After Aston, the right has — hahaha, I can’t finish this headline

Susan Sontag once wrote a serious and moving essay, Regarding the Pain of Others. Were the title to be used for a study of Saturday’s Aston byelection, it would consist entirely of “hahahah-ahahahahaha”. For anyone whose leftish heart is still beating even faintly, this was a good one. Folks in bars across Melbourne were watching the coverage on their phones. 

The result turned early and turned strong, so the rest was pure sadism, full of hilarious moments. “I really, I don’t, I’m lost for words,” said Keith Wolahan, the boy-faced ex-soldier member for Menzies, on the ABC panel when they threw to him. When they came back from a cross to Antony Green, Wolahan was gone. On Sky News, Credlin was holding forth about the Abbott government to a court of tame men, the madwoman let down from the attic to talk about the rotten boroughs. “When Tony became opposition leader, we…”

Still televised, from the Rowville, uh, what was that — it looked the Liberal do was being held in a breeze-block changing room — Peter Dutton, down from Queensland, gave a terrible speech, his point being that the Liberal Party had at least held together, a modest aim indeed. 

Losing candidate Roshena Campbell then gave a speech, and showed why she was. Cliched, stagey and self-regarding, she never connected during the campaign. People sussed her: Melbourne city councillor, Brunswick resident, barrister. Dropped in so the local party wouldn’t select yet another man (Emanuele Cicchiello; a local professional woman applicant, Ranjana Srivastava, was seen as too much of an unknown quantity), she comes off as an inner-city hip professional with a few centre-right economic opinions.

Did the Liberal centre have an inkling it might lose this? Apparently the very core did, but the wider penumbra did not, with passes to the Saturday night shindig being given out willy-nilly (when a loss is likely, the location becomes secret, like a speakeasy). And a possibility is that they consciously took the risk of dropping in a candidate like Campbell as a way of reconnecting to the teal seats.

Twenty-four hours later, some were trying to spin it. John Ferguson, the world’s oldest copy-boy, filed a rat-a-tat piece in The Australian that read as if he had dictated it from his phone at a pub bar to the world’s last copy-taker, noting, “This was an earthquake for the Liberal Party, but not as surprising as the political establishment is suggesting.” 

Also in the Oz, the ever reliably wrong Tom Tomasevitch Switzerov reassured the faithful that things are not as bad as they look. The Liberal Party becomes a ruthless, focused organisation when it needs to be, Switzer noted. People were writing it off in 1993. What does it need to do? “Call out the corporates who act like social activists. Condemn the ‘sensitivity readers’ who censor children’s books.” Yep, that was all they were talking about at the Boronia Mall*.

OK, let’s stipulate that that’s a bit right. The Australian political system reproduces itself in a stable fashion because it’s designed to. Compulsory voting, exhaustive preferencing and public funding pegged to the primary vote ensure that a major party can keep going with almost no real membership at all, and that there is insufficient incentive for a real, right-down-the-middle split. 

But that’s also a problem. It means that political decline never comes to the point of complete crisis, requiring resolution. The Aston result is truly dire. The vote was in part a rejection of Dutton as a leader, of the party’s reactionary position on climate change, of the candidate drop-in, and of some Anglo/European-descended preference for a non-Chinese candidate (like it or not). 

But the Liberals could have kept Aston. If they’d run with a local candidate — doing retail politics, campaigning for the neglected middle-outer east, and making some dissenting noises on climate change, and also on the rush to war with China — they might have reversed the 8% swing against them in the 2022 election and made it the starting point of a fightback.

The trouble would have been finding a local candidate like that, given the state of the party branches and those willing to run. For the Liberal Party, holding an open preselection is now like tapping a ship’s biscuit: all that will come out are the weevils — the reactionary, conspiratorial, fundamentalist and resentful types now crowding out the party’s membership lists.

Losing Aston means the keystone has fallen out of the party’s outer-eastern realm. This was a contiguous five-seat bloc, stretching from Menzies and Deakin, starting around Doncaster and Ringwood, passing through Aston, and going to Latrobe and Casey, based around Melbourne’s very-outer suburbs and exurbs. In fact, it’s worse. Both Menzies and Deakin are on 1%, Casey on 3%, and only Latrobe, centred on Pakenham, is safe on a 60-40% margin. 

This is all the Liberals have in Melbourne. All of it. The demographics are shifting too, with Menzies and Deakin becoming younger, less Anglo, less European, and the latter’s party apparatus centred around Michael Sukkar and the clownish sinister happy-clappy right. They are now open to challenge not only from Labor but from a suburban-styled community independent, less socially progressive than the teals but still in the sensible centre on climate change and the rest. 

The Liberal Party of Australia, the actual Liberal Party, is now down to 25 seats in the 151-seat Parliament. The Liberal National Party, most of whose grunt and energy comes from its National core, has 21 seats. Yes, Australian lower house politics, post World War II, has become one of the most stable systems in the world. But there is surely a point, where smooth reproduction is interrupted to some degree that the force turns from centripetal to centrifugal, driving candidates away from the Liberal core, to run as “cerulean” independents — bluer than teal but more centrist than the party. Were that to occur, the right really could come apart, 1944 in reverse.

For those on the left, the loss in Aston holds out a glittering possibility. The Tasmanian Rockcliff government (it may change in the three hours before this is published) is on a 13-12 margin, and one of several members could always go independent. In the next election, the election there will be contested with 35 seats on five multi-member electorates of seven members each. The quota will be about 10,000. You could get a quoll elected. 

Could we have the grand slam? Labor wins 2025, Tasmania falls, Queensland holds, and then, mirabile dictu, Labor takes the mayoralty of Brisbane, currently held by the right. That would leave the Liberal Party without branded government of any description in Australia, above some stray local councils. Once you’ve thought of this possibility, it is impossible to stop. 

For the Liberals who aren’t crazies, this vote should affirm one thing. They should regard the 2025 election as lost, and most likely a reversal, and simply devote themselves to five years of the bloodiest, most relentless internal struggles to remove or limit the religious groups that have taken over core positions in the party. They should go full Trot, and regard actual national politics as a mere distraction from the real fight within. 

They have no alternative. But they also have the luxury. Because let’s face it, while they may have lost the battle for the baubles, they’ve won the politics. The Albanese is a left-Howardist government, integrating a centre-right social order with a higher integration of the nation into a racially-based international alliance of AUKUS.

We won’t be reviving local industry, reversing iniquitous schools funding, or attacking the corrosive inequality of housing and superannuation that builds inequality day by day, putting anything resembling a social democratic country further out of reach. We lost the politics to get the power. Regarding the pain of others.

*Switzer hilariously repeats a common error, suggesting: “Meanwhile, the cultural left has made a ‘long march through the institutions’, unconsciously following the model laid out by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci nearly a century ago.”

Two things. Firstly, Gramsci never said that. There is no record of it. A moment’s thought would tell you why. The phrase is a repurposing of Mao’s famous 1930s “long march”, and was used by German left leader Rudi Dutschke in 1967 to suggest an alternative strategy for the left, with no prospect of revolution. Secondly, what do you mean “unconsciously”? From the late 1970s onwards, the left and progressives have been very consciously pursuing this strategy. That’s where your Gramsci comes in. Progressives didn’t acquire this empire in a fit of absent-mindedness. Why does Switzer get this quote wrong and misunderstand what has occurred? Because he’s a little complacent and a little intellectually mediocre, and that is one of the right’s problems at the moment.