Image credit: Wikimedia, Canva
By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
Remember the pious hand-wringing a few years back as Liberals and their media friends warned that electing community independents meant the end of the two-party system and of order itself?
Conferences were held, editorials published - anything to alert voters to the recklessness with which they were flirting.
Of course, this was always code for fears of a more sectional nature - the historic fracture between a Liberal Party sliding rightwards and therefore away from its most affluent and educated base.
Which made it even more puzzling that the party then did so little to reclaim its city supporters, openly disparaging their EVs and wine bars.
Strangely, that pearl-clutching over the two-party order is nowhere to be heard in relation to One Nation's rise even though, objectively, Pauline Hanson poses a more structural and open challenge to Australian political norms.
Instead, senior Liberals - including Angus Taylor - plan to swap preferences with the wreckers. Others in his party room would go further. They propose a non-compete pact, the effect of which would stop Coalition and One Nation candidates running against each other.
Perhaps they should get a room?
One wonders when sleepy mainstream Liberals will wake up to their real opponent. The teals only wanted their inner-city seats. Hanson's outfit is after their soul.
The atmosphere of tripartite volatility fuelling One Nation's rise has implications for Albanese Labor, to which I will turn shortly.
But let's stay with the Libs a bit longer because here is a party which is squandering its primacy within our electoral duopoly as carelessly as it waved off its once treasured blue-ribbon base.
Under Peter Dutton, surrendering the cities was always a high-risk strategy. Under Taylor it is several orders of magnitude crazier because the rural-regional base has already slipped from the Coalition.
Currently, the combined primary vote support for Lib-Nats sits at 17 per cent in Newspoll and 18 per cent in Redbridge-Accent. Fewer than one in five voters would hand Taylor or Matt Canavan their first preference.
The brightest spot for the traditional "right" was that each survey recorded a decline in One Nation's support. These voters flowed back to Labor, despite endless breakfast TV hyperventilation about "falling" house prices. Wasn't that the point?
The popular theory is that Hanson's trainwreck National Press Club address hung a lantern over her manifest unreadiness for high office.
It certainly did that. The upside for the Lib-Nats, though, required a microscope. One Nation support had atrophied, but the Coalition parties got none of it.
Liberals insist Taylor's removal is not being canvassed "just yet," but give the impression of trying to convince themselves as much as voters.
"He hopes to get more time, the time he denied Sussan," remarked one, caustically.
Another volunteered a reference to Malcolm Turnbull's February critique of Taylor as the party's "best qualified idiot", admitting he considered it unfair at the time, whereas now "I wonder what he saw that we didn't?".
Taylor has his supporters of course but even one of these agreed that his greatest protection right now is that one leadership changeover had already occurred.
History shows that opposition leaders don't need to be incompetent or despised to be removed, they just need to be headed for a possible defeat - think of Bill Hayden (1983), Kim Beazley (2006), and, yes, Sussan Ley (2026).
On the opposition benches, hope springs anything but eternal. Things tend to be a bit more mathematical.
At its current primary support, the Coalition falls short of even two Senate quotas per state.
With this in mind, picture the party room and imagine what is going through the minds of existing senators and lower-house MPs. It'll be dark thoughts like: "my career will be over unless I secure the safest number-one spot on the Senate ticket in my state". Cue fierce internal contests, shifting allegiances, and calls for a more convincing leader.
In the recent SA election, the state's Legislative Council which uses a similar voting system to the Senate, this scenario played out for real. Where the Liberals would previously expect to secure four of the 11 upper-house quotas on offer, they got just two. One Nation picked up three.
Put yourself in the shoes of an over-stretched lower house Liberal eyeing another two gruelling years of working nights and weekends, lumbered with a party unsure of its targets.
In such circumstances, even an ideologically simpatico MP may defect from camp-Angus to say, camp-Hastie. Looming political mortality can be clarifying like that.
Recall Neville Wran's wisdom, "always back the horse called Self Interest - at least you know it's trying".
The danger for Labor in the new disorder is less obviously existential, but this period is unpredictable. Puncturing the house-price bubble which had seen 400 per cent growth since the start of the century, was sound policy. And long-overdue.
Breaking a promise, however, mired that reform in bad faith. Anthony Albanese will take heart from Labor's small post-budget rebound after a few weeks trailing Hanson.
The constructive interpretation attributes the turn-around to Hanson's ill-judged attacks on workers, women, ethnic communities, and the environment. But it also includes marks for a government being prepared to take tough decisions. We'll see.
Labor is preparing for its national conference later this month. Expect to hear more about the areas it is less bold in, particularly gambling advertising.
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.