Labor's overwhelming victory and the coalition crisis

Hello everybody and welcome to my post-election edition of Gorey Things.

Well, the votes have been counted. They're still counting, of course, but we know the result and it's a clear and overwhelming victory for Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Party.

I predicted a while ago that Labor would be returned with an absolute majority, but I didn't pick the number of seats that they won or the increase in their primary vote.

I thought Labor would pick up four or five seats, at least two of them from the Greens, which occurred, and I thought they would lose one or two, probably to the Liberals or an Independent.

Instead, Labor has picked up a swag of seats in, well, all over Australia. They've absolutely dominated in Tasmania. They've won seats in Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney.

In fact, the Liberal Party has been reduced to around 45 or 46 seats in coalition with the Nationals. When you consider that about 14 or 15 of those 45 seats will be Nationals members and most of the rest are going to be regional-based Liberals, they've really been reduced to a party that only represents regional Australia and the fringes of major metropolitan areas. And this is the big problem for the coalition.

It’s why I'm calling and suggesting that they should break up the coalition and go their own way as separate parties, the Liberal Party and the National Party. There are precedents for this.

Up until about the mid-1980s, in fact, whenever the two parties were in opposition, they generally did not maintain a coalition. They went their own way. And there were advantages for both of them in doing that.

Those same advantages exist today. It means they can focus on their policies within their own core constituencies. It means they can build their brand. And that's especially important for the National Party. It also gave the National Party more airtime in the media, when they were a standalone entity and were able to argue their own policies in the lead-up to an election.

Of course, everyone knew that if the Liberal Party needed their numbers after the election result to form a government, that they would. And once they were in government, the coalition held firm for however many years that they were in power. And in the Menzies and McEwen years, that was quite a long time.

The problem, if they don't break up, is that the coalition will be too skewed towards those regional and outer metropolitan voters, the ones that are more likely to be on the right of the political spectrum.

The Liberal Party has effectively been wiped out in the major cities of Australia, holding only one or two seats in Melbourne, not many more in Sydney and hardly any in Perth and Adelaide. They no longer appeal to middle Australia. They no longer appeal as much as they used to to professional people.

I noticed this at the last federal election in 2022, when I was working on the campaign of independent candidate Jack Dempsey in Hinkler. We had support from what I called the doctor's wives of Hervey Bay. They were intellectual, professional women.

Some of them were, in fact, doctors and not doctor's wives, who used to traditionally vote for the Liberal Party. But they couldn't because it went against their conscience on issues like climate change in particular.

How does the Liberal Party win those votes back? That is the huge challenge for them. I actually can't see them coming back at the next election. So you're looking at a situation where the Labor Party will be in power for at least the next six years, possibly the next eight or nine.

The Liberal Party really needs to go back to its core values of being a middle of the road party that represents aspiration and opportunity. At the moment, they're sounding very shrill, like a right wing populist party, dare I say it, in the Republican mode of Donald Trump in America and the Reform Party in the United Kingdom.

That is not going to get the Liberal Party and the coalition back into power. The Liberal Party needs to win again those seats that they have lost to the Teal independents. They need to be stronger than they are in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney.

If they're only going to hold 45 seats in the next parliament with 150 members of that parliament, and if those 30 or so Liberals are mostly regional and outer metropolitan or peri-urban, I can't see the Liberal Party winning.

And the problem goes further because they've lost a generation of talent on the moderate wing of the party in particular. They've been hijacked in a lot of their branches by happy clappers, Christian fundamentalists who generally drift towards the right wing of politics.

In Queensland, they're dominated by climate change deniers. It's very, very hard to see them coming back unless they break away from the National Party, end the coalition and rebuild in those areas where they've traditionally been strong in the leafy suburbs of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide in particular.

Can the coalition break up and can they still have a working relationship? Of course they can. As I said, they've done it before. And most recently, I think it was in the early 2000s, Peter Ryan took the National Party out of coalition in Victoria for a whole term so he could rebuild the party, rebrand the party and retain its party status by winning a couple of seats from Independents and Labor, which they did successfully.

The only downside or problem I can see with breaking up the coalition is in Queensland, where ironically, they merged a number of years ago and I never supported that merger.

As an ex-National Party member myself, I thought they should retain their separate identities in Queensland and all over Australia. They merged in Queensland because of the Fitzgerald Corruption Commission reforms which recommended doing away with preferential voting.

Now, that was a silly thing to do and Queensland has now gone back to preferential voting but it meant that the Liberals and Nationals couldn't compete against each other because they couldn't guarantee the flow of preferences to one or the other party that finished third.

So in Queensland now, they have a situation where seats are earmarked or allocated to either one of the parties depending on who held that seat at the time of the merger.

So you've got the strange situation where regional seats like Leichhardt and Groom are designated as Liberal seats when in ordinary circumstances, the Nationals would contest those seats if a Liberal sitting member vacated or resigned. And I think that's what they should go back to. I don't know how the mechanics of it would work with the LNP machine now being merged but I'm sure that a solution could be found to that problem if the Coalition splits and I think they should split.

That's my message for both parties and it's my commentary on the election that if the Liberal Party are ever going to get back into power, they need to return to their core values, they need to win back seats that they've lost to Teals and Labor in major cities.

Most Australians live in capital cities. If the Liberal Party aren't competitive in those capital cities, they have no chance of returning to government.

Thanks for listening. This is Michael Gorey with Gorey Things.