Australian elections: What went wrong?

SYDNEY, Australia — A week after they went to the polls to elect a new government — and failed —  Australians it seems have had time to reflect on the political mess they helped to create. 

The election non-result — the Aug. 24 contest led to a hung parliament and three key independents are in the process of deciding to which party they will lend their support to form a government — has caused grumbling and much apportioning of blame, but also a surprising amount of  introspection.

Many Australians found themselves largely ambivalent about Australia’s two major parties — while some were merely disgusted by the caliber of the campaigns their politicians ran, notable for a lack of soaring oratory and the absence of a big vision. Instead, the parties talked about stopping things: chiefly population expansion, boat people, progress on climate change policy and big new taxes.

Did this small campaign and its outcomes represent something rotten at the heart of the Australian psyche — a kind of fatal self-interest and narrow-mindedness that resulted in voters ending up with the politicians they deserved? 

Mark Philip, 55, of Newcastle in the Labor state of New South Wales suspected as much.

“It felt like the major parties were only focusing on a very small amount of voters in marginal seats — who quite frankly have marginal concerns. They thought the rest of us would just vote out of habit. But I think carefully each election about what party I want to vote for — and neither party deserved my vote. This election I voted independent.”

Rebecca Huntley, managing director of Ipsos Mackay, Australia's longest running social trends report, said that while other factors — disillusionment with politicians and poor research on the part of political parties — played a part in the indecision, “If people really looked at the two parties with some attention, they would see they aren’t totally the same. If people had decided to engage more they might have seen some points of difference."

She said compulsory voting contributed to the indecision.

"All it requires you to do is turn up and be a part of the process — but one of the consequences is that people walk into the polling booth without having thought about it too much,” she said.

Josh Gordon, political editor at the Sunday Age newspaper, blamed a more banal phenomenon seen recently in Australian society — consumer-driven voting.

“Increasingly voters are picking and choosing political parties like consumer products. These voters are quite a large band in the middle. In a sense ideology is being removed from politics,” he said.

Gordon defined this type of voter as someone “engaged in a self-interested sort of way. But they are not wedded to an ideology."

Referring to the previous prime minister, John Howard, a Liberal politician who targeted working class Australians to win his three terms in office, he said: “They used to talk about Howard battlers. They are not the sort of people you would describe as battlers any more. They may live out in the suburbs — working and commuting long distances. They are worried about population, traffic and crime.

“The whole notion that Labor represents the workers and Liberal big business — that is gone now."

Other voters interviewed rejected the notion that they were to blame for the political impasse.

Jo Beattie, a 36-year-old teacher from Warrnambool, in rural Victoria, said that the results reflected the campaign.

"Neither side put out any decent policies. It was a very hollow campaign," she said. "I wouldn’t blame the public. Traditional parties haven’t impressed, so people have put their vote elsewhere."

She pointed to a lack of leadership on the issue of whether to allow asylum-seekers into the country — many of whom arrive in Australia illegally aboard boats operated by smugglers. It is an issue that has polarized Australian society.

Although government figures show that the large majority of asylum applicants arrive in Australia by plane and with a valid visa, public debate on asylum seekers has been focusing on boat arrivals with politicians on both sides using alarmist terms like "border protection" and vowing tough measures to deter smugglers and unlawful entrants to the country.

"The major parties are in a position to help asylum-seekers and give them a better chance in life. But instead both Liberal and Labor took a short-sighted view," Beattie said.

Jerome Samaha, a 30-year-old Sydney personal trainer, said politicians had no one but themselves to blame. He said the electorate was "punishing the Labor party," which had held power since the 2007 election, won with Kevin Rudd as leader, but not giving them a clear majority.

“I think Labor got punished for their policies … Also for Rudd getting the flick. Trust is low for Australian pollies at the moment,” he said.

Gordon agreed with criticisms that both sides displayed a lack of vision, but suggested that the poll result was not "Australians getting what they deserve," but rather a symptom of deeper problems in Australian democracy.

“What I think happened is that we have two political parties that have become very scientific in honing in on the middle ground — and they became very adept at using fine-grained polling techniques and focus groups to identify key demographics of swinging voters,” he said.

“What has happened here is we have seen both major political parties focus on the minutiae. In a sense they have kind of collided in the middle — and the hung parliament reflects that — it’s very even in terms of seats.”

In the scramble for the "middle" the parties lost sight of the big picture, he said, and also their core constituents: workers for the Labor party, and big business for the Liberals.

“The Labor party was so keen on capturing the middle ground that they eroded their own base," Gordon said. “Neither of them [Liberal or Labor] look like they stand for any vision — so there’s a large group of voters who are feeling very disillusioned with both the major political parties and that is reflected in the large primary vote for the Greens.”

He added that both major parties had become risk adverse, and so refrained from articulating any vision. “Those big policy ideas are viewed as holding up a big target and saying ‘shoot.’ They do not want to hold up a big target,” he said.

Huntley, of Ipsos Mackay, said that both parties in the election “used research badly.”

“I wonder why they started to retreat from big questions and get very small," she said. "There was no sense of alternative — which gave the population no real clear water between the parties.”

The result of this sameness between the two major parties was that on polling day, “it was hard to decide,” she said.

As the suspense dragged on this week over who the independents would back to form a government, social media provided evidence that when it came to self interest and apathy, many Australians failed to learn their lesson from the 2010 election.

One Facebook entry republished in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph read: “I just wish they would hurry up. i was supposed to get a day care grant till all this shit happened now we can’t get it till we have a govt!!!!!”