As Went Victoria, So Goes the Nation

As Victorians lamented and endured yet another state-wide lockdown, caused by the incompetence of Premier Dan Andrews and his ALP government’s failed hotel quarantine regime, it’s possible that a few other and equally depressing thoughts also came to mind. As tiresome and unnecessary as the weeklong February lockdown was, the sad fact remains that Andrews and his party continue not only to be broadly popular but also on-track, according to the polls, to win yet another term of government come 2022.

How can this be? What explains this paradox? Presumably, as the theory goes, any governing party in a democracy that exhibits enough bungling and failures will be voted out at the next election. Even the flimsiest opposition should be confident of attaining the Treasury benches on the merest promise of a possibility that it represents competence. Oppositions don’t win elections, as they say, governments lose them.  

Yet, as we here in Victoria know all too well, this paradox is still very much alive. The most recent failures  in the hotel quarantine program – coming on top of last year’s hotel quarantine catastrophe, which sawnotions of ‘diversity’ and ‘identity’ trump rigor and competence and led to the deaths of some 800 Victorians – are just the tip of the iceberg. A litany of other recent fiascos is also all too easily recalled. Labor’s branch-stacking scandal, the non-construction of the East-West Link, the blowouts on the Metro Tunnel, the gang riots at Moomba, the nightly push-in robberies, the politicisation of Victoria Police, the Labor mates dispensing their justice from the bench — the cavalcade of Andrews & Co’s disgraces is such that no month passes without some or other further manifestation of Labor’s ineptitude.

Yet in spite of all of this, Andrews and the ALP remain unassailable, Labor now having held power in Victoria for 17 of the last 21 years. It is a tenure predicted to increase given the recent redrawing of state electoral boundaries and their favourability to the incumbent ALP. A development that is naturally welcome by the government, yet one that obviously spells further doom for the already dwindling Liberals,  a point made by the Herald Sun’s James Campbell, among others.

And it is in the details of such restructures that the answer to the ‘paradox of Dan’ is revealed. As has happened in a variety of locales across the West, large-scale demographic change has heavily favoured parties of the left, rendering the right impotent and largely useless. A situation seen in places like California and Canada, and now, with the recent inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, in the very capital of the Free World itself.

And so too it is in Victoria. As the Liberals’ share of the overall vote declines as their dominance in the inner-east is eclipsed by a resurgent growth in population (and the associated ALP-vote) in other parts of town. The ALP is now comfortably ahead in the immigration-fuelled, high-growth regions of Melbourne’s north and west: holding all but three of the 13 seats that have populations of 10 per cent more than the state average. This situation is further compounded by the fact that the ALP also holds all of the 15 fastest growing suburban areas and almost 40 of the 45 electorates with the greatest number of soon to be ALP-voting children.

Thus, to answer our initial paradox: the incompetence of Andrews and his government – which is quite substantial, given not only these latest debacles, but the amount of high-ranking staff and party members that have left his team in disgrace or under a cloud– is almost irrelevant. To cite the polls, voters are overwhelmingly on his and the ALP’s side, with the Liberals losing no matter on which side the demographic coin lands, be it middle-income progressives or  lower-income migrants.

Which is why Andrews can be as incompetent as he likes, as nothing the opposition says or does really matters all that much. A switch from current Liberal leader Michael O’Brien, a man almost completely unknown to the broader Victorian public, to, say, the far more aggressive and contentious Tim Smith will do little to change attitudes and voting habits of the bulk of voters in the increasingly important western half of the city: that is, a people which views the Liberal Party as a largely unwanted anachronism, and which votes accordingly. This realisation that has hopefully dawned upon the wiser heads at the Victorian Liberal HQ. A brief glance overseas at the broader movements and correlations between immigration, demographic change and left-of-centre political dominance should have made this long evident.

In fact, it is this explicit connection between immigration and a leftward shift in politics that was outlined by Helen Andrews in her excellent piece concerning the 20^th century US experience. Or by fellow Americans Ann Coulter and Michael Anton, who, in his 2020 book ‘The Stakes, describes how his once Republican home state of California came to be coloured a deeply toned – and equally dysfunctional – Democratic blue.

Thus the Victorian Liberals are yet another right-of-centre party that is finally having to confront the largely predictable consequences of the gaping contradictions inherent in its own policies and ideology. Their decades-long reliance on immigration to stoke economic growth (see John Howard’s doubling of the immigration intake, for one) did achieve the narrow economic goal of a sufficiently buoyant economy (almost 30 years sans recession, pre-COVID). Yet their failure to contend with the deeper electoral changes that such a demographic shift has wrought leaves them a rather denuded and pathetic entity: their position is akin to that of the washed-up and and impotent ex-boxer ranting with frustration from ringside but entirely unable to exert any influence on the contest.

The right thus finds itself at an impasse. Howard’s dream of the Liberals as a ‘broad church’ able to unite ‘both economic liberalism and social conservatism’ was always a fantasy. As the state of the State of Victoria has shown, a ‘double-dose’ of social and economic liberalism that emaciates social capital, erodes the birth-rate, and is reliant on immigration for economic growth destroys the possibility of any type of a healthy and socially conservative society. 

This is a truth occasionally acknowledged by the federal Liberal Party as it confronts this dissonance by making cosmetic changes to the social fabric (such as Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s recent change to the National Anthem) whilst continuing full-steam ahead with the demographic and economic changes that have made themselves and their party electorally vulnerable and increasingly irrelevant.

Indeed, the larger effects brought about by these demographic changes may now be so deeply baked into the electoral cake that right-of-centre parties — particularly socially-conservative one (rather than economically laissez-faire) — are consigned to eternal political oblivion.

Yet, given the right’s role in bringing about its own demise by prioritising the short-term and short-sighted economic impetus of mass-immigration over any broader, longer-term notions of the national good, it’s hard to feel much sympathy even while dreading the consequences. As Victoria’s latest hotel quarantine debacle has shown, the right are now merely spectators: watching with grim bemusement and flashes of public anger as debacle becomes disaster and a state lurches from one crisis to the inevitable next.