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NSW election result opens way for a radically centrist approach

By Vern Hughes - posted Monday, 2 May 2011


There were no surprises in the NSW state election on March 26. Voters by-passed the Greens and Independents to lodge their anti-Labor votes with Barry O'Farrell's Liberal Party. The ALP was reduced to about 20 seats in a parliament of 93, more than Queensland Labor's ignominious cricket team of 11 parliamentarians who survived the rout by Bjelke-Petersen in 1974.

It would be premature to write off the NSW Labor machine. After all, Queensland Labor's remnant of 11 in 1974 bounced back to produce the Goss and Beattie Governments within a surprisingly short period of time.

Nevertheless, it is likely that NSW Labor will remain an electoral rump for the forseeable future, leaving a big vacuum in the state's politics. This landscape will most likely be replicated at the federal level after the next poll scheduled for 2013.

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Two features of this landscape are significant for assessing the future shape of Australian politics.

First, the Greens in NSW, like their counterparts in Victoria four months earlier, failed to make inroads into the lower house. Their vote increased marginally to just over 10%, the same as the Green vote in the Victorian state poll. The Liberal Party's decision to withdraw preferences from the Greens ahead of Labor will ensure Adam Bandt's defeat in the federal seat of Melbourne next time around.

The Greens' failure to break into the lower house in both states suggests that the party has reached the peak of its electoral influence. Outside the inner city, the Green option was not taken up by suburban or regional voters in NSW as a vehicle for sending Labor a message.

Secondly, the rural Independents in NSW fared badly, and independent candidates in urban areas rarely threatened Labor or Liberal incumbents. Faced with a discredited Labor machine and a Liberal Party with weak community roots or infrastructure outside its North Shore heartland, independents had reason for hope that voters might have taken up the opportunity to elect local representatives who were strong on personal character and local accountability. The voters said no, and voted-in Liberal MPs.

On the NSW returns, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor would lose their seats in the next federal election to the National Party.

If the landscape in NSW is replicated federally, the big question in Australian politics in the next period is how might this emerging vacuum in the centre of politics be filled?

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The vacuum is not new. It has been in formation since the mid 1970s when the two party share of the primary vote reached its peak. Since then, it has been in steady decline, despite the transient, short-lived nature of the available electoral alternatives (Australian Democrats, Ted Mack-style independents, One Nation, Family First, and now the Greens). In other words, the two party share of the primary vote has consistently fallen despite the fact that there have been no stable, centrist, socially conventional, electoral alternatives on offer.

The Democrats retained a healthy vote for so long as the party appeared to hold to a centrist positioning; once a leftist identity became apparent, the party withered. One Nation burst into the Queensland parliament with 11 seats, and lost them promptly once the fringe character of its policies and personnel was revealed. Family First could never shake its Pentacostalist Christian origins and has been dispatched from the federal scene. The inability of Independents, once elected, to say no to pork-barrelling and stand for the public interest, has undermined their standing and potential appeal. The Greens' appearance as a party of benign environmentalism for the affluent middle class has given way to a recognition of its leftist base and its antipathy to mainstream social attitudes.

The NSW election outcome has served the nation well in clarifying the transient nature of these alternatives. In doing so, it points to three features of what may be required to fill the political vacuum:

The first is the evident voter disinterest in the political fringe. If ever fringe candidates were going to do well, the NSW election was their opportunity. The social demographic centre of Australia - suburban rather than inner city, conventional in social outlook rather than bohemian, family-oriented without religious dogma, self-reliant in lifestyle without intolerance – is clearly the only social space in which a new political formation aiming to fill the vacuum can situate itself.

It's clear, too, from the NSW results, that the social centre in Australia is aligned with a policy centre that eschews fringe causes and vested interests. When the Greens cannot even take Marrickville and Balmain, it is apparent that even in these electorates there is a kind of residual allegiance to the public interest that checks (and in these cases overrides) the pull of sectional cultures or differentiated localities.

But it is in ideology that the centre in Australian politics is in most urgent need of expression. The Labor machine in NSW (as in the rest of the country) has no ideology other than manipulation of the public sector and its resources for outcomes that fit the interests of the machine at any moment in time. There is nothing else. For NSW voters, the state of public services require comprehensive reform so that they might at long last serve the public. This hope for systemic public services reform was not going to be met by the incumbent machine, the localized Independents, or the Greens. It might perhaps be met by the Liberals, if they sat down and thought about it seriously, but there is no guarantee of that.

The only ideology on offer in Australia that confronts the parlous state of public services is the thinking and innovation generated by Third Way activists Noel Pearson, Peter Botsman, and, in his early pre-leadership period, Mark Latham. Their work constitutes a Radical Centre in policy reform, reworking government and markets to strengthen society, expand citizen and consumer choices, and fortify rather than undermine the formation of social capital and communities. It is radical because of its disdain for failed ideological projects of both Left and Right, and centrist because of its orientation towards marrying public investments with market mechanisms to enhance citizen and family self-determination.

Everyone knows that a new political configuration is needed in Australia to fill the political vacuum. The question is how it can be done. A great deal of public debate is needed about the process of political renewal. We can begin, though, by saying to the political machines in our country, as we can now say of the NSW Labor Machine: "The Emperor has no clothes".

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About the Author

Vern Hughes is Secretary of the National Federation of Parents Families and Carers and Director of the Centre for Civil Society and has been Australia's leading advocate for civil society over a 20-year period. He has been a writer, practitioner and networker in social enterprise, church, community, disability and co-operative movements. He is a former Executive Officer of South Kingsville Health Services Co-operative (Australia's only community-owned primary health care centre), a former Director of Hotham Mission in the Uniting Church, the founder of the Social Entrepreneurs Network, and a former Director of the Co-operative Federation of Victoria. He is also a writer and columnist on civil society, social policy and political reform issues.

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