At last week’s election the major parties recorded their lowest ever vote.
There is great disenchantment with our political system.
This is principally because what people see discussed in Canberra so often does not match the real issues in their lives.
The Canberra led discussion since the election gives me no confidence that this disconnect will be fixed anytime soon.
Instead of focusing on things that are real, the Canberra bubble is obsessed with things that are teal.
The so-called teal candidates were a collection of well-funded individuals, who principally stood on a platform of more radical climate change action and the establishment of a national integrity commission.
They are new, shiny, hip and most of all come from the most well-heeled, well-connected parts of our country.
In a sense the election of 5 new teal candidates (and the re-election of Zali Steggall) is the backlash of the loud Australians.
At the last election the Quiet Australians surprisingly re-elected a Liberal National Government and ever since the parts of Australia where money talks have plotted their revenge.
The focus on the teals is disproportionate to their vote share.
Teal supported candidates across the country received just 3.4 per cent of the vote.
This makes them the 7th biggest “party”.
Compare the attention they receive to that of One Nation (with 5 per cent of the vote), the United Australia Party (with 4 per cent of the vote) or the Nationals, who held all their 16 seats and received 6 per cent of the vote.
The seats that the teals won are very different from the rest of Australia.
The median family income in these seats is double the national average. When you can easily afford the higher food and energy prices that result from climate change policies, you can breezily accept the need to end fossil fuels.
As I got around the country during the election the biggest issue by far for people was the cost of living. I heard stories of people living in cars for a lack of housing.
People are scared of losing their homes as interest rates inevitably rise. And some people can’t work because of unfair and useless vaccine mandates.
We lost government not to the teals but because we lost seats to Labor. Doing a reasonable job navigating Australia through the pandemic was not enough in the end. We were blindsided by the rise in living costs over the past 6 months. A last minute, 22 cents a litre off petrol was not going to cut it.
I congratulate the Labor Party on coming to government and wish them well.
The best thing they could do is to ignore the political noise and listen to the people that buy their furniture from A-Mart not Nick Scali.
The A-Mart class are already doing it tough and it is going to get worse before it gets better.
Interest rates will rise by multiple percentage points. Even with these rate rises, inflation will remain high.
Thanks to mad, green policies the western world is dangerously short of food and energy.
Wheat prices have doubled.
Diesel stocks have fallen to the lowest level in almost 20 years. Australian manufacturing businesses are being crushed by crippling electricity and gas price rises.
Our wholesale electricity prices have surged more than 3 times since the Liddell coal fired power station started shutting down in April. Those wholesale power price increases will start to flow through to your electricity bills soon.
If we listen to the Nick Scali class we will make a bad situation worse by shutting down more coal fired power stations and not finding the new sources of oil and gas that we desperately need.
The Labor parties aim to expand intermittent, renewable energy to more than 80 per cent of our electricity by 2030 does not bode well.
Most of all the new Labor Government must resist the urge to spend money to alleviate things.
More government spending will fuel inflationary fires not extinguish them.
Let’s hope the Quiet Australians are heard before it is too late for another, and much bigger political backlash.
