Getting the nation moronically into debt to placate Covid panic merchants may be the best thing the Liberals have done in decades…

They have left behind such a flat purse that, for the first time in almost thirty years, the federal government has piddling discretionary funding with which to buy support (or silence) from interest groups.

Labor will have to stand or fall on how its policies affect the majority of Australians’ day-to-day lives. 

It is no wonder that parliamentarians are spending their waking hours trying to cover up what a vulnerable position the sparse kitty puts them in. Their endless summits, roundtables, working groups, and ‘listening’ exercises get tarted up as inclusiveness. These ego-fests are actually about trying to ‘duchess’ as many interests as possible until the day when cash giveaways can return. 

It is also a desperate attempt to come up with ideas for cheap (and popular) policies that can be flogged to the masses. 

Labor’s long-time playbook is of zero help on that count. It reads: capitulate to the most maniacally unhinged of activists and promise whatever it takes to keep them feeling the love.

Not at all coincidentally, this usually involves profligate spending.

Labor’s brains trust is not helping either, as it is dominated by self-aggrandising journalists, pompous academics, and overly-entitled brats who think that spouting trite undergraduate garbage about gender politics places them on par with the great thinkers of the Enlightenment.

Such hubris has Labor scuttling about, struggling to hide that without handouts it has little of real substance to offer the public.

The idea that most Australians spend their days fretting about an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, working conditions for highly paid women, or any of the other elite froth that Labor has adopted to bolster its inner-city credentials, is laughable. For a government to attempt to pass off such fringe distractions as if they are central concerns of the nation should give a resounding free kick to any credible opposition. 

On that front though, there is only tepid humming and hawing rather than any serious alternatives.

The Liberals are not only letting Labor choose the battlegrounds, but are also too scared to say when one of Albanese’s policies is just window-dressing. If they were fit to lead the country, Dutton’s opposition would expose Labor’s shallow rhetoric and then calmly move on to talk about practical ways to make the majority of lives better. Their failure to do so reveals a complete lack of intellect, gumption, and spine.

The real problem is that both major parties suffer from the exact same rot at their core. Over decades of unimaginable prosperity, both parties have fallen into lazyiness and expedient policy-making that relies on largesse rather than merit to get over the line. Neither has had any incentive or need to do serious thinking because they have been able to simply spend taxpayer’s money instead (or promise to). 

Both parties have encouraged the view that government exists chiefly to serve the whims of the loudest groups of whingers and ‘I’m a victim’ rent-seekers. It is no wonder that identity politics has risen swiftly and with such toxicity: it is the quickest way to get rewarded, and it plays to the divide and conquer mentality that lies at the foundation of payment-based politics. 

Throwing money around is nothing new, but adopting that tactic at the expense of far-sightedness and real direction – qualities both Labor and Liberal willingly surrendered during Australia’s run of good economic times – is no way to govern for the common good. All it does is popularise the notion that there is no truly shared interest, only a never-ending cycle of dissatisfaction and payoff that cunning grifters disguise as ‘reflecting modern values’.

Both parties have lost the courage to say that constant government charity is unacceptable, because it has been advantageous for them to pretend otherwise.

Both parties have ceded the ability to develop – let alone deliver – tangible, practical measures that go to the heart of what the majority of Australians really care about.

This is not rocket science. Humanity’s basic desires have changed little over millennia: shelter, food, meaningful work, and the ability to raise a family while living in relative peace and privacy. 

The secret to Labor becoming a government in the true sense of that word, and the Liberals earning a way back from opposition, is identical for both parties. It will not be found in the ‘progressive’ obsessions of Labor’s loony left or the return to Christianity favoured by the Liberals’ bible-thumping faction. Instead, it lies in re-learning how to develop policies from a position of austerity, maturity, and broad relevance. 

Sadly, with Labor already dropping come-hither hints about being able to spend more if they win a second term and the Liberals happy to ride along, it looks like rewarding a patchwork of petty gripes is a future that suits both of them just fine. 

Lillian Andrews writes about politics, society, feminism, and anything else that interests her. You can find her on Twitter @SaysAwfulThings