By RUSSELL BLACKFORD - METAMAGICIAN AND THE HELLFIRE CLUB
Added: Fri, 27 Aug 2010 23:03:59 UTC

Well, that was a weird election, and a particularly weird election night. It looks like we'll have a new prime minister - Tony Abbott of all people - but we probably won't know for a week or more, since the outcome is too close to call, there'll almost certainly be a hung parliament, and there'll have to be recounts in some very close electorates.

I feel sorry for Julia Gillard, who probably could have been a good prime minister. She is likeable, talented, and gracious. I wish she'd been given a chance by the electorate, and of course there's still an outside chance that she'll survive in power. I hope so, but I'm not counting on it. I'm not as sorry for her as I could have been, however, since her whole approach has been to move to the right in order to fight this campaign.

Labor took secular, civil libertarian voters for granted in this campaign and throughout its term of government. There was nothing to excite us or even to attract our loyalty. No wonder the electorate of Melbourne fell to the Greens. That's a salutary reminder that the votes of people like me are not rusted on. In my own electorate, Charlton, there was no doubt that Greg Combet would be returned easily, and my own vote for the Green candidate flowed back to Labor as I put Combet second. But Labor is now on notice that it's possible to lose seats to the Greens even in the House of Representatives. The Greens will now have the balance of power in the Senate, and that's a very good thing in my opinion. As long as they don't start fielding left-wing social conservatives like Clive Hamilton, the Greens are going to be a progressive force in the parliament. Labor should stop complaining about competition from the Greens for left-wing voters and actually start adopting policies that appeal to its own core constituency.
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Clarifying some points about the election

In response to Gordon Campbell's useful comment on the previous post, I should clarify some points.

I wasn't suggesting that large numbers of voters put the Coalition ahead of Labor directly because of the sort of issues I identified. I do believe that some voters did this, perhaps thinking they could make a protest or because a particular issue, such as internet censorship, was a deal-breaker for them. So yes, some votes were lost to the Coalition (again, mine wasn't one of them).

But that wasn't so much what I was getting at. I was more concerned about other effects, such as losing the electorate of Melbourne to the Greens when, as it turns out, every seat counts. Again, the Greens will have unprecedented power in the Senate when their members take their seats, which will make it difficult for either major party to govern in its own right. What's more, Labor would look a lot better placed for political negotiations, in the context of a hung parliament, if it looked dominant in the Senate.

Over the past few years, many people have become Greens voters when they are not naturals for the Greens (I am, as I said, a Hawke-Keating social democrat, and I've never been very impressed in the past by the Greens' economic credentials ... but of course the Greens are getting more sophisticated all the time, so Labor is less and less able to rely on this).

But the main effect I had in mind when I spoke of failing to capture imaginations, and so on, isn't that Labor had direct leakage of votes to other parties during the few weeks of the election period. It's that many natural Labor voters are now almost as hostile to Labor as they are to the Coalition. This started to happen quite some time ago, probably even in 2008.
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