With the inner-city enclaves now a preserve of the Greens and the Teals, Labor needs to turn its attention to the everyday voter. And it will need to, because Peter Dutton and the Liberals will be doing exactly the same thing, writes Joe Hildebrand.
And lo, in the last two days alone this is exactly what has come to pass. Dutton himself has publicly declared this very strategy and new Climate Minister Chris Bowen has flipped the teals the biggest bird I have ever seen outside of Sesame Street.
This is what the Greens are doing to Labor even without all the whizz-bang consultants and algorithms the teals can afford to buy.And so in an election with a massive swing towards the ALP, where it picked up seats in every other mainland state, it somehow managed to go backwards in Queensland — the very state where it was founded.
More than ever, before both parties are locked in a race for the hearts and minds of suburban Australia and whereas once this might merely determine which party wins elections, this time it could decide which party actually survives. But one seat troubles me even more, a seat once critical to federal fortunes and yet whose name was barely mentioned during the campaign.
Instead it stuck with the Coalition for more than a decade and became a new bellwether, tending to follow whichever party formed government — the very epitome of aspiration.
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