Two national outbursts this week deserve political strategist’s urgent attention. Yesterday’s fantastic dressing-down of Energy Minister Josh Frydenburg at the hand of SA Premier Jay Weatherill has something in common with the saga engulfing Coopers Breweries and the public reaction to its ill-conceived gay-marriage debate advertisement. Both are enraged responses to deep Federal Government betrayal and they say something about a rapidly deteriorating social mood.
We all know how publicly dreadful the Coalition Government has been: disunited, chaotic and ineffectual. But there is something more than that going on here. The anger in the community is burning to white hot proportions and the blowtorch is the particular manner of Coalition failure.
The Abbott Government’s failure was conventional if accelerated. It simply pursued an agenda that was out of step with so much of the polity that it generated a kind of darkly humoured contempt that was fatal in the polls.
