My horror at the May federal election result has largely given way now (quite a lot of colour has returned to my cheeks) to an intrigued fascination with the mysterious Australian people. Why did they vote the way they did? Who and what are they, these voters, these enfranchised enigmas?
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And so I have been quick to pounce on and to study the just-released Australian National University Australian Election Study (AES). The study examines how more than 2100 Australians voted and why they voted the way they did, what beliefs and biorhythms drove them when they bustled to the booths on May 18.
And just to digress for a moment, I have had ample time to read and examine the AES because, with some corrective eye surgery looming, I am unable to safely drive and am marooned at home where reading, with my one good eye, is almost all I can do.
I will be glad when the operation corrects my eyesight but it will be a mixed blessing because my faulty eyesight has been playing such exciting tricks on me for some months now. For the first time there have been unicorns in my street and pterodactyls in my garden (turning out later to be only people on bicycles and gang-gang cockatoos respectively). And I have sometimes amusingly mistaken my wife for a flowering shrub, for Big Bird from Sesame Street and on one dramatic occasion (for I had turned a hose on her and shouted at her to f-off before I realised my mistake) a door-knocking Liberal Party candidate, with two heads.
Where there used to be only mere dogs in the street, my mischievously malfunctioning eyes have been seeing instead a menagerie of wart hogs, heffalumps, Galapagos turtles and hippogriffs. I will rather miss them, these pterdoactyls and two-headed Liberal door-knockers, when my surgery abolishes them.
The AES paints, with a blizzard of data, very much the same dispiriting portrait of Australian voters that Erik Jensen more impressionistically painted (after following the party leaders everywhere throughout the campaign) in his ripper Quarterly Essay called The Prosperity Gospel. Speaking to ABC Radio about what he saw and divined, Jensen, alarmed, diagnosed that the once modest Australian Dream "is no longer a house, a car and a few kids".
"Now it's the dream [and Morrison understands it and exploits it] that says 'I don't just want a house and a car, I want extraordinary wealth'. It's a dream that says 'Don't just think about being modest and comfortable in a stable and happy country - think about being extraordinarily wealthy.' It's a huge shift [from the Australia of Menzies and even of Howard] because it takes the individual, the basic unit of society and makes him incredibly selfish ... his selfishness only allows his imagination to extend to the limits of his family and that's as far as it goes..."
And so it was no wonder, Jensen diagnosed, that Labor election policies promising fairness and some redistributing of the national cake, fell on selfishly stony ground.
The AES investigation finds and shows, forensically, just the sorts of things Jensen the Impressionist painted about the election outcome. The AES' leading compilers, the ANU's Sarah Cameron and Ian McAllister, say that how Australians voted in 2019 underlines a continuing important shift away from "occupation-based voting" towards "asset-based voting" with the one in three Australians who own shares and the one in five who own investment properties having their spines chilled and their voting influenced by Labor's policies) of erasing tax breaks enjoyed by the asset rich.
The Australia that emerges from the AES data is alarming for those of us who have dreams (impossible dreams, full of unicorns?) of a fairer, kinder Australia. These are grim times in which to be a disadvantaged Australian, to be a refugee, a Julian Assange, to be anyone trying to find some room in the nation's heart. A withering selfishness of the soul seems to be setting in, Australian society changing, for the worse, at the same time and at about the same pace that the climate is withering the world.
I have no shares and investment properties to harden my heart and so when one morning this week I saw in my front garden a group of gaunt, shabbily-dressed souls (begging battlers down on their luck, perhaps impoverished Newstart recipients struggling to survive in pentecostal Scomo's greedy, heartless Australia?) I hurried out (frightening the pterodactyls away from their birdbath) to press a few dollars into the battlers' palms, to invite them in for a meal.
But when I got out to them they turned out to be not bedraggled battlers but my garden's bed of tall hollyhocks, withered, dishevelled and half-killed by climate change's current baking heatwaves and hot, howling gales.
My faulty, trick-playing eyesight had deceived me again, but at least my heart (one of the dwindling number of soft ones left in this increasingly unkind Australia) had shown it was in the right place.
