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Voting confusion - which party of last resort?

By Niall Lucy - posted Wednesday, 25 August 2010


When you find yourself thinking Mark Latham makes sense, you should probably say no to that next beer.

So I’ve been on the mineral water since Latham’s piece for 60 Minutes went to air on the Sunday night before the election.

It’s not that Latham had anything new to say about the campaign, as though we needed him to tell us we’d been witnessing the triumph of spin over substance for the past several weeks.

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It’s not as if Latham, after all, who lead Labor to defeat in 2004, was the last “honest” politician in the country, never tailoring his messages for nightly news grabs or participating in stage-managed events.

It’s not as if Latham was any less media conscious in 2004 than he accused Gillard and Abbott of being today.

Indeed, modern political campaigns - since at least Eisenhower’s “I like Ike” US presidential campaign of 1952 - have been increasingly designed for media consumption, and Latham knew this. He knew that many voters would judge Gillard and Abbott on how they sold their policies, and “themselves”, through the media.

He knew that, in modern politics, images are usually far more powerful than ideas.

That’s why Abbott’s preference for budgies over boardies was not politically insignificant, at least not in electoral terms.

But images, no less than words, don’t have fixed meanings: while some voters may have thought Abbott looked daggy in Speedos, others no doubt thought he looked virile.

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None of this is new, and we hardly needed Latham to remind us of it.

So to this extent the Latham piece for 60 Minutes was little more than an embarrassing parody of a hard-hitting news story, not unlike Dick Smith’s self-obsessed “home movie” posing as a serious documentary on the ABC the week before last.

Was there no one at the national broadcaster who found it even faintly ironic that a film arguing for a “small” Australia, which called on ordinary Australians to curb their consumption habits, was made by a multi-millionaire whose wealth derives from the sale of electronic goods built with cheap, off-shore labour?

Still, what could be more inner-city liberal these days than the “immorality” of consumption?

This goes to the heart of the cosmopolitan middle class’s love affair with green politics, which are all about the illusion of personal choice and the performance of a certain kind of ethical comportment.

While green politics owe their formation in this country to the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation’s popular resistance, in support of local residents’ groups, to opportunistic development around Sydney in the 1970s, there’s not a trace of this history in the self-representation of The Greens today.

The Greens will never win the popular vote because, like every middle class before them, they’re contemptuous of popular taste. Like every middle class in history, they see popular desires and aspirations as the expression of a brute sensibility in need of moral refinement.

For this reason it’s never occurred to them to try to turn their politics into a popular movement - by advocating, say, the need to develop an electric-car industry that could lead to the creation of huge numbers of jobs.

Instead, because theirs is ultimately a project not of political but of moral reform, they want us to stop driving cars!

That’s a message that will never catch on, and until The Greens confront this reality they’ll continue to represent little more politically than an organised expression of the inner city’s historical aversion to suburban tastes and values.

They may look forward to holding the balance of power in the Senate for the time being, but a double dissolution could soon put short shrift to that.

Organised snobbery, in a word, should never be mistaken for a political project, and The Greens should take care not to think that “smug” is a good look.

Meanwhile, out in the suburban shopping centres, no one was quite sure whether to vote Labor or Liberal.

Latham’s partial explanation for this was that Gillard and Abbott both ran safe, uninspiring campaigns that left voters with no real alternative with which to align themselves.

But the deeper reason, I think, is that voters were rightfully confused.

They didn’t know what to make of a “progressive” Abbott talking up a genuinely reformist paid paternity leave scheme, or a “right-wing” Gillard threatening workers who would breach industrial agreements with “the full force of the law”.

For middle class Laborites, of course, the choice was simple: vote Gillard, for the symbolic impact of electing our first woman PM (despite her barely nominal representation of feminist, secularist or leftist concerns). But clearly that symbolic impact had little political currency beyond the inner city.

For the same middle class Laborites, the kind of masculinity that Abbott represented was too last century, and too patriarchal, to warrant anything less than their disdain.

But if other voters couldn’t make up their minds about the major parties, it’s not because this was the first “superficial” election they’d seen.

It’s because they sniffed a con job in the wind.

Surely Gillard was disciplining unions on behalf of business sector interests?

Surely Abbott was pandering to small-“l” liberals, many of whom might otherwise have swung to Labor, by proposing to reform paternity leave?

Voters had never seen such cynical about-faces from the major parties before, which is why they were confused.

This is where Latham got me thinking: maybe political differences have become so twisted out of shape that to be compelled to vote for either of the major parties is to be compelled to endorse a lie.

Perhaps, then, for good political reasons and in the name of democracy, it was time to “vote” another way.

For Latham, of course, the other way to vote was informally, and it would appear he wasn’t alone in taking this for a legitimate alternative to voting affirmatively: current estimates put the informal vote as high as 5 per cent, or more than a third of The Greens’ vote. Nor should it be supposed that at least some proportion of The Greens’ vote (around 13 per cent nationally) wasn’t, as it might be called, de facto informal.

The Greens want to tell us that Australia made a conscious decision to vote for them on Saturday, whereas the uncomfortable truth may be that close to one fifth of the electorate couldn’t see anything worth voting for in Labor and couldn’t bring itself to vote conservative.

The wonder, I guess, is that it took Mark Latham to call it.

Sort of.

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About the Author

Niall Lucy is a professor in the humanities at Curtin University. He hosts weekly music/culture show The Comfort Zone on 720 ABC Perth, Wednesdays @ 1.30pm. His latest book is Pomo Oz: Fear and Loathing Downunder (Fremantle Press). He co-edited Vagabond Holes: David McComb and The Triffids.

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