The Currency Lad

THERE is no point getting angry with anyone about the death of morally responsive democracy in Victoria or anywhere else in the Western world. Pretty much everyone is to blame. A Uniparty now reigns over the ashes and rubble of what used to be a civilisation. Seen this way, Daniel Andrews’ comfortable win in Saturday’s state election – and the nonchalant forgiveness it constitutes for his government’s innumerable crimes – makes a lot of sense. Only three things are really necessary for electoral success against a lukewarm opposition: nihilism, profligacy and calumny. Don’t espouse anything that backs you into a principled corner, bribe every tractable constituency and demonise the frugal along with the religious. “We will govern for all Victorians,” Andrews declared Saturday night, registering the first lie of his third term. He will, of course, go on masterfully prevaricating, spending and hate-mongering for another four years. Most Victorian voters know exactly who he is and regard him – with justification – as a virtuoso in the dark arts of saleable unreality. While he’s there, they won’t be personally responsible for anything.

In will be 50 years this Friday since the election that brought Gough Whitlam to power as Prime Minister after 23 years of Coalition rule. The golden milestone also marks the end of the old Labor Party and the beginning of an infamous fiasco. Whitlam noted the polling day was also the anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz at which another “ramshackle, reactionary coalition” had suffered a “crushing defeat.” A more apt coincidence in a discussion of Whitlam is that Napoleon crowned himself Emperor at Notre Dame on the same date in 1804, snatching the headwear from the hands of Pope Pius VII. If Daniel Andrews is an extrapolation of what a third-term, scandal-immune King Gough would have looked like in the later 1970s, Peter Dutton is a throwback to what Whitlam actually was in the 1960s: a leader obliged to reform, modernise and unify a party habituated to losing and wounded by the Industrial Groups.

The Liberal side of the Victorian story is more complex and nuanced on this Monday morning than many prognosticators on the right realise. If it is true that the psephological sweet spot in politics today is the demographic that wants affirmation for its virtuous hobbies (like the climate) and free money on tap, the hostility to the Liberals could be read as a compliment. An undeserved one, alas, because the ascendant Guy-Kean iteration of Bob Menzies’ party represents no threat to anybody’s carbon capture grant, teen mastectomy startup or Seán na Sagart side hustle. The more orthodox Sky Right exegesis is that an election-winning cohort is just waiting for a red meat repudiation of woke in all of its lunatic manifestations. Either way – and accepting as proven that the public is no longer sure whether Liberals are secretive wreckers or open imitators – the choice for the Liberals is obvious. Either stay the course until enough swing voters believe they’re not ultra-conservative conquistadors after all (dumb); or return to – and revivify – their foundational purpose and fight a longer, nobler fight. The former has never succeeded. The latter has – for Ming himself, for John Howard, for Tony Abbott. And, as it happens, for E.G. Whitlam.