I have utterly shocking news for the Coalition, that weird relationship in which two parties are stuck together, knowing they aren't good for each other.
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It won't win the next federal election. And the way its constituent parties are behaving, it won't win the one after that, either. These predictions are not based on my own instinct. I mean, I was the person who was convinced Labor would win in 2019, so you would never trust my psychic powers.
No, I am making these forecasts based on the best political analysis we have in this country, the Australian Election Study, which has surveyed Australian voters since 1987. What the trends in that study show is Australia is moving to the centre-left, while the Coalition is going in the other direction altogether. Blame the women. I mean, that's what the Coalition and News Corp do anyway, right?
Ian McAllister, the ANU distinguished professor of political science who heads the study, says it plainly: "The electorate over a long period is moving to the centre-left driven by generational change and the expansion of education."
Voters are moving away from focusing about economic management (where the Coalition has hoodwinked the electorate into thinking it owns the expertise) to issues which terrify conservatives: climate change, same-sex marriage, voluntary-assisted dying. The Coalition, says McAllister, is moving away from the mainstream electorate. McAllister's team completed another, smaller, election survey. And its findings should terrify those who support conservative politics.
"[We saw] an unpecendented generational shift particularly among women, with less than one in five voting for the Coalition," he says.
In the past, says McAllister, women would become more conservative as they got older. Not now. In the past women could be relied upon to be religious. In Australia, it was Christianity all the way. Not now.
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That may also be true for the entire electorate if we follow Britain, where the 2021 census shows for the first time fewer than half the population in England and Wales described themselves as Christian and those who said they had no religion increased to 37.2 per cent of the population, up from a quarter.
Meanwhile, we have the Coalition which hates women and First Nations people. I know you are saying to yourself, it's always been like that. Yeah - but you haven't. It's not them changing all that much, just getting a little more ideological. It's you. You believe in equality. You support women getting equal pay (at least theoretically). You believe in the Voice to Parliament.
The roots for this change grew during the same-sex plebiscite, a vote where everyone knew what the outcome would be except desperate hate-filled losers. The electorate was on board the wedding train (weird because we aren't so much into marriage in general). McAllister says this was when the drift started to become a landslide.
"If the Coalition wants to attract support among younger generations it will have to change," he says.
Let me outline the extent of the problem for you. In the last few days, we have seen exactly how off-piste the entire Coalition project is, compared to the rest of us. We saw it blithely follow the man of multiple ministries, former prime minister Scott Morrison, off a cliff and into a dark sea. In Parliament on Wednesday, 50 conservative members of the House of Representatives backed him in, amid plenty of defensive rhetoric from the man himself. As Dan Jervis-Bardy and Doug Dingwall wrote on Wednesday, Morrison went down swinging.
"My government stood up and faced the abyss of uncertainty that our country looked into and the coercion of a regional bully and saw Australia through the storm," said Morrison. "Australia emerged stronger under my government."
United censureship from 86. Only one person stood up to Morrison's baloney. Bridget Archer, the member for the Tasmanian seat of Bass, one of very few Liberal members who had a comforting swing to her in that notoriously marginal seat which replaces members after just one term. Yep, that Bridget. She said she voted for the censure motion because she believes in integrity. (Could someone please rescue that woman from the Liberal Party? She deserves better.)
We also saw the Liberal Party call for a review of its electoral failure. The results? Not a shred of serious self-reflection and no clear idea of how to attract women as voters. No clear idea of how to attract women as candidates. It's pathetic. The Nationals are holding on to their vote (and wondering how on Earth they ended up with the daggiest bloke at the B&S).
Apparently the review recommends targets and pipelines to get women to represent. Ahahahahahaha. The party has had those weasel words for as long as this has been an issue and it has not budged representation one tiny centimetre. Women make up just under 19 per cent of Liberal MPs in the House and just under 41 per cent of senators. Quotas work. They worked for Labor. They would work for the Coalition if only they bothered to engage with real cultural change. They deserve our disdain.
Don't imagine the Nationals escape Scott-free. The prevailing loathing of First Nations people and their circumstances by conservatives has now tainted these representatives of rural and regional Australia. There are many things I could say but they would not be nearly as incisive as what activist and advocate Noel Pearson said to RN Breakfast's Patricia Karvelas on Tuesday. Scathing of the Nationals for coming out against the Voice. Devastating about Jacinta Price (no relation) and assuming this lot will come to their senses. Pearson has more faith than I do.
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Bugger the lot of them. The conservatives could take advice from Professor McAllister, who says gender representation matters.
"If you want to to attract the votes of women then getting more women into parliament is imperative," he says.
And if one more conservative tells me that in his party, people get preselected on merit, I will just laugh in his face. Keep going with your definition of merit, mate. You'll be in the wilderness for a generation.
- Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the ANU and a regular columnist.
