Whether it is the NSW branch of the Labor Party, the Islington set of London or woke Democrats of New York, a common collective blind spot of the left is that they honestly believe they are morally superior to their political opponents.
It is one of the great weaknesses of tribalism for this self-belief traps them into thinking that their mere existence is enough for the public to vote for them.
This self-idolation is how, in Australia, Labor’s feminists can so readily identify sexism, for example, in rightwing bogeyman Liberal leaders like Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and most recently Peter Dutton, but not in the boorishness displayed by their own leader publicly joking about his scheduling sex with his second wife after the aprodosiac of his footy club winning a match, or gesticulations likening a visiting female leader’s gift of fruit melons to a women’s body.
It is how Labor has in the past cast Malcolm Turnbull, a millionaire, as out of touch and elite because of his wealth, yet have no problem with Kevin Rudd also being used to the finer things in life via the similarly entrepreneurial success of his wife Therese Rein.
Bottom line, Liberals being wealthy equals bad, Labor being wealthy equals, well, they were once poor. In the UK, this hypocrisy is also shown when Labour ministers are outed as sending their children to expensive private schools, despite raising taxes on the private education sector and railing against the Eton-educated toff Tories.
To the general public, who do not care for political brands but vote on promises of making life better for tomorrow and the next generation, it is, of course, rank hypocrisy.
But for the left, it is one of their most self-harming traits. Not because it is obviously faulty from the outset, but because they mistake their election victories for wrongs being eventually righted.
In the UK, the public mood aligns only occasionally with the left, where Labour has governed just five times since the end of the Second World War.
In Australia, where Labor has traditionally been dominated by the right, and less smug centrist faction, the rewards have been more numerous. Since the end of the Second World War, Labor has led majority and minority governments 13 times, compared to the Coalition’s 19.
But this mismatch can be explained. Poorer left-wing leaders make two key mistakes in their misguided sense of moral superiority. Here the examples of Keir Starmer and Anthony Albanese are particularly worth examining, as both won elections on small-target strategies and their opponents firing at their own feet all the way to the finish line.
If you can remember one stand-out inspiring moment of either leader’s campaigns — and Albanese had two — where they presented a bold, deeply thought-out vision for how to fix today’s problems, you win a medal.
As a result, both were delivered loveless landslides on historically low primary votes. In the UK, Starmer was shown the door before he even got halfway through his five-year term because of the electoral threat posed by Nigel Farage’s dominant Reform.
In Australia, Albanese was given more time to finesse his mediocre approach to government.
This is partly because Australia’s election cycles are shorter and that his Cabinet and caucus carry the trauma of the Rudd-Julia Gillard leadership wars of the last decade, as well as the fact that, post-Scott Morrison, the Liberals have been incompetent that they could not even find a chook to raffle in the event they were even capable of holding one.
Albanese would have hoped his second term would be more of the same, allowing him to bed in Labor as the natural choice of government in Australia, largely through upping the dosage of middle-class welfare and reliance on the state. On the weekend he was already laying out what he would do in his third term in an interview with press gallery journalist Paul Sakkal.
Given the weekend result, when the populist One Nation stormed one of Labor’s safest seats in Western Australia, interviews like that look recklessly hubristic. It has taken a long time, but things are starting to catch up with Albanese and fast. Because in Pauline Hanson, he finally has an opposition against whom his usual tactics are not working.
During last year’s election, Albanese reheated his scare-and-spend approach. His flagship policies were waiving HECS for university students, a successful pitch to young Greens voters, promising more taxpayer-funded doctor’s appointments and Medicare clinics which he badged as a cost of living measure and a promise to solve the housing crisis with a five per cent deposit scheme.
When Albanese was asked if he would go for tax incentives that favour existing homeowners, he would get angry at journalists and insisted his word was his bond.
And when it came to high energy prices? Forget about the previous election vow to lower electricity prices by $275, his message this campaign was that then Liberal leader Peter Dutton would build a nuclear plant in the suburban Brisbane seat of Dickson.
It was timid, listless and lazy. But after this year’s budget’s broken promises when he raided the housing tax incentives he promised he would not, it represents something more — the cooked model of politics that voters have had enough of and want to burn.
Labor was either too scared, dishonest or complacent in banking on a continuing hopeless Coalition to tell the truth then — preferring to fib and seek forgiveness later.
But Hanson’s potency shows how wrong that calculation was. The public didn’t give Labor 94 seats because they viewed the government as angels from heaven bestowing upon us their big-spending and big-taxing policies. Voters simply had few other options.
But this time around they do, as the weekend’s stunning byelection victory in the West Australian seat of Secret Harbour for One Nation showed.
One Nation keeps making history, claiming a first federal seat from the Coalition in New South Wales, lower and upper house seats in the South Australian election and now a raid on Labor’s heartland in a state that has been dominated by the red side for a decade.
Voters want solutions, and they want change. As previously noted, they are so fed up with the major two that they are willing to divorce the former from the latter to register their rage.
You would think the prime minister might see it for the wake-up call that it is or at the very least, be humbled. Instead, he reached for some Trump-esque superlatives when he addressed the party faithful in Queensland after One Nation’s historic victory over Labor was announced.
‘Our Party has never been more respected in the world,’ he claimed, without evidence. ‘And never been more listened to because on so many big topics, we don’t wait for the world, we take the lead.
‘That’s why we should all be proud to be members of the greatest social-democratic party in the world.’
This kind of talk is eyerolling enough from Trump. From Albanese, who, as I exclusively revealed in The Nightly, was not even invited by the French to attend this year’s G7, it is embarrassing.
Then he returned to the moral purity, claiming that Labor owed it to history to defeat the party that is polling neck-and-neck with his own side, which he claims is the object of global respect.
‘Across the world, hard right populists are on the march, peddling politics that is dangerous, divisive, and downright dishonest. We simply must defeat them. We owe it to history. And we will defeat them,’ he said.
‘They’ll say anything and do anything to win votes. Bend any facts. Peddle misinformation and disinformation.’
Albanese is right to sound the alarm to his own side about the danger of a One Nation-led or dominated government; they would surely undo a lot of the causes his movement cares about, starting with climate change and potentially industrial relations protections, and maybe even abortion rights.
But that’s the point; we know this because Hanson has not been shy about suggesting radical policy ideas, and still, One Nation continues to be rewarded at the ballot box.
As for dishonesty and saying anything to win votes, Albanese & Co can hardly complain. This is the electorally winning method of campaigning they perfected and recycle every election, through both their own broken promises and their scare campaigns.
And ironically, it is not what One Nation is doing. The populist party has revealed its policy intentions in an often hamfisted and shambolic way, like their internal debate over the migration cuts and Hanson’s confusion around permanent and net migration numbers.
Albanese might think it is his duty to defeat One Nation in the name of history, but he will need a better method and a little more self-awareness to build a credible case against the party that threatens to overturn his brand of incremental politics. If indeed he is the right man at all to break an opposition he’s never before had to battle.
This article was first published by The Nightly