The most striking thing about the LNP Coalition today is not scandal, disunity, or chaos – but how little anyone pays attention to them. In a noisy political world, the federal opposition is a whisper in the background.
Parliamentary watchers joke that the Coalition backbenches could be replaced by cardboard cutouts and it would take weeks for anyone to notice. (Yes, they exist, but nobody knows who they are.) And they’re as boring as a Tim Wilson whinge. That may sound harsh, but it captures the peculiar invisibility of a party once defined by combative energy.
Predictability as Policy
When the Coalition does manage to grab a headline, the message is rarely new. Their platform is so predictable it might as well be printed and laminated for the next 20 elections: tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts to Medicare, suspicion of unions, and a stubborn insistence that coal still holds the key to Australia’s future.
Barnaby Joyce still thunders about regional Australia being ignored, Angus Taylor still insists that climate policy will wreck the economy, and Matt Canavan still treats coal as though it were the Holy Grail. Their consistency is impressive – but only in the way a broken record is consistent.
If climate change is the defining issue of this century, the Coalition seems content to fight the last one. While the world races to embrace renewable energy, they cling to fossil fuels as though political survival depends on it – which, in their dwindling base, it just might.
The problem is not only the policies themselves but the staleness they project. Australians know exactly what the Opposition will say before they say it. That predictability breeds indifference.
Beige Leadership
This is not to say the Coalition lacks capable people. But politics is about momentum, ideas, and story. Under Sussan Ley, the Coalition has no clear story to tell. She is a competent parliamentarian, but competence is not the same as inspiration. The comparison with Howard’s authority or Abbott’s bulldog energy is cruel but unavoidable.
In politics, beige is not a strategy. It is a slow fade into irrelevance.
Democracy Needs Noise
Australia’s democracy works best when governments are challenged – when they are forced to defend decisions and sharpen arguments. But right now, the sharpest critiques of Anthony Albanese come not from Ley’s Coalition but from disappointed voters.
An opposition that refuses to reinvent itself risks more than electoral defeat. It risks leaving the country without the robust contest of ideas that democracy depends upon.
Waiting Game
The Coalition seems to believe that governments lose elections rather than oppositions winning them. There’s truth in that. But it is a dangerous bet to stake a party’s future on boredom.
Australians may well tire of Labor, but if the only alternative is the same set of reheated policies, delivered by a party that struggles to be noticed, voters may look elsewhere – to independents, minor parties, or simply away from politics altogether.
The Only Spark
At least Barnaby Joyce guarantees the Coalition won’t be boring forever – though rarely for the reasons his colleagues might hope. His unpredictable outbursts, like Canavan’s coal crusades or Taylor’s climate obstructionism, provide the occasional headline. But spectacle without substance is not strategy. For now, the Opposition’s greatest achievement is reminding Australians that irrelevance can be just as damaging as incompetence.
Dear reader, we need your support
Independent sites such as The AIMN provide a platform for public interest journalists. From its humble beginning in January 2013, The AIMN has grown into one of the most trusted and popular independent media organisations.
One of the reasons we have succeeded has been due to the support we receive from our readers through their financial contributions.
With increasing costs to maintain The AIMN, we need this continued support.
Your donation – large or small – to help with the running costs of this site will be greatly appreciated.
You can donate through PayPal or credit card via the button below, or donate via bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
You’ve written about the precise reasons for their irrelevance.
As for the lack of climate policy, by both parties, it has and is wrecking the economy with the poorest in society paying for their privilege and profits.
It seems to me, that our politicians worry more about the goings on in other countries than here!
Australia has problems that need addressing, rather than involving us in overseas issues.
Ley a “competent parliamentarian” Roswell? I don’t think so, to me she is just another third rate Liberal trough wallower who has no idea what she stands for, apart from the kudos of the position.
Sacrificial lamb,awaiting the slaughter that will surely come when the Liberal abattoir decides on the next incompetent.
ooo, mind that hook, dear.
Australia’s conservatives, many mentioned here, have a finger on the pulse, but it may be genitalia getting monitored. Uninflated, most are little piles, inconsequential. “Policy” seems to be merely any fixation, possibly donor provided, or any grab for fleeting attraction; but that is a delusion, a lunacy, if it is not widely, vigorously, bravely faced. Not one mentioned here indicates ability beyond lace tieing and bumwiping, with B Joyce a dud at most basics, yet yabbering in ego driven quantity. Overall, nobody seems to feel that local politics is keeping up, succeeding. Whitlam lit beacons, suggested pathways, offered hope. Today, some fear cells, walls, condemnation, futility, deadends, tiring emptiness.
We have an opposition? You mean those privileged nasty little children who are always squabbling and fighting amongst each other are the opposition? How very sad…
But, but…If you want them to be noticed they have to do something to get themselves noticed. Like Barnaby Joyce, Pauline Hanson, or Bob Katter! Join the anti-immigration march. Trash Climate change and net-zero! Politics is all performance art now. See how Trump’s cabinet doesn’t contain a single person who has not made himself/herself known on TV/media. Others don’t exist. And Trump by being larger than life and in everyone’s face 24/7, became POTUS! No one can even understand his policies or how they will work. They simply believe everything he says. It works (for now at least). Until the punters wake up that is what we are in for.
Policies are seldom enunciated in the loud media. Mainstream media focuses on negatives and sensation. It’s worldwide, and the roots of the burgeoning plague of mistrust in all things political, bureaucratic and institutional, and politicians are either captured by it or enthusiastic users of it.
Labor’s landslide was likely achieved via notions of stability vs mistrust in the contradictory policy-free mish-mash of the LNP.
The public has been propagandized to focus on the ‘now’, neglecting the context of history and extrapolation to the future. So globally both immediate paranoia & the slow pace of precautionary principals are the two-edged swords in panic-driven changing geopolitical strategies and ethno-religious culture wars – Moves are seen as decisive or slow, muddling and uncompetitive? … “When do we want it? Now!”
In Oz, the mainstream media are not relenting as sensation-peddling negative attack-dogs. And the LNP, regardless of its own shambolic past and its policy malaise, is fast jumping on the msm bandwagon and getting aired loudly. Regardless of anything, for example it’s jumping on; transparency broken promise, FOI changes, Nauru refugee deal, ousting Iran ambassador et al & proscribing IRGC, ant-immigration marches, neo-Nazis, ‘sovereign citizens’, Jews antisemitism & Palestinian statehood, visits to China and visits/no visits to Washington, coal oil gas & green hydrogen. All, regardless of technology or policy, just amping up culture wars and mistrust.
Except for the minority that study the details (some of which appear prima facie no good), for many, the opposition bull-horns suffice to breed rising mistrust.
It results in defeating cycles of reaction detracting from reasoned governance, and a splintering of objective politics and democratic process. It’s not ‘divide and conquer, it’s divide and divide again until there’s nothing but a strew of decomposing crumbs. That’s what MAGAts consume ain’t it?