People like the idea of disrupting political norms — until it happens. But this election offers a better way

The lesson from the Canadian election, and from Donald Trump’s plummeting approval numbers even among Republican voters in the US, seems to be that voters love the idea of someone coming in to disrupt the system — until someone shows up and does exactly that. Suddenly, the hitherto-odious system seems better left intact.

In the US, you can blame that on affluent white voters actually believing the self-delusion that they’re the victims in a society gone woke, rather than the occupiers of the higher echelons of the US pyramid of privilege — albeit nowhere near as high as the rich or the super-rich. Disrupt the financial underpinnings of that system of privilege, and even those in the middle can feel things tottering and start worrying. The disruption was only ever meant to happen to others. To the people with darker skin, to trans people, to migrants, to China. Not to us.

In Canada, where opposition leader Pierre Poilievre lost his seat after apeing Trump up until the Mad King began musing about seizing Canada, the “disruption” on offer had an altogether more existential quality to it than the recession, inflation and loss of retirement savings Trump was offering Americans.

In such circumstances, what happens to the argument that the alienation and resentment fostered by business-as-usual politics will be channelled into right-wing populists like Trump? Where to now for the alienated and the resentful forced, in Hilaire Belloc’s words, to cling onto nurse for fear of something worse?

The question provides an electoral update on what was a seemingly resolved question about whether the mainstream left answer to alienation — try to make globalist capitalism deliver better for workers without overturning the entire economic order Trump-style — was going to work. Trump’s election in November seemed to put the question beyond doubt: such managerialism was no match for the anger and resentment of people smashed by surging inflation.

Now, tweaking the broad settings of modern capitalism in a more worker-friendly direction seems somewhat less toxic as an alternative, if Canada and, depending on today’s results, Australia are any guide. Even the Coalition has signed up to that brief, backing Labor’s exorbitant additional health spending and declining to reverse the bulk of the government’s industrial relations changes, and even promising to go further in breaking up retail oligopolies.

Where neither of the major parties want to go, however, is in committing to a style of politics that is easier for the alienated and resentful to come back to — a style of politics that values integrity, transparency and removing, to the extent it is possible, the influence of vested interests over policy. And neither side is willing take political risks in advancing much-needed reforms, preferring to endlessly put off tasks like reestablishing sustainable fiscal settings, curbing our addiction to fossil fuels, or reducing taxpayer-funded demand for housing.

Advocacy on such issues — tax reform, most particularly, but also climate action — has thus been left to the Greens and community independents, who are prepared to propose politically difficult reforms, knowing that their specific constituencies will back them. The likely outcome from another parliamentary term of major party government will thus be more inaction on climate, the budget and the tax system, genuine housing reform, and reducing the massive risks now posed by our reliance on an unstable United States.

The only way those issues will be progressed, and Australians given a better kind of political system aimed at delivering for them and not vested interests, is a minority government that must be far more responsive to the reform urgings of the crossbenches.

If the polls prove correct, and Labor hangs on to majority government due to the awful campaign Peter Dutton has run, the Coalition will have deprived us of a chance for a step-change in the quality of government in Australia. An historic opportunity will have passed, one that could have turned a long-term trend of governments with small minorities into a trend to minority governments in which the major parties have to respond to demands for better institutions, better practices and better policies.

That is the best expression of voter alienation and resentment — a vote not for a chaotic overturning of the whole system but for wresting back control from the major parties to deliver a better politics and policies more aimed at the national interest than vested interests. It will hardly be perfect government, but it would be a substantial improvement on business as usual and managerialist tweaking. It’s a possibility worth thinking about for the half-to-two-thirds of voters who’ve yet to cast their ballot.

Are you hoping for a minority government?

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