Advance’s tactics in Dunkley herald a new, nastier brand of politics

The Australian right elite is clearly cracking up, and it is delicious to watch. The signs are coming like crows in winter, flying into a fortune teller’s marked-out space of sky. This week was a double-whammy, with the release of two polls showing that, as the headlines noted, Labor’s primary vote had fallen below the Coalition’s. Actually, it had done so in October, as numerous pollsters noted. And buried in the middle of the story (in the Oz), and not mentioned (in Nine), was that the two-party-preferred vote was unchanged at 52-48, a solid lead for Labor.

This was standard spin, desperate to not run the headline: “Coalition still dead!” The interpretation, of which there was none, was obvious. Peter Dutton has spent two years in opposition consolidating right-wing voters — conservatives shading towards cookers — and persuading them that they can trust the Coalition again, and doesn’t have to pledge a vote to sundry whacko outfits to the right of them. 

Many in the mainstream and centre-left forget — due to an utterly irrational obsession — that Scott Morrison, a compromise candidate for the leadership, was seen by many on the right as just Malcolm Turnbull with fluid retention.  

Indeed, the right seem as dazzled by ScoMo as we are, piling all calumny upon a man who won them an election they didn’t deserve to get — even if he, and others, then seemed to display no interest in actual governing. Since the 2022 defeat, they’ve been dutifully running the line that the Coalition lost because they presented no real alternative to Labor. 

This was an import from US non-compulsory vote politics and doesn’t work in an exhaustive preferential system. But no matter. The purpose was to wage war inside the party, strengthen insurgent forces, and recompose branches. The deselection of Russell Broadbent in Victoria and Ian Goodenough in WA — is that not the best name for an Australian politician ever! — shows they’ve succeeded.

The question as to how many of them believe this guff as a general election principle has always intrigued me. One confirmation that they did was watching the Sky News panel during the election night coverage in Victoria in November 2022. Like freestyle climbers halfway up Arapiles, they scraped desperately for something to hold onto, and at one point, after a mournful round of “what about the forgotten people” simply ran out of stuff to say. 

Having consolidated power within the right side of politics, the Coalition is now projecting a US style of politics, in which any concession to the real is abandoned in favour of getting in a partisan line. Consider Dutton’s response after Barnaby’s midnight street nap — that it was in Canberra, where there are a lot of Greens and Labor staffers, so no wonder nobody helped him up. 

It is obviously infuriating to anyone rational, but that’s the point. It is designed to get the centre and left to respond by being both umpire and advocate. The left-populist response — that “Barnaby destroyed his first family and doesn’t seem too keen on being home to the second one, so maybe the pavement is where he belongs with the rest of the dogsh-” — is never going to be run, because there would then be an eight-way debate about the politics of family, choice, substance problems, collateral slut shaming, and unwarranted criticism of municipal cleanliness standards, etc. 

So the two camps are diverging. The centre-left, Labor and the Greens, must project themselves as the new rulers, the steady agents of government and progress. The Australian right, which has never yet fully taken on the surreal disregard for truth of the US right, is now wheeling off into the outer world. Witness the “Advance” campaign in Dunkley, the ads suggesting that the High Court release of detained non-Australian criminals was not only Labor’s doing, but that Labor advocated for it.

This is the exact opposite of the truth, as regards the case the Albanese government presented. I do not recall such a blatant overall lie told in Australian politics, even in the “children overboard” heyday of the Rodent. That makes the Dunkley by-election interesting as a harbinger of future politics. It’s a blunt, nasty style, of the sort we have avoided in most spheres for decades. The visual style is aggro, with a ’20s/’30s mob air.

Labor has hoped that the mainstream right would stay within certain limits, and that some sort of self-regulating public sphere could be maintained. The left can’t match the right with blatant lies, because anything we can throw at a right-wing candidate would be something we wouldn’t see as wrong. For example, if you wanted to really detach a conservative vote from a right-wing candidate, you’d lie about their sexuality, fake up compromising photos, etc. That’s really it. Corruption, incompetence, lying, domestic cruelty? The right don’t give a damn. The only things the left can reach for are truths, or lies they would find it abhorrent to present. 

So Dunkley might tell us something about whether these tactics will work. More by failure than success. Advance has pumped $350,000 and many volunteers into one by-election, something they can’t repeat in a full election. If Labor suffers a hit, it will still be difficult to say if they have made a difference. Should Labor hold the line, by contrast, it will be clear that US politics — the nasty stuff beyond most Australians’ experience or comprehension — is not yet of use in this country. That would put the right more out to sea than ever. And Dunkley is Frankston, so the sea is mostly effluent and used syringes. 

The final part of the right crack-up? The Nightly, the Seven West sponsored evening news — …newswhat? It’s a news site that looks like a clickbait aggregator — what we owe Two and a Half Men, What Taylor Swift and Navalny have in common — where you can click through to a PDF version of a print edition that doesn’t exist. It claims to get the news first because it “comes out” in the evening, which suggests it was set up by the last all-print editor who hadn’t yet succumbed to emphysema. Best of all, the full edition… scrolls sideways! Yes, the dear old Global Mail is back again, Jokerfied.  

We wish it great success, with its exciting new items of listicles and breaking news that either everyone else has, or is 18 hours old and hasn’t been swapped out yet. From that, you would say that the whole right shebang is in disarray, but we’ll hold off a final opinion until the Dunkley results come in, the Sky panel “analyses” them, and decides that what’s required is a junta, which we’ll read about in The Nightly 18 hours later.