Elections are no longer a binary contest – independents of all persuasions make for a noisier political discourse
Anyone tuning into the official election campaign launches over the weekend would be forgiven for thinking Australia was in the middle of an old school binary contest for supremacy played out through the legacy media.
With lovingly curated showcases of personality, principle and policy breathlessly analysed by expert commentators and packaged to lead the nightly news bulletins. The only thing missing was Jana Wendt.
But the reality is that this election is less a straight two-horse contest and more a scrappy three-legged race, a fragmented series of skirmishes playing out across the nation through disaggregated networks.
As this week's Guardian Essential Report illustrates, if 'someone else' were a candidate for government it would currently have its nose narrowly in front.
Of course, 'someone else' is not a single entity. There are stark differences between the candidates sitting outside the majors; but they all exist as rational responses to limited choice in a world of infinite options.
The Greens, defending an historic high of four lower-house seats while eyeing off further gains, emerged in the 1980s as a reaction to the dominance of Labor's industrial base and its impact on the environment. It added salience around the climate crisis before broadening its social and economic justice chops in a bid to pitch itself as more than a party of protest.
One Nation was the 1990s nativist reaction to globalisation that peeled working class votes away from both majors; and presaged Clive Palmer's 21st century indulgences as the real local expression of Temu Trump. While their combined numbers are lower, they contribute an outsized sense of fear and loathing from the right.
The 'teal' independents are something altogether different, a modern-day revolt from the liberal wing of the Liberal party based on core values, particularly its refusal to address climate change. With its current policy focus and appeal to lower income workers in outer metropolitan areas, the Coalition appears to have given up on winning back these seats.
The teals' most relevant antecedent might actually be the Catholic-aligned DLP, which split from the Labor through the 1950s and 1960s over home grown communism, keeping it out of power for nearly two decades.
If the teals become anything like the political fixture the DLP was, they could be equally as disruptive, exercising real power through a disaggregated network, anchored with common infrastructure but tempered by a determination not to manifest into a formal institution.
These dynamics make for an even noisier political discourse, amplified by a changing media ecosystem which sees young people finding new sources of authority through which to interpret the world.
As much as the vote intention table marks a tidal change, these figures show the profound shift in the way voters are consuming information with 42% of under 35s getting most of their news from a non-traditional source.
These are often filtered through the eyes of lone wolf influencers, freed of the constraints of journalism, for whom reach is its own virtue.
Like the political parties, the rise of these alternate voices can be read as a rational response to structural weaknesses in old gatekeeper media models, particularly when filtered through commercial self-interest or, in the case of ABC, political interventions.
It is here where the atomisation of both politics and media finds a common landing point, an algorithmically charged attention economy where bravura jumps to the head of the queue.
Pointedly, the major parties have accepted the role of influencers in the media, with leaders making themselves available for long form interviews with those who have earned an audience.
The prime minister has embraced influencer podcasters, inviting them to cover the budget and even inserting coded words into his final speech of the term to this parliament. And just to show they are not 'delulu to the solulu', the Coalition is all-in repurposing Drake.
Whether the leaders of the major parties will be forced to embrace independent representatives with the same pragmatism remains to be seen, although a final table shows that the expectation is that one of the two majors will form power in their own right.
What's most interesting here is that only a bare majority of those intending to vote away from the major parties expect to see minority government.
While there is a clear difference between desire and expectation, the consensus settling around the likelihood of one side securing a working majority may be a natural response to the instability generated by the ultimate insurgent influencer.
But even if it doesn't happen this cycle, the age profile of third-party voters means the time is fast approaching where more active power-sharing arrangements will become a reality.
The truth is the complexity of our times does not lead itself to binary choices. Embracing diversity not as a performance but as a design principle will only make the future governments – whatever their flavour – more faithful custodians of the public will.
For those of us who are still drawn into the theatre of the leaders' debates and the head-to-head battle for supremacy, it might be a case of enjoying it before the worm turns.
Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company. Essential is conducting qualitative research for the ALP
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