An election campaign about nothing that matters
There are a lot of big political issues you might have expected to generate serious debate in this federal election. Rising sea levels, skyrocketing housing costs, global remilitarisation and historic levels of wealth inequality spring to mind.
Instead, the campaign has been dominated by big headlines about the utterly mundane.
For instance, there’s the Teal independents vs. Liberals corflute wars. Ro Knox, Liberal candidate for Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, fired the opening shot when she accused sitting MP Allegra Spender’s campaign of sticking a poster over an image of an Israeli hostage family (Spender has since threatened to sue for defamation).
The Sydney Morning Herald launched a detailed investigation, including analysing metadata from photos of said posters, to get to the bottom of the escalating dispute. This battle for the ages heated up when a grainy video emerged of three posh women using lipstick to deface a corflute of Teal MP Zali Stegall in Sydney’s Mosman.
“It was Chanel! Why’d you let me do that?”, cried the first woman.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter, do piggy things on her nose”, her friend replied.
When Kooyong Teal MP Monique Ryan’s husband seized a campaign sign belonging to her Liberal rival, the incident received media coverage comparable to that of Trump’s tariffs.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s most media-saturated moments came when he fell off a stage and then spent a day bizarrely denying it (before presumably being told by his PR guy that this only made him look weirder), and when he tried to relate to the yoof in classic boomer dad style by saying the Coalition is “delulu with no solulu”. The cringe still reverberates weeks later.
Liberal challenger Peter Dutton has also had a few moments in the spotlight. When he whacked a cameraman in the head with an errant kick of a football, the newspapers cleared their front pages. Melbourne’s Herald Sun released a blow-by-blow account, imploring readers to “SEE THE PHOTOS, WATCH THE VIDEOS”.
But of greatest interest to the media has been which taxpayer-funded mansion Dutton will live in should he win the top job: Sydney’s Kirribilli or Canberra’s Lodge?
The first leaders’ debate was aptly described by satirical site The Chaser as “a rare chance to see the two most boring men in the country squabble for an hour” and “a bid for both major parties to confirm their commitment to the leader of Australia, Rupert Murdoch”.
It all seems kind of humorous, until you stop to think about it and realise it’s not funny at all. There are no substantial political differences, so the drama and the debate revolve around who’s better at holding steady on a stage, kicking a football or sabotaging an opponent’s plastic signage.
And they’re pumped out by a corporate media all too happy to keep quiet on the fundamental issues facing most voters. To question the politicians seriously would mean questioning the current inequalities and injustices of Australian capitalism; good luck getting that headline past the Murdochs or Kerry Stokes.
When it comes to the cost of living, the only difference is a $5-per-week tax cut (Labor) or a 25-cent discount on a litre of petrol (Liberals). Both parties are in lockstep on protecting a housing market geared towards the bank balances of landlords, spending half a trillion dollars on nuclear-powered submarines, letting the fossil fuel companies ravage the environment and denying the humanity of refugees seeking safety.
They’ve adopted the same campaign strategy: don’t rock the boat, i.e. don’t say anything that will piss off big business.
The boredom of this election campaign is contrasted with the dire need for a political alternative. Thankfully, socialists are trying to make that happen. The Victorian Socialists are running in four lower house seats and the Senate.
With no attachment to or funding from corporate Australia, VS is implacably hostile to landlords, bosses and the political elite. The party’s program can be summed up as “people before profit”. The working class is getting screwed by rising living costs while the rich have never had it better, so we should redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom. With Trump in the White House and endless atrocities such as the genocide in Gaza, now is not the time to sit at home and despair but to go out and fight for a different kind of world.
In this election, vote socialist wherever you can, vote Greens before Labor (the Albanese government deserves a beating) and put the Liberals and right-wing micro parties last.
Socialists are not yet able to make a decisive stamp on the Australian political scene. But with declining support for the two major parties, there is an appetite for an alternative. The more people who get involved in fighting for that to be a socialist alternative, the better off we’ll all be.
