The electorate is turning left. Why is the PM facing the wrong way?

*It must be so disappointing to be in the left faction of the Australian Labor Party.*

First, its guy, the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, is not being very left of anything. Second, a progressive agenda seems to have popped off the list of anything important. Third (wimps), members of the left faction aren’t criticising their guy, at least not in public.

For a team which loves pouring shit on everyone (OK, OK, that’s not exclusive to them), they are remarkably, silently, silent. They have given up their ability to critique their leader and surrendered that privilege to the Greens and to the Coalition. Honestly, it’s much better to do it from within because the target is less defensive then. I think.

Instead we have a cranky, controlling — and yes, conservative — prime minister who is not living up to the hopes and dreams of his constituents. He’s even made a few captain’s calls. That’s not very — ah — progressive.

Why does this matter for Labor in both the short term and the long term?

Young people are progressive. That might irritate their ageing parents and grandparents, but that’s just the way it is. And here’s the other thing. Young people aren’t ageing the way their parents and grandparents did. While Boomers, Gen X etc became more conservative the older they got, this lot aren’t doing that. If Labor wants to stay in power (which it barely is now because of the Senate), it needs to get a wriggle on in the progressive department.

Just ask the ANU’s Ian McAllister, one of the wranglers of the Australian Election Study, a national survey of political opinion conducted after each federal election. He explains it so clearly. The electorate is moving to the left. That’s the trend – and that’s driven by younger people moving to the left. Moving to the left and staying there. Those younger people are soon to be middle-aged (soz, it happens to the best of us and the rest of us).

But McAllister says they are staying in their (left) lane.

“Younger people are getting into their 30s and are not shifting through to the centre and the right. A lot of that is driven by less secure employment and housing. They can’t get their foot in the housing market,” McAllister says.

So it’s hard to nail exactly which of these is the most irritating area of a lack of action, but let me give you a shortlist – feel free to add anything I’ve missed. Also I can’t expand everything because apparently I have word limits. And sure, the list’s order will vary depending on who you are but let’s start here:

* Negative gearing, capital gains tax, housing and the whole damn mess
* Gambling
* Taxing gas exports
* AUKUS
* Census

I’d like to think I’d have been a good landlady, but considering it takes me a year to get a bung stovetop fixed in my own house, I’m not all that confident. While I’m constantly getting emails from people who tell me they are outstanding landlords, I’m sure they could still be outstanding without negative gearing (or at least not to the extent it currently exists). Let me point out that people who have investment properties still have their investments and they will still make money – just not at the expense of first home buyers. I asked Hal Pawson, professor of housing research and policy at UNSW’s City Futures Research Centre, if changes to negative gearing would make housing more affordable. Prices wouldn’t shift much, he says, but there would be a progressive, cumulative impact on the housing market over time because it would reduce the advantage investors have at auction.

“One person bidding now has a big tax advantage and the other doesn’t,” he says.

There are so many ideas to fix this problem and all Albanese says is nope, nope, nope. Which I’ve heard elsewhere.

I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest people are moving left, assuming that refers to economics as it usually does.

Replacing Liberals with equally wealthy Teals backed by a billionaire in blue ribbon seats is not turning left. We still have a housing crisis that has abandoned lower income earners. There is nothing remotely economically left about Australia.

Because Murdoch and the mining/gas interests. You saw what just happened when questions over negative gearing entered the media cycle. Murdoch media is a constant discourse of EV disasters and why gas is good for us so anything which potentially upsets their profits is voraciously attacked.

I’d also suggest Labor is in complete denial on the teals thinking it’s an LNP problem. It’s most definitely not and they’re going to be shocked when it eats into their votes during the next election.

The electorate isn’t becoming more left-leaning.

What’s happening is that political preferences are diverging by gender, with women becoming more progressive than in the past, and men becoming more conservative.

This won’t make much sense to people 30+, but young men see the left as a source of discrimination, and the right as a voice for equality.

This is because the left’s approach to tackling gender discrimination, hasn’t been to address the issue in the age groups in which it occurred, but instead to create opposing discrimination targeted at young men.

For example, if older generations in a company are predominantly men, then companies are encouraged to move towards a gender balance, but they can’t just fire their older workers, so instead they bias new hiring and new promotion towards women.

The result is that young men are facing exactly the kind of discrimination that older women faced when they were young.

It’s the same with university. Women are already, by far, the majority of university graduates, but scholarships are still gender biased, towards women.

A lot of people don’t like hearing this, but the consequence of allowing society to become misandristic towards young men, is this kind of partisan political split by gender.

Because neo-liberalism is a right wing ideology? Labor abandoned their grass roots left movement 40 years ago, as did the majority of western parties.
The third way is the only way in the minds of politicians like this.