Spring in Victoria is renowned for festivals that provide ample opportunities for us to end our winter hibernation. This year there will be the Organs of Ballarat Goldfields music festival, the High Country Women’s Cycling festival in bright, the World Superbike championship, our own Antipodes Hellenic festival, and of course the Melbourne Cup Carnival.
Every four years, political junkies also get to enjoy a festival that only they find enjoyable, minus the sunshine and great outdoors of course. The Victorian State election.
This festival will be consuming every waking moment for political parties, their staff, and enthusiastic supporters. Fresh from their first ‘democracy festival’ of the year, the Federal Election, these enthusiastic festival goers will immerse themselves in every nuance and ‘event’ leading up to State Election Day on November 26.
They will hang on every word uttered by their opponents, every dollar promised and every door knocked, consumed with the belief that every action they take will be seen and heard by all of Victoria and will play a critical role in persuading the masses to support their colour of politics.
Descriptive words like ‘crisis’ take on an almost nuclear importance when used to define a campaign stumble, such as the recent flurry of revelations around the Liberal Party’s operational problems at their campaign headquarters.
Some on the Labor side will take comfort in the notion that the voting public, supposedly following this election campaign in every detail, will be put off by the reported chaos within the Opposition’s organisational wing and just choose to stick with the ‘devil’ you know.
Many of these same people had convinced themselves that Albanese’s numerous gaffs during the Federal Election campaign had torpedoed Labor’s chances to win the election. Clearly, they were incorrect in this instance. But their fear wasn’t misplaced.
Australia was paying attention during the Federal Election, and the focus on these gaffs merely reinforced with millions of voters across the country that that the political class doesn’t understand them, doesn’t speak to them and ultimately doesn’t represent them. Hence, a record number of Australians (over 5 million, in fact) opted to dump the Red and Blue sides.
Despite it being their key function in our society, democracy festivals actually have little relevance to the daily lives of voters. For example, election promises carry little weight within the broader voting community. But this does not stop the major political parties from rolling out billions of dollars, often allocated to parts of Melbourne and Victoria that are already flush with government support. It worked in the 1990s so it must work in 2022, right?
Labor has fallen over itself to reward Victorians for their sacrifices during the pandemic. It has poured billions into Melbourne’s east and Victoria’s Gippsland region. Poorer communities in Melbourne’s west and north west feel a bit neglected.
Have Labor noticed? It’s no accident that one of the most common responses to our surveys in this part of Melbourne is focused on a want to make the seats they live in marginal.
A sense of neglect may only be one reason why these safe seats may start resembling marginal seats.
According to the 2021 Census, postcodes 3030 (Werribee, Point Cook) and 3064 (Craigieburn, Donnybrook) contain the highest number of incorporated and unincorporated owner manger businesses. These two post codes are the epicentre of Victoria’s small business community. Long gone are the mass shop floors that once used to employ the working class of Melbourne’s west and north.
The working class now are mostly in precarious jobs, on ABNs, within health services, transport and trades. Remember the aged care workers having to work within multiple aged care facilities just to scrape together a full-time wage?
Labor seems to have missed this memo. Is the Liberal Party performing any better? Well, their announcements to date seem to make more sense when it comes to where this election may be won or lost. The problem for them is most of their attention is justifiably focused on seats they should never have lost or may lose. Nothing they are doing addresses a much deeper structural problem, one underpinned by the grim reality that the Liberal Party of Australia was ideally suited for the post World War II economic boom, where a little bit of austerity here and there was welcomed by a generation that arguably was the wealthiest in this country’s history.
As Victoria and this country has rapidly changed, the Liberal Party attempted to adjust with the times. Before 2022, their solution to this challenge in Victoria was focused on winning the hearts and minds of religious, conservative voters of the sort you’d find in Utah, the Mormon capital of the world.
Some within their ranks must have woken up to this folly and are now donning a disguise, trying to impersonate social democrats, recognising that Victoria has an appetite for more progressive representation.
In the western suburbs, this has seen the Liberals abandoning a traditional, obvious disinterest in the area and actively campaigning to voters with millions of dollars in infrastructure promises, while Labor has begun pouring money into community projects in an effort to make up for decades of underinvestment and perceived neglect.
The problem for both. Hardly any take notice of the democracy festival outside political enthusiasts.
The democracy festival will continue for another month, with every twist and turn breathlessly reported, and endlessly analysed.
But don’t read too much into the internal ructions of one party’s campaign headquarters. Compared to superbikes, horseracing glamour and even giant organs in Ballarat, it’ll barely register in the world outside of political gotcha questions, photos of candidates in hard hats and complex policy debates distilled down to soundbites.
Kosmos Samaras is a pollster and the former Deputy Director for the ALP – he comments regularly on politics for major news outlets.