2 weeks Ago By Frank Bongiorno
On May 30, 2022, during his first media conference as the new Liberal Party leader, Peter Dutton laid out a strategy that he has stuck fairly closely to in the three years since. It was a misconceived strategy, based on large doses of wishful thinking about his party’s capacity to attract Labor-leaning voters, which the Coalition is now paying a heavy price for entertaining. “Our policies will be squarely aimed at the forgotten Australians in the suburbs,” he announced, and particularly “those in seats where there has been a swing against the Labor Party on their primary vote”.
Dutton would not be giving up on any seat, he announced — and he surely had in view those formerly blue-ribbon Liberal seats that had since gone teal — but he made it clear that the Liberals would be heading out into traditional Labor territory to draw to the Liberal bosom a new version of Robert Menzies’ “forgotten people”. These would include blue-collar workers, tradies, small businesspeople, migrants and women. This strategy would only work if those voting Labor could be readily detached from that party and, equally importantly, attached to the Liberals.
On the face of it, what Dutton was proposing looked like a more attractive proposition for a right-wing leader than trying to win back from Labor independents and Greens city and inner-suburban seats full of the tertiary-educated, professionals, women, renters, young and progressive-minded voters who worry over issues such as climate change and corruption. The Liberals’ ambition was based on the idea that it had become the party of the working class in an ironic reversal of the traditional pattern of Australian politics. By April 2024, having helped defeat the Voice referendum, Dutton told a small business forum that the Liberal Party was now “the party of the worker”.
But was he right? The Liberals had taken heart from the Labor Party’s undoubted loss of support in the outer suburbs, often in seats that the ALP managed to retain but now held by narrower margins. This trend was evident at the 2022 Victorian state election, even while Labor’s tally of seats was unaffected. Kos Samaras was the most prominent among the pollsters who pointed out that this posed dangers to the Labor Party.
Meanwhile, the Voice referendum result cultivated the idea that “No” votes in such electorates could be translated into Liberal votes at election time. Dutton’s problem lies partly in the reality, reported in the 2022 Australian Election Study, that although class-based voting has declined, the self-identified working class is still more likely to vote Labor (38%) than for the Coalition (33%). To this extent, the old order of Labor as the party of the working class has survived, however precariously.
Even in the fabled 1996 John Howard landslide — in many ways the origin story of this idea of the Liberals as “the party of the worker” — the shift of manual workers was hardly as drastic as might have been assumed by the prevailing rhetoric about Howard’s “battlers” and “aspirationals”. In their study of voting patterns, Murray Goot and Ian Watson pointed out that blue-collar support for the Coalition dropped back in 1998 and stayed there until 2004. In the heyday of industrial Australia — say, from 1910 through to 1970 — the typical Labor voter might be thought of as a man born into a working-class family who left school at 15, joined a union and did half a century of manual labour in a factory, workshop or mine, formed a family with three or four children, and at 65 joined his wife, also a Labor voter, on the old age pension to ease into a short and frugal retirement surrounded by grandchildren, who would themselves probably vote Labor, too.
Today, that typical Labor voter would be a youngish, tertiary-educated professional, probably a woman, and a resident of one of the big cities, where she is renting. She might be thinking of voting for the Greens next time. She wouldn’t be unhappy to see a good independent put up their hand, either.
Labor and the Greens dominate among young voters, attract a larger share of the tertiary-educated than the Coalition, and do better among women — a reversal of the pattern from a few decades ago, when the gender gap saw men more likely to vote Labor. These shifting demographic patterns exercise a decisive influence on policy. Political scientists developed the idea of the “catch-all party”, which collects the support of various classes, cohorts and demographics in its endeavour to get a majority.
The parties can only succeed in this endeavour by offering policies that often look disconnected and lacking in “narrative” because each is calculated to appeal to a specific set of voters. In 2022, Labor attracted more votes than the Coalition among both high-income earners and renters. Somehow, then, it needs to offer policies — affordable housing on the one hand, and protection of homeowners and property investors on the other –– that will keep those two groups in the same camp.
On the strength of recent opinion polling, the seeming advantages of Labor over the Coalition can be expressed simply enough. Labor — assisted by Greens preferences — has assembled (and probably retained) wider voter support. The Coalition does not appear to have been able to break through in the outer suburbs in the manner that Dutton had hoped.
Nor does it appear to have won back enough of the young, tertiary-educated or women. The broad mix of voters that saw Labor into office in 2022 appears largely intact. What’s your take on the voting demographics of the major parties? We want to hear from you.
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