From the business breakfasts with their steaming bain-maries to the climate change forums in draughty church halls, something is happening in this country.
It has been happening right from the kick off, under the cover of the underpowered and then farcical campaign proper, with its stumbles turned into gaffes, and the mad prevarications of Morrison — “It’s not about politics”, the interest rates, Jesus — and now it is coming to the fore.
It’s a wave of determination that the election be about something real. It’s about three key issues, and about a new multigroup alliance that’s pushing them. It’s happening everywhere, and it may utterly sweep the Morrison government away, or be the means by which the Coalition somehow clings to power.
The three issues that are driving this groundswell campaign are climate change, integrity and corruption, and inequality as expressed in the cost of living and housing affordability and availability.
These three issues dominate almost exclusively, interlocking and reinforcing each other. Other matters — China, the Pacific, refugees, even the NDIS — barely get a look in. In these forums at least. Which is to say, the forums with a left-right range, not the political spittoon where the crazed right dwell and propagate.
For the first time that I’ve seen, there is really no difference in what is being talked about, the questions coming, the sources of anger and insistence, in the chamber of commerce get-togethers and the touchy-feely blue-skivvie Uniting Church forums.
Any Coalition MP foolish enough to turn up and take a climate-denialist position at these places would get torn to shreds. Ditto with corruption and integrity — Morrison’s absurd arabesques around the refusal to put forward a genuine federal ICAC simply will not fly.
That’s why last week, on Wednesday night, more than 30 Coalition candidates withdrew from candidate forums to be held over the following week, en masse and within a two-hour window (according to a forum organiser, who compared notes with others).
These were forums Coalition candidates had already agreed to attend, and had now pulled out of, citing spurious double bookings. The reason? Not that they were meeting opposition and ridicule on their absurd positions, but that they were getting no support at all. None. They had no party in the room, aside from whatever T-shirted dweebs they could bring along.
Worse, the questions were coming in the form of demands for commitments — to vote up an ICAC, to cross the floor on climate. Finally, large groups of people were linking it all together.
They see the casual political corruption, the pork and waste of this government, as an expression of a mob that has lost the will to govern, or any sense of responsibility that comes with it.
Thus, they see its complementary expression in the net zero farce, in the fires response, in the flood response, and that in turn reflected in the cold indifference to the rising, searing effect of the nation dividing into two on the most basic possibilities of life and opportunity.
It feels like everything is on fire, and the bloke who could try and fix it doesn’t hold a hose. What’s happened?
The simple picture is that the unity of the bourgeois class has collapsed. One section of it — connected to old money, industries and rural communities (or part of them) — is holding firm, while a progressive group, aligned with newer sectors, has decisively broken loose.
They’ve joined with the hardcore section of the knowledge class and the separate organisation of green and teal movements has allowed for a unity of core purpose. Sectors of rural communities who have felt dudded for decades — women, the health-afflicted, etc — have joined them, along with a separate group of “rust” independents with somewhat different social and other policy settings but the same core commitments.
When this is combined with the core Labor vote, this new social recombination — which has only decisively occurred in this campaign, catalysed by Team Morrison’s failure of perception of it — then the numbers we’re starting to see (54, 55, now 56 two-party preferred for Labor) will deliver the majority they seek (which, paradoxically, is not what the “middle” sector want).
But that’s only if there’s no countervailing power. That’s a big if, because one of the features of the new social divide is that it separates not primarily on differing content values — though they’re there — but on the very act of participation itself.
This new super grouping are the ones that speak, have access to the means of speaking, see themselves as engaged. The others? Those not drawn to the crazy Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, United Australia Party, etc fringe (about 10%) feel no one represents them, and has not for decades.
They have withdrawn into silence, as an act not of surrender but of resistance. They resist debate, resist polling, resist talk. But overwhelmingly they will go into the booth and vote for Scott Morrison, who most closely matches their resentment at being subordinated to those who do, and can, participate.
Should that prove to be a silent, emergent counter-power, then they may well be able to fight the progressive supergroup to an ugly draw, and the possibility of a Coalition plurality, giving them first nod at forming government. I hope not.
I hope and believe that what I’m seeing and hearing in the streets and halls of the land is a determination to have the future start right now, and build it. But don’t be surprised if the silent speak on May 21, with the only weapon they feel they have — a refusal of consent to someone else’s vision — and we end up changed in everything but our government.
