Scott Morrison’s Liberals were absolutely thrashed in the Australian elections this weekend. The party’s vote collapsed, and there were big-name defeats, with the man touted as Morrison’s successor – Josh Frydenberg – ousted in Kooyong, a suburb which had been in the party’s hands for 121 years.
Whatever went wrong for the Morrison government, Saturday’s results might have relevance closer to home, even if teasing out domestic lessons from elections on the other side of the world is problematic. Australia is a different country, with a different political culture and a different electoral system. Scott Morrison was also an unloveable figure — stolid, gaffe-prone and not outwardly empathetic. When women marched on Parliament House to protest his government’s handling of a ministerial rape allegation, Morrison’s attempt to commend the demonstrators got sidetracked by the awkward musing that ‘not far from here, such marches, even now, are being met with bullets – but not here in this country’.
Might the shift away from the Tories by graduate professionals be about more than Brexit?
Anthony Albanese has been sworn in as the new prime minister but his Labour party still lacks a majority.
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