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Scotsman
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Scotsman
Four big lessons for Scotland and UK from Australian Labor party's surprise landslide
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Australia has a distinctive electoral system and political culture, and the recent election produced a decisive win for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party, which has its largest majority in the parliament since 1943. There are four main lessons for the UK to learn from the Australian election. First, make it easier for people to vote. Australia has had compulsory voting for over a century and, while the fine for not voting is small (around £10), most comply. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Compulsory voting means that time and energy do not need to be used in 'getting out the vote' and most campaigns are aimed at winnable votes around the political centre. Its introduction in the UK is unlikely but Australia provides examples of how to make it easier for people to vote. Labor party leader Anthony Albanese, seen holding up his Medicare card, was successful because of a focus on issues that matter to people's lives, like healthcare (Picture: Asanka Ratnayake) | Getty Images Democracy sausage sizzles Election day is always on a Saturday, polling booths at local schools are accompanied by fundraising fetes and democracy sausage sizzles. It is also easy to vote before the election, either in person or by post. There are also education campaigns by the well-funded and trusted Australian Electoral Commission. The recent local elections in England provided shock results for the two major parties as Reform won mayoralties and council seats in a broad range of areas. However, the other important point is that voter turnout was very low – often less than 30 per cent of the electorate, which effectively means Reform's platform was often only really backed by about 10 per cent of voters. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The UK Government should prioritise increasing the turnout for local elections, and pay attention to integrity and responsiveness to citizens at this level of government. It is also well and truly time to move on from the first-past-the-post voting system in a multi-party context to make people's choices count. Australia uses preferential voting, or a ranking of all candidates, in lower house seats, and proportional representation to elect state Senators for its upper house. This accommodates a range of parties, including the emergence of a new group of locally based Independent parliamentarians, but makes it more difficult for radical parties to win lower house seats. Positivity trumped negativity Second, the decisive outcome in Australia showed that positive policies and not negative campaigning matters in post-Trump times. The conservatives, the Liberal-National Party Coalition, ran a mainly fear-stoking, culture-war-focused campaign. Earlier in the year they thought Trump would be an asset to their campaign but clearly, like in Canada, he was not. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The Coalition's 2023 success in defeating the Voice Referendum on constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians let them assume they could win more votes from Labor on this divisive platform. It did not work in an election campaign context. They also announced unpopular core policies such as a US-style Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) to downsize the public sector workforce and getting rid of work-from-home policies – Opposition leader Peter Dutton even stated that 'women should just job-share'. Worst result since WWII They also proposed drastically lowering immigration quotas and the introduction of nuclear energy, where there has never been an industry, amid long-term climate change denialism by many in the party. They did not promote policies to appeal to women, younger voters, or Australia's large multicultural population. The result was that the Liberal party recorded its worst result since its founding in World War Two, and has very few seats left in Australia's main cities and urban areas where nearly 90 per cent of the population lives. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The choice to embrace a hard-right agenda, rather than try to win back centre-right, inner-city seats they lost in 2022 to independents, was spectacularly unsuccessful. Issues that matter to voters The third lesson is to genuinely campaign on the ground on issues that are meaningful in people's lives. This election was primarily about economic security – what went right for Labor was that they listened to voter concerns around housing affordability, soaring health costs, student debt, and the cost of living, particularly food, energy, and petrol prices. The Prime Minister focused especially on improving free access to Medicare-funded healthcare, Australia's equivalent of the NHS, frequently producing his own Medicare card at media calls. While there remains significant uncertainty in Australia about how Trump's tariffs and other issues will affect future national and economic security, this was primarily a win built on consolidating a domestic policy agenda. In the UK context, future campaigns will need to present their own narratives about economic equity and values clearly, and not let Reform set the parameters of the debate. Appeasing overt racism and hard-right political agendas does not work. It was notable that Albanese rarely mentioned Trump at all, and instead focused clearly on core voter concerns. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Media diversity is important Finally, the media need to do better and move beyond relentless, flawed opinion polling and simplistic horse-race analogies. Nearly all of Australia's mainstream media outlets, most of which overtly supported a Coalition win, failed in this election by suggesting the outcome would be close. The dominance of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp in Australia – the only other significant player is Nine Entertainment – inhibits political debate and real scrutiny of what is happening on the ground. At one point, taking from the Trump playbook, Dutton referred to the publicly owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation as 'hate media'. However, in a context where Australians trust the democratic system but have low levels of trust in politicians and parties, the ABC remains Australians' most trusted media source. Media diversity – like the UK currently has – needs to be valued. We also need to instil an expectation that the media can do better in informing the public about politics and policies. We cannot leave that to political influencers on TikTok alone.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Chinese Australians, Once Scorned, Are Courted as Tight Election Nears
