ScoMo in SloMo slide toward fatal collision at next election

Voters respect strength, but Morrison runs a national cabinet where voters see the states calling the shots.

Many regional and outer-urban voters are seeing politics as a game where you either have private school boys and girls implementing Labor policies, or state school boys and girls doing the same.

But they don't want Labor policies and are looking for alternatives. That's why Campbell Newman is highly likely to be elected to the Senate. It's possible that in the house of Reps they may even vote Labor to tell the Libs to sort their act out.

Net Zero cuts another way in the cities. Morrison might be playing to city voters, thinking the conservatives will have nowhere to go. This won't work. Why vote for a Liberal government to implement Labor policies when you know Labor will implement them much better?

Then there is the risk posed by independents and minor parties.

Craig Kelly was effectively forced out of the Liberal Party for his views on climate change and Covid – views which have significant support from the facts as well as the Liberal base. Now a United Australia Party member, he might win the seat – or he might cause it to be lost by the Liberal Party to someone else.

Independents often do well in safe Liberal seats – look at Rebekha Sharkie in Mayo.

Then there are the 'Deep Green Fake Liberal Independents' running in six inner-city Melbourne and Sydney seats. Even if they fail to take any seats, it will see Morrison trying to defend his heartland – seats like Wentworth in New South Wales and Kooyong in Victoria.

Wentworth, formerly the seat of Malcolm Turnbull, illustrates the problem. It was won by an independent when Turnbull resigned and was only won back against that independent, Kerryn Phelps, with a margin of 1.31 per cent. Yet a notional distribution of the same votes shows the margin would have been 9.85 per cent against the Labor candidate.

It also boosts the small possibility of a hung parliament enhanced by the damage done in other seats by the Greens to Labor (and possibly the Liberals too, with the seat of Ryan in Brisbane vulnerable).

Then there are resignations, like that of Christian Porter, leaving the West Australian marginal seat of Pearce (5.2 per cent) to be contested by a new member (albeit a local councillor) against the sitting mayor of the area.

In the case of Pearce, this will add to problems in Western Australia where the Liberal Party self-eviscerated in the last state election winning only two seats with a 14 per cent swing against them across the state. They are in no shape for a federal campaign.

And then there is just the brutal electoral logic that the last redistribution robbed Morrison of two seats, so he is now technically a minority government and needs to win seats to hold on to outright power. No one has been able to point me to which seats those might be.

So ladies and gentlemen, time to head on over to www.alp.org.au to see what the future holds.