been going wrong for the Coalition, it also seems that it was at least getting its money’s worth out of the polling conducted by CT Group (formerly Crosby Textor).
Its late campaign polling reportedly showed the Coalition on track to lose up to 12 seats, shedding light on Dominic Perrottet’s campaigning in the seemingly solid seats of South Coast, Camden, Ryde and Drummoyne — efforts which left Labor “bemused”, according to a report in The Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday.
As it turned out, the Liberals indeed suffered an unexpected defeat in South Coast and, according to the results projections on my own website, are going down to the wire in the other three.
Successes inevitably attract less attention than failures, but the Australian polling industry deserves at least some recognition for righting the ship after its heavily publicised failure in 2019.
