The changing political landscape in Australia, and the world

30 November 2007

The defeat of the Liberal/National coalition Government in last Saturday’s federal election in Australia could herald an upheaval in the political landscape, not only locally, but globally, says Steve Biddulph, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald:

We are so conditioned to the idea that two main parties define politics, we even call them left and right as if they were parts of our body. But parties spring up in response to the primary tensions in a certain time and place. In the 20th century that polarisation was capital versus labour.

A century earlier, before even the idea of power among the working poor, politics was aristocrats versus tradesmen, the growing middle class of shopkeepers and artisans that formed the basis of the Tories.

It’s no longer the workers against the bosses though.

The issue of the future, coming down on us now like a steam train, is of course the environment, the double hammer blows of climate change and peak oil. Energy, weather and human misery are the factors that will define our lives for decades to come. You can cancel your newspaper, those are the only four words you need to know.

But that’s not the end of it.

For two years now the best predictions have been that the subprime meltdown would act as merely the detonator of a much larger explosive charge created long ago by US consumer debt, concealed by Chinese and Arab investment in keeping that great hungry maw that is America sucking in what it could not begin to pay for.

The avalanche-like fall of US house prices will be closely followed by the same in linked economies worldwide, and presage a harsh and very different world than the one we have lived in.

In a nutshell then:

In short, the party is over. We are a civilisation in collapse.

Earlier this year, former Labor leader, Kim Beazley, who incidentally has just been appointed professor of politics and international relations at the University of Western Australia, predicted the party that lost last weekend’s federal election faced political oblivion in Australia.

“If the Labor Party is not able to get in there and change [the current] industrial laws, the whole character of working Australia will change substantially, and to the Labor Party’s detriment.”

The Liberal party’s position being equally as serious.

If Mr Howard lost, “there is a serious question mark over the future of the Liberal Party”. Labor would win the NSW election in March and Mr Howard would remain the only governing Liberal. “After some years of Labor state governments, Liberal oppositions are still struggling to get a third of the seats in state parliaments.”

Mr Beazley noted the state Liberal branches were already in poor shape and if Mr Howard lost the election, the Liberals would not govern anywhere.

The next few years stand to keep political observers on their toes.

Originally published Friday 30 November 2007.