Politics

After such a decisive election outcome, soul-searching about what happened and why is only natural. One of the most conspicuous failures in the campaign was the role played by the media – they certainly tried to undermine our democracy.

There has been an earthquake in Australian parliamentary democracy, which has checked the dominance of the two major parties and demonstrated two-thirds of the country were hungry for change.

The phrase was coined by a volunteer for Sophie Scamps in Mackellar, but it was just as fitting in Kooyong or Goldstein or anywhere else that people were experiencing the optimism and satisfaction of engaging for the first time in a political campaign. The phrase was ‘active hope’.

Now that election day has finally arrived, it’s reasonable to ask: How much better informed are voters to make their choice? The campaign has certainly been neither a contest of policy ideas, nor of visions for our country’s path ahead.

Expectations of a Labor victory today have been trimmed dramatically. Far from the landslide many were increasingly confident of just a week ago, forming a minority government is now widely seen as the best they can expect.

Whoever wins this election, Australia’s next government will face enormous challenges across the full spectrum of foreign and domestic policy. But the arsenal of policy tools available to the incoming government will have been undermined after nearly a decade of short-term thinking, deeply politicised decision-making and misspent political capital. For the national interest, this must stop.

Whether or not Scott Morrison can engineer the miracle of his second coming on May 21, he will leave significant negatives in terms of the Liberal Party and public policy in our country. The standard of political debate, and the respectability and responsibility of candidates, has nosedived to its murkiest levels. We are there – we are in the mud.

Scott Morrison is desperately looking to generate a last-minute momentum shift in this election, but Anthony Albanese believes it is already occurring around the kitchen tables of the nation.

Looking at the offerings of both major parties, their ambition seems no higher than to get through to May 21 with enough seats to win government. Whoever wins will then have to sit down and work out what to do next.

Isn’t it reasonable to expect our political leaders to put our people first? It is instructive to recognise that the election campaign has spent most of its time on point-scoring against opponents, blame-shifting and gotcha moments.