The election remains the most relevant point of reference for attitudes to immigration because nothing has changed since May that would normally be associated with a rise in xenophobia. Interest rates have fallen twice, and there have been no asylum seeker boats.
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So, what did the election really tell us? First, we had a proxy contest on immigration in the primary votes of the Greens on the side of diversity, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots on the side of nativism.
The score was 14.1 per cent to 6.4 per cent in favour of the Greens in metropolitan electorates, and 11 per cent to 9.5 per cent to Hanson/Palmer in non-metropolitan electorates. The Greens won the primary vote contest in regional Victoria and NSW by narrow margins, while Hanson/Palmer did not come close to the Greens in any city.
No sign of a backlash there. On the contrary, it suggests that diversity trumps nativism for those voters most animated on the issues of culture and identity.
Zoom out to the national electorate to recall why Dutton’s campaign to target Labor seats in the outer suburbs was doomed. Labor won the metropolitan vote after preferences by 60.6 per cent to 39.4 per cent, with a swing to it of 4 per cent. The Coalition won the non-metropolitan vote 52.3 per cent to 47.7 per cent, but even here, Labor achieved a swing of 1.8 per cent. Remember that no previous government in the post-war era had increased its majority at its first re-election attempt.
The Liberals were left with just three seats in metropolitan Sydney, one each in Melbourne and Perth and none in Adelaide, Hobart, Canberra or Darwin. The Liberal National Party retained just one of Brisbane’s 10 seats. The crossbench holds two more urban seats than the Liberals.
Nothing has changed since May that would normally be associated with a rise in xenophobia.Credit: iStock
Let’s narrow the frame to our three largest cities to understand why the Liberals lost. Sydney and Melbourne are our most diverse cities. About two-thirds of their population are born overseas or have at least one migrant parent. Brisbane was the only mainland state capital that had not crossed the threshold to majority migrant at the 2021 census.
The seats the Liberals did hang on to in Sydney (Cook, Lindsay and Berowra) and in Brisbane (Bowman) are in the whitest parts of the city, where migrants and their local-born children are not yet the majority of the population. The seat of Goldstein they won back from teal Zoe Daniel in Melbourne was offset by the loss of that party’s last remaining seats in the eastern suburbs, Deakin and Menzies.
The demographic time bomb hiding in plain sight for the Liberal Party is the moderate voter it continued to underestimate in Melbourne, the city that was the jewel in Robert Menzies’ crown in the 1950s and 60s.
The last Liberal leader to win a seat in Melbourne from Labor was Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 – in Chisholm, in the city’s east. The Liberals held eight of Melbourne’s 21 seats at that election. Now they have just one.
Melbourne was the capital with the most visible presence of neo-Nazis marching last Sunday. Far from telegraphing a swing to the right, the rallies could reinforce citywide support for diversity.
There is no credible path to majority government for a Liberal-led Coalition that ignores New Australia because migrants and their local-born children are the new silent majority in the Australian electorate.
George Megalogenis is an author, a political commentator and a journalist.
