ANDREW MILLER: Federal election result is a woke-up call for stale Libs

West Australian

04-05-2025

Our six-year-old vibes with Ed Sheeran.
'I'm in love with the shape of you,' she belts out in an Aussie schoolyard accent, while working intently on her cat drawing.
I hum along until she starts yelling 'I'm in love with your BOD-DEEE.'
They grow up so fast, with a new soundtrack for every generation.
In 1975, Sweden's ABBA took off in Australia because their raw appeal resonated deeply with our fuss-free culture.
'The winner takes it all, the loser's standing small, beside the victory, that's her destiny.'
Gough Whitlam was the biggest loser of 1975, but perhaps he's smiling somewhere today.
Following their recent drubbing in the WA election, I suggested a welfare check for the Liberal Party. After Saturday's overwhelming rejection of Peter Dutton, and anything else with even a vague whiff of Trump Down Under, it's time to call the Coalition an ambulance and contact the family.
The Liberals as we knew them are toast, jam-side down on the floor. Once a fearsomely professional political machine with a stranglehold on the top end of town, you're now just as likely to find a shiver of besuited ex-Labor ministers scoffing tapas in the boardroom, getting business done.
The Coalition took a jump to the Right, and centrist Labor immediately leapt into their leather and velvet seats.
The Libs peaked under grumbly John Howard, when he announced his visionary gun buy-back scheme after the Port Arthur massacre, veering away from the failure of the US to govern itself properly.
A society built with economically rational bricks requires humane cement to hold it together. Reward for effort, safety for all.
Voters respond to leaders that care about them, and we sniff out phony personality makeovers on politicians quicker than Gout Gout goes downhill. No-one was buying Dutton 2.0 with the glasses.
The Libs now find themselves leaderless, rudderless and bleeding. The anti-woke panic of red-faced boomer-men has left them looking dated and misinformed. You won't get much sympathy in Australia if you sympathise with neo-Nazi clowns booing during the ANZAC service, or pretend to be protecting women's bathrooms from some imaginary trans menace while failing to acknowledge the true toll of male domestic violence.
Australia has sensibly rejected nuclear reactors in favour of solar, batteries and other developing technologies; climate change denial in favour of sophisticated long-term mitigation; rolling back the public service in favour of stronger social safety nets, and banning work-from-home in favour of flexible work arrangements - it's only fair.
None of that should surprise anyone, because our working and middle classes are happy to work hard, but not for nothing. We aspire to our creature comforts, but we also want accessible universal healthcare, and our kids to be able to afford housing. We respect science and education, so we voted for improvements to Medicare and HECS relief.
We want our Government to thread the needle internationally: trade with China while promoting human rights; respond to alarming US authoritarianism; support the besieged Ukrainians, and condemn the death of innocents everywhere in the middle east. The UN credibly claim that over a thousand healthcare workers - my people - have been killed in Gaza.
We expect to have our cake and eat it too, because it is the reasonable promise of our very wealthy, ethical modern democracy.
Whether Prime Minister Albanese can get over this surprisingly generous gift from voters and deliver results will determine his legacy. Burn out like Whitlam, lose even his own seat like Dutton, Howard and Tony Abbott, or build a foundation for a century of success - independent of the flailing, failing US.
Fernando sat at number one for 14 weeks in Australia - a record that ABBA held for 40 years until Ed Sheeran came along to claim it. It takes time for the world to change, but once it shifts, there's no going back.
As the Nobel Laureate sang - the times they are a-changing.
'Can you hear the drums, Fernando?'