Today Australia awoke to a new Prime Minister.
If anyone thinks that their problems are solved, they’re kidding themselves.
We might expect the polls to reflect an improvement for the Coalition. But my guess is that they won’t be as much an improvement as that we saw with the last spill.
For, the problem wasn’t just one man, one front bench or even one party. The problem is that the political arena is still the battle grounds for the wars of last century. A pair of Hipster glasses doesn’t help outdated ideologs speak to the younger voters.
“Kevin07” was so successful because, on the surface it looked like a leader had got with the times. In practice, it was the same song and dance as ever before.
The battle between “fat cats” and unions doesn’t inspire younger voters like it did their parents and grandparents. There has been enough royal commissions and investigations to conclude that both sides are as bad and irrelevant as the other.
Even capitalism itself has lost its glow to gen-Y and Millennials. Did I just hear people gasp and collapse in the offices of the IPA?
Think about it. Aussies now starting or just establishing a career find themselves with a terrifying student load debt (if they could even stomach that future and went to uni). The prospects of home ownership within an hour’s drive from most jobs is practically impossible and anything outside that region is an overpriced, monotonous, sprawling hell-hole, made and sold like mobile phones.
In their childhood, they watched successive state and federal governments flog off any service of value for seemingly little return. In selling off communication utilities especially, it has meant that they now pay top dollar for suboptimal services.
They pay a premium on most technology simply because they are Australian.
In short, they entered a mature capital marketplace that presents them few opportunities. They lost the game before they had even started.
If this is the best their governments and the marketplace can offer them, why should they defend either or the ideology behind them?
Moreover, for the new Prime Minister, he finds himself part of a scene stuck on repeat for the last eight years. The man he ousted was in many ways a victim of his own success.
Being such a potent critic of the other party, he needed to demonstrate how much more improved he was when he had his turn. Removing a couple wealthy business taxes and being hard of refugees can only got him so far. If that was his entire vision, the term should have ended a few months in.
The voting base is changing quicker than our major parties can evolve and they have so far failed to understand why the ensuing teams post-Howard have failed to find legs.
They haven’t even begun to start a discussion with younger voters. They’ve only talked down to them and blame them. Anyone with a child in their twenties knows just how far that will get you (even if your tech-savvy and say it with hashtags).
It’s for that reason that I’m stuck on how to wind up this post. I can’t say (in one way or another) that it’ll be interesting to see how this next leadership plays out, because I doubt it will be interesting. I guess all that I can say is that I hope we’ve past the trough and that they have learnt enough to see the need to revise their party policies, on all sides of parliament
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