Advisors Focused Liberals on Excitable Voters Mirrored Across Tasman
No mystery has suffused Australian politics such as the precise reason why the Liberal-led coalition gave the impression of receiving its federal election advice from its opposition the victorious Labour Party.
In New Zealand the Jacinda Ardern era ideals remain immovable. One is the piously showboating legislative self-harm in the exalted strangling of access to the nation’s abundant oil and gas reserves and the institutional welcome to subsidy-laden progressive substitutes.
In the 1970s Australia ranked 6th on the OECD rich list. It is now 21st h.
New Zealand in the 1970s was 11th. It is now 33rd.
The general elections in both countries rarely touched upon this sobering decline. The New Zealand general election which required the centrist National Party to enlist two coalition partners to gain a parliamentary majority picked its way around ethical victim-oppressor issues.
Eighteen months later the Australian election was characterised by a similar deflection. This took the form of an inability of the Liberal Party to pull itself away from the media-sown magnetic mine field ready to detonate with any departure from a scripted identity/climatic priority.
An enduring impression of the election is of the seat-losing and flummoxed Liberal leader Peter Dutton’s (pictured) smooth cheeks puffing in and out like bellows as he sought to sidestep any direct response to the issues that only a few months before his party had decided were the ones to ride to victory.
His appearance was of someone deeply conflicted, unable to make up his mind, and torn between two opposing marketing options: the moral high ground or the actual real-life issues, the down-to-earth ones.
A clue is now emerging across the mists of the Tasman Sea indicating that the coalition’s focus groups were indeed focused. But on the governmental picture in New Zealand which demonstrated the extent of progressive partisanship notably in the nation’s public service determination to promote progressive priorities.
Half way through its mandate New Zealand’s National Party- led coalition has proved powerless in curbing throughout the public realm the constant use of Maori language to describe state departments or what they do.
Similarly it has proved impotent in these departments to rein in ambitious head start schemes favouring those claiming Maori descent.
The National coalition has proved its helplessness in disciplining its own state broadcasting agencies in regard to the enthusiasm of announcers in showily framing their utterances in the Maori language.
In anything remotely official state operatives believe themselves obliged at the outset to verbally genuflect toward the precolonial era occupiers of the land on which the event is being staged.
The mystery of why the Liberal coalition was so guided by moral issues deepens in recalling that the Australia Labour Party’s previous leader Bill Shorten was deemed to have lost the federal election six years before because of fears over a single policy plank.
This was that his pursuit of the then frenzied international climatic regime. The victorious Liberal opposition claimed that if imposed it would hit voters where it hurt most which is in their pocket.
In office Scott Morrison the new Liberal prime minister though looked befuddled by anything remotely in the bright shining rainbow prism be it the climate or identity.
After Morrison’s losing and shuffling campaign the incoming Labour government now supercharged its own rainbow colours and identity themes by floating its Voice referendum, essentially a vote on a separate Aboriginal parliament.
It was voted down. It was now that the somewhat surprised Liberal opposition seriously scented victory in this just recent federal general election which it so decisively lost.
An as yet unidentified element now intervened at the outset of campaigning that swung the Liberal Party from anything but vague or abstract challenges to the Labour government’s moral issues orthodoxy.
Focus groups are designed as a sieve to sift marketing schemes by separating the ideas likely to work from those that wont. Did there emerge from this rigorously structured hierarchical vetting system a notion, even an overriding conclusion?
Was this that the only narrow win by New Zealand’s National Party was proof positive of an Australasian regional passion for luxury beliefs transcending grocery prices, the deficit, defence?
Eighteen months down the line the National Government’s evident failure in controlling, or even cooling the nation’s now demonstrably enduring social passions provided further evidence that the path that Peter Dutton must take was in never confronting this suburban virtuous morality signalling.
After all in spite of New Zealand’s stratospheric retail meat and butter prices pastoral land was still being taken up for planting pinus radiata trees.
Then there was the routine confidence in the accompanying taxpayer funded international credits market designed to somehow offset foreign pollution. Was not the confidence in this new-age auction formula still endowed with an official depth of sincerity in an inverse ratio to any provable value?
Now though an explanation takes shape. It is that as the election drew near one of the highly credentialed focus groups or focus groupies pointed to New Zealand and uttered to former policeman turned party leader Peter Dutton something akin to these words-
“Mate, forget the facts. The fairy tales are the ones that count.”
In Australia mysteries don’t stay mysteries. Someone always blabs. Until now.
The Lucky Country’s horror of being seen to be influenced by outsiders is a factor here. So is the anonymity of focus groups. The 11th hour Liberal campaign U-turn riddle solution as residing across the Tasman Sea is one that holds water.
