In a rubbish bin in Redfern, seven months after the election won by Labour’s Anthony Albanese, a sticker reading ‘Bin Him’ (‘Throw it away’ in English) can be seen with the face of the former prime minister, a Liberal Scott Morrison.
In office between 2019 and 2022, Cook’s now deputy finished the year by becoming the first former president to receive a motion of censure for his secret ministries and appeared before the Royal Commission on Robodebt, a government initiative between 2015 and 2019, it created $1.76 billion in debt for 443,000 people.
“The worst government in history,” in the words of former Liberal leader John Hewson, has snuffed out a fourth consecutive Conservative term. In the May elections, the Liberals obtained “worrying” results, as the party report published before Christmas underlines: they have only 4 of the 44 remaining urban seats; although Parliament has the largest number of women in history, they register the fewest MPs in their ranks; they are strong only in rural Australia. On the other hand, its government partner, The Nationals, has not lost a single representative.
“It’s fair to say that May’s election was a Coalition defeat rather than a Labor victory,” says voting behavior researcher Sarah Cameron. In her opinion, the three factors of the defeat are “Scott Morrison’s unpopularity, poor perception of the management of the pandemic and a very bad economic outlook, the worst since the 1990s”.
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“The worst government in history” has thrown out a fourth consecutive Conservative term
The May federal election report produced by the Australian National University shows his popularity was the lowest in 35 years of study, at 3.8. Cameron, co-author of the study, points out that “the gender gap is widening”, conservatives have less support among women, and it is observed that Generation Z and millennials, who are already over 30, do not become conservatives as in previous generations.
“This 2022, citizen disaffection has come across as well-organized and funded independent campaigns that have provided a viable alternative,” Cameron notes. For example, in Kooyong, Melbourne, where treasurer Josh Frydenberg lost his job to Monique Ryan, a neurologist and hospital department head, in one of the so-called safe seats of the party
In Canberra, while the Liberals protected Morrison for the deal of secret ministries during the pandemic (which one report calls “corrosive to confidence in governments”), Albanese and his Executive are working to extend their honeymoon. They came to power in a campaign which, far from major reforms, accepted conservative premises such as the lowering of taxes on high incomes or the refund policy for small boats that reach the coast. They had fewer votes than in 2019, but won due to the absence of the Liberals.
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But in eight months it is difficult to keep up with the government. Before the summer holidays, Albanese secured a national anti-corruption commission in Parliament, won votes in the Senate to pass a new labor relations law, approved a new 43% emissions reduction target and is now concentrating his forces on the conduct of the referendum on the inclusion of indigenous citizens in the Constitution to be held next May.
60% of the population approves the management of the Albanian Labor Party, one point more than after the electoral victory
In addition, Foreign Minister Penny Wong was in Beijing this week to open talks with China, a move the Japanese ambassador praised in an article on the Financial review as “the representation of the first step in stabilizing relations”. According to polls, 60% of the population approves of Albanian’s management, one point above June, after he won the elections. Some reforms he managed to negotiate in the Senate with the Greens and get to the independents, who won seats from the Liberals. A party that has governed 50 of the almost 80 years of its existence, but which today has the worst number of seats since 1946, when it ran for the first time.
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