Informed by impeccable sources that the federal election would be held on 12 April, I booked a holiday to Italy, departing on the 14th. Then Cyclone Alfred swung in toward southern Queensland and the election was delayed. Damn it! The tickets were non-refundable but – thank Buddha! – my presence is no longer required on the campaign planes and buses. A nod from the boss, and away I slunk.
So it is that, for the first time in decades, I am consuming this election like most voters – intermittently through media, social and otherwise, and only when I can’t avoid it.
From this distance it is even clearer what was obvious at home. This is the most dismal election in decades. Far better to televise the papal conclave. At least dramatists have seen potential in that.
Only one line stays in my mind. Peter Dutton telling Anthony Albanese that he couldn’t lie straight in bed. It sticks because it is true. Throughout this campaign, the prime minister has held up a Medicare card, telling the good voters that under Labor they will need only the green card, not their credit card, to see a doctor. And every single Australian already knows that is not true.
But Dutton’s offerings, once stretched across the Sealy Posturepedic, are no less bent. A nuclear policy whose costings demand mass shrinkage in industrial energy use; a defence spend that will depend on higher income taxes, as Dutton simultaneously claims an “aspiration” to index tax bands to manage the effects of bracket creep. (Tbh, Labor is not even pretending to consider that most basic piece of tax reform).
Labor, so we learn daily from the polls, will come home on 3 May. At worst it should have enough to cobble up a minority government without Albanese and Adam Bandt having to walk down the aisle. Though that I would like to see.
All usual caveats. Anything can happen. Many remain undecided or soft (why wouldn’t they be?). Et cetera.
The depth of dismality (my word, but feel free to use it) stems from this: Albanese and Dutton, and a reasonable proportion of the people around them, know that Australia is slowly being cooked. They know that without fundamental, sensible reforms, Australia is on the early stages of the structural path that leads ultimately towards the malaise that has befallen America. Albanese, Dutton and those around them have concluded that pushing said reforms presents risks to their current employment or their hopes of future advances.
Call that modern politics. Former Treasurer secretary Ken Henry calls it a “wilful act of bastardry”. And he’s right to call it intergenerational robbery.
So we mark time.
Unless the incoming pope declares Catholicism compulsory and birth control verboten, Australia will never again be a society that is not weighted towards the aged. Jobs in the care economy, often taken up by migrants from poorer countries, are important jobs. But despite important pay increases supported by Labor, they remain relatively lowly paid. The people working them face a potential lifetime of being cut out of the heavily distorted housing market. So will anyone else unable to take up former treasurer Joe Hockey’s famously glib advice to “get a good job that pays good money”.
In time those who arrive poor, and millions of others who are not being helped along by family money, will feel themselves fall into a multi-generational underclass. Australian egalitarianism will have gone the way of the White Australia policy and roll-yer-own tobacco.
Does this matter? Yup.
Trump’s rise in America comes from a series of fundamental societal shifts. For decades the American “heartland” was dying, a trend accelerated by the shift – “offshoring” – of manufacturing to China, to Mexico and elsewhere. Between 2010 and 2020, the US census records more than half the counties in America LOST population. That drift was largest in the so-called red states – traditional Republican party country in the midwest, great plains and the south.
The Trump contest was played out most obviously with the Democrats, but the political movement most extinguished were traditional, conservative Republicans. They are now almost gone from American public life. What drives the “Make America Great Again” movement, for all its contradictions and follies, is the restoration of hope in lives that had lost it. That hope will take some time to crumble before Americans realise the postwar manufacturing boom is never coming back, no matter what self-defeating games Trump plays with tariffs.
This is not to make a case for Trump but to sound a warning. Australia is engaged in a structural drift that will divide us into the property-holding and property-deprived classes. None of the political offerings does more than play with the edges, and half of them – super for deposits, shared equity schemes, etc – simply add to the demand side, pushing prices still higher.
Once that hope is lost, the ground will become ripe for populism, and divisions will start to bake in. The time to get moving is now. But it is already clear 2025 is not the year, or the cycle, that will see it happen.
Sometimes taking a break is useful, just to see what’s staring you in the face.
Hugh Riminton is national affairs editor at Channel 10
