If the polls are to be believed, the Australian Labor Party will be returned to office this Saturday for a second-straight term.
The ALP appears set to either rule in their own right or as the main bloc in a minority government, with Anthony Albanese on track to be the first Prime Minister since John Howard to win re-election.
This is a remarkable turnaround from earlier in the year when the polls had Labor well behind the Liberal-National Coalition. Indeed, so poorly had the ALP performed, some were suggesting this would be an “unlosable” election for the Opposition.
This last part is certainly true. Under the ALP, Australia has recorded some of its worst statistics on record – we have experienced the largest drop in living standards in the OECD, battled a cost-of-living crisis, and watched as food, housing and energy costs skyrocketed.
We have also seen a record number of Australians facing homelessness, and we have witnessed some of the highest crime rates ever seen. Victoria, for instance, is now plagued by regular home invasions, gang crime and machete attacks.
Just one of those factors alone would ordinarily cause an incumbent government to be behind in the polls and end with them being booted from office, so what has happened?
The answer is the one thing that you are not supposed to talk about: diversity.
Put simply, Australia’s new-found demographic diversity – amplified by the ALP as our record immigration intake, mass citizenship ceremonies, and the PM’s own propaganda campaigns attest – has destroyed the electoral basis of the centre-right, as in spite of the pronouncements by the Liberal Party that migrant groups are “natural conservatives”, the facts fail to bear this out.
The reality is, as many Aussies may suspect and assorted academic studies confirm, the more cosmopolitan the country, the worse things are for the right.
This has been recently confirmed by ALP-affiliated pollster Kos Samaras. As the latest poll from his Redbridge group illustrates, Labor has extended its two-party-preferred lead to 53%, with the Liberal primary vote “collapsing” to 34%. This, per Samaras, is due to the delusions of the LNP finally “being dashed up against the rocks of diverse and young Australians, large numbers of whom live within critical seats”.
This is not the first time Samaras has noted such trends. As he and others have observed, the Liberals and the wider right are facing an existential crisis as the homogenous right-leaning Baby Boomers die off and are replaced by a more left-leaning cosmopolitan cohort. This is further exacerbated by our immigration regime, of course, with Samaras noting elsewhere that when immigrants do enrol to vote, “20% more of them vote Labor”.
Former Victorian Labor minister Theo Theophanous wrote this week in Melbourne’s Herald Sun that the Liberals are anathema to many of Australia’s younger and more cosmopolitan communities.
“Labor has crafted policies that appeal to these groups” while the ALP are seen as superior at “supporting work from home arrangements, LGBT and indigenous communities, and to some extent Palestinians in Gaza”, he wrote. while the Liberal Party, in contrast, “finds it difficult to craft policies” that appeal to the nation’s more diverse Gen Z and Millennial groups.
Theophanous also confirms that much of Labor’s appeal is due to ethnicity. He writes of the ALP’s electoral edge that a “major factor is the greater support among ethnic groups for Labor”. He adds that the ALP is supported by 60% of “those who speak a language other than English at home” and that the Liberal Party’s plan to slash immigration “has not played well among recently arrived ethnic groups”.
The same has been seen at other state and federal polls. At the last federal election, for instance, Chinese voters “deserted” the Liberals over the party’s supposed “anti-China” stance. This was also echoed at the NSW state election, with the top 10 NSW electorates in terms of Chinese ancestry all “swinging away” from the Coalition. Victoria has also seen similar trends.
Indeed, the entire country seems to be heading the way of Victoria. That is, as a de facto one-party state dominated by a largely incompetent and quasi-corrupt ALP government that retains power via patronage and by better manipulating the underlying drivers of demography and diversity.
Victoria, remember, suffered one of the longest COVID lockdowns in the world and still returned the ALP to office. So entrenched is Labor in the state, nothing the Liberals do ever really matters. At the 2018 state election, the Liberals offered a tough-on-crime approach and lost. Next time around they offered up a “Labor-lite” approach and lost again, as it is all largely immaterial when the ALP and the Left simply dominate the demographics.
This is what many in the Liberal Party and the establishment right still seem unable to entertain, and one of the more frustrating features of this campaign has been the cavalcade of complaints by mainstream conservatives that Labor remain popular despite their obvious incompetence.
Peta Credlin, for instance, has wondered “what we have done to deserve Labor”, while Andrew Bolt was amazed that “voters are falling for Albo’s astonishing lies”.
Well guys, the answer to this is the obvious one.
Due to decades of elite-imposed mass migration and diversity, much of Australia now cares less for competence or veracity than for ethnic affinity or tribal loyalty. This, of course, is how Albo and the ALP remain popular despite their ineptitude, and how sensible proposals like the establishment of nuclear plants – over 30 countries use nuclear energy – can be smeared as “extreme”.
Despite the delusions of civic nationalists coasting on the capital of prior generations, Australia is well on its way towards some serious tribal tensions and an overt form of ethnic politics as seen in places like Singapore.
What makes matters worse for us, however, is that we lack the Asian city-state’s more “direct” tendencies and are stuck with a system (democracy) that theorists from the ancient Greeks onwards have recognised as only practicable within homogenous societies.
The long-time leader of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, observed of the ethno-cultural diversity of his homeland: “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”
If there is any consolation from this most dispiriting of all elections, it may be that Australia’s centre-right finally realises what it is up against, and what the stakes of failure will be.
Header image: Anthony Albanese with current and future Labor voters (Facebook).
