As expected, Kerryn Phelps destroyed the Morrison Government in Wentworth on Saturday with the largest swing in by-election history. Should we celebrate? No.
If Kerryn Phelps is the new face of Australian politics then we are sunk as a nation. Consider what we know. Ms Phelps is in favour of addressing climate change, killing offshore refugee detention, not moving the Australian embassy to Jerusalem, stopping Labor’s imputation credit reforms and, implicitly, being and living gay.
As it happens I agree with four out of five of those policy positions (Labor is right on imputation). Yet should this paltry offering be enough to destroy the incumbent government’s 117 year majority in Wentworth? If so then we are witnessing the end of national interest politics as we know it.
There is no doubt that the Morrison Government had it coming. It ran the worst campaign in the history of Australian politics. And nobody really knows what it stands for, either, beyond being blokey, climate skeptical and a God boy. On single issues it was always going to get crucified in Wentworth.
But if the answer to that is a stylish, coiffed, pure identity politician then we are entering an era of politics in which the greatest challenges of our time is matched only by the triviality of our leaders; Kerryn Phelps’ victory is one of style over substance, identity over nation and the personal over the political.
Consider for a moment what got us here. The Turnbull Government did nothing for years. When it finally did do something it was to legalising gay marriage. Sure that was progress but in the scheme of things is trivial, impacting only 4% of Australians. When it did finally move forward on national scale policy it launched an appallingly retrogressive corporate tax cut and the National Energy Guarantee, a byzantine policy that would have slowed mitigation, as well as handing Pauline Hanson a veto over carbon targets.
Meanwhile, the Turnbull Government completely ignored the issues that mattered most to Australians. It had no population policy beyond flooding the place with cheap foreign labour. It had no economic policy beyond having no population policy. It had no answer to falling living standards; ignored city crush-loading; egged-on foreign buyers pricing locals out of real estate; exacerbated falling wages at every turn; had no understanding of the post-mining boom context; no productivity policy, nor reform; did nothing about broken horizontal fiscal equalisation; failed to fix the gas and power markets delivering a withering shock in household utility bills and had no economic narrative to explain any of it to a baffled nation going backwards.
This is why it couldn’t get anywhere in the polls. It is also why it put a rocket under One Nation support, structurally fracturing its own QLD base, and guaranteeing that the Coalition would never see power again. Turnbull deserved everything he got as well. The problem is those that understood these forces and mounted their coup then lost it to the usurper Morrison who has no clear vision at all.
In other words, Kerryn Phelps is a response to a symptom which was a response to a symptom which was a response to a symptom. The underlying malady is now so buried in false diagnoses and failed treatments that it is comprehensively lost.
This is like an abuse victim losing his way in drugs. As each new misdirection covers the underlying illness it becomes the new crisis, obscuring the real causes of trauma ever more deeply under new mistakes and trauma. Kerryn Phelps is not the answer. She is the methodone treating the heroin addiction that resulted from the coke addiction which derived from the heavy drinking which covered over the abusive childhood.
Unless or until our politics gets back to first principles then “Australia” is dead.