Diners are seen inside a restaurant in Melbourne's Chinatown on Oct. 29, 2021. Credit - Asanka Ratnayake—Getty Images It was deep into World War II when Mark Wang's father, who worked for China's military intelligence, left Shanghai to meet with U.S. General Douglas MacArthur in Melbourne, Australia. Since China had no functioning consulate in the city, they chose to talk in the home of a prominent local businessman, whose family had first emigrated from China in the mid-1830s. In between discussions on how best to expel the Axis Powers from China, the pretty daughter of his host caught the older Wang's eye. 'It was love at first sight,' says Mark Wang, the CEO of the Museum of Chinese Australian History in Melbourne, of his parents' first meeting. 'And that's why I'm here!' It's a sweet anecdote that also illustrates how the fates of Australia, China, and indeed the U.S. have long been intertwined. While Australia has been inhabited by Aboriginal peoples for at least 65,000 years, the first European settlers arrived in 1788, with the first Chinese following just 30 years later. It was not always a harmonious melding with periodic race riots culminating in the 1901 White Australia Policy, which effectively halted legal migration from Asia to the self-styled 'Lucky Country.' After that policy was repealed in 1975, Chinese immigration ebbed and flowed corresponding to the various crises that blighted the continent, from the Vietnam War, Tiananmen Square massacre, and recent crackdown on freedoms in Hong Kong. Today, persons of Chinese heritage comprise some 5.5% of Australia's 26 million people. 'The Chinese-Australian community are major contributors to our cultural life, economy, business, to every aspect,' Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told TIME in a February interview. 'Chinese Australians have been a large part of our multicultural community for 200 years.' And they may prove pivotal to Australia's future as federal elections approach on Saturday. Polls have Albanese's center-left Labor Party neck-and-neck with the opposition right-leaning Liberal-National Coalition, with observers believing a hung parliament—whereby no party reaches the 76 seats required to form government—remains a likely outcome. The tight race has led to a surge in political advertising and campaigning on popular prominently Chinese-language apps such as WeChat and Red Note targeting marginal, multicultural constituencies in recent weeks. Since January, the RECapture Project has found more than 220 authorized Liberal ads on WeChat and about 35 for Labor. Even non-ethnic Chinese candidates have embraced the platforms, sharing videos of themselves eating Sichuan hotpot and drinking bubble tea. Fan Yang, a University of Melbourne research fellow who leads RECapture, says that campaign posts are often sophisticated and appear tailored with the help of outside agencies. 'Red Note is known for lifestyle and e-commerce, which means political content is less prioritized by the platform algorithm,' she says. 'One way that politicians navigate the algorithm is to approach third party influencers to increase their online visibility.' The fact that some neighborhoods with the highest proportion of ethnically Chinese voters are also the closest fought is galvanizing this strategy. The Labor-held ultra-marginal Sydney seat of Bennelong has around 30% residents of Chinese heritage and is now notionally Liberal due to a redrawn boundary. According to RECapture, Liberal candidate Scott Yung has appeared in more than 100 authorized ads since January. Meanwhile, Sydney's Bradfield constituency has the fifth largest population of ethnically Chinese voters nationwide and has been inundated with WeChat ads for both main parties' candidates as well as independents. Attack ads targeting both party leaders have also proliferated as the election draws near. Still, the brazen courting of Chinese Australians—both Albanese and Coalition leader Peter Dutton have been recently filmed enjoying Chinese meals on the campaign trail—is a welcome departure from Australia's last federal election in 2022, when anti-Chinese sentiment had reached an unfortunate peak amid a severe chill in Sino-Australian relations as well as COVID-related racism. According to a 2021 report by the Lowy Institute, almost one in five Chinese Australians reported being physically threatened or attacked in the previous year. The pandemic marked a crescendo, but anti-Chinese bigotry had been building since around 2016, when then Australian Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull ordered an investigation into alleged Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference, leading to an Espionage and Foreign Interference Bill the following year. A slew of high-ranking local and national politicians were subsequently accused of being in the pay of the Chinese government. The election of U.S. President Donald Trump on a Sinophobic ticket and his subsequent railings against the 'China virus' and 'kung flu' also helped normalize anti-Asian sentiment, say local community members. In October 2020, Liberal senator Eric Abetz sparked outrage when he asked three Chinese Australians called before the chamber to discuss non-White parliamentary under-representation 'whether they are willing to unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship' in what one of the participants subsequently denounced as a 'McCarthyist' loyalty test. Of course, anti-Chinese sentiment goes back to Australia's Gold Rush period. In 1855, the state of Victoria imposed a £10 levy on every Chinese immigrant arriving in the colony. To circumvent this 'poll tax,' many Chinese immigrants landed in South Australia and then walked the over 350 miles to Melbourne, which on the back of the mining boom was soon to become the richest city in the world. In 2017, Jimmy Li, president of the Chinese Community Council of Australia Victoria Chapter (CCCAV), helped organize a walk to retrace this epic journey to raise awareness of the historical injustice. 'One of the proudest aspects of Australia is our multiculturalism,' he says. 'People live peacefully together, maintain their cultures, but also we connect, interact, and work together.' It's a view that has broad public support, with a 2023 survey finding that nearly 90% of respondents believed that 'multiculturalism has been good for Australia.' Indeed, an internal review by the Liberal Party following their 2022 election defeat found that many Chinese Australians—which had traditionally backed the party—had shifted their support due to geopolitical tensions and the COVID backlash. Under the Albanese government, bilateral relations have warmed significantly, and Dutton has also toned down his hawkish rhetoric, saying last year that he was 'pro-China and the relationship we have with them.' Still, the pall of Chinese interference continues to dog this election. In recent weeks, both Yung, the Liberal Bennelong candidate, and independent lawmaker Monique Ryan have had to fend off allegations of CCP backing. The question remains how to get more Chinese Australians actually into political life rather than simply being courted by the nation's establishment. While Chinese Australians are active in philanthropy and local politics, the cohort remains underrepresented at the federal level. 'It's a work in progress,' says Yan Ma, a CCCAV committee member. 'Politicians from every part of every spectrum who care about multicultural communities are actively recruiting Chinese speaking or Chinese background staff members. So that's a good sign.' Write to Charlie Campbell at
