The 'forgotten' Australians that haunted the Liberals' campaign

Thanks to voters themselves, a relatively policy-lite major-party contest delivered a surprisingly policy-heavy verdict.

The more politicians went superficial and disrespectful, the more voters reacted by going deeper and more substantial.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the safe-seat challenges by "teals".

Here, aspiring candidates were attacked mercilessly as fakes and a risk to order. And yet here also these very candidates were enthusiastically boosted into parliament on policy.

It wasn't just that feckless special pleading by endangered MPs failed to touch the sides, but rather that it demonstrated the problem.

Voters saw such alarmism as a further cause for change. Every time they heard "fake" independents, it merely reinforced the artificiality of the status quo where parties saw themselves as the central interest, the election's primary object.

Warned of fakes and chaos, voters thought more critically about what they already had - ersatz stability, performative representation, faux action, pseudo-democracy.

Between progress or stasis, voters couldn't wait to cast their ballots.

Suddenly it was the blokey theatre of conflict and hyperbole, versus the chance of collaboration and progress. Zoe Daniel's slogan in Goldstein - "Same isn't Safe" - spoke to a sense of a fast-fading future.

Another clear battlefield outcome is among remaining Liberals, few have grasped the full weight of what just happened.

Take the conservative hard-man Peter Dutton.

If his preferment to the leadership were not itself stridently at odds with the solution-focused message from voters, Dutton's first words confirmed his party's intransigence.

Standing knee-deep in the dishevelled detritus of defeat, Dutton declined to honour the voters' rejection of the key markers of Scott Morrison's operation: reckless China fear-mongering, inertia via tactical division and culture wars, negation on climate, reconciliation and gender equality.

Rather, the new leader reassured us he would not be "Labor-lite" and would focus on fixing the inevitable mess the freshly installed government would make. The sentiment here was unmistakeable: You got it wrong, you fools.

Well, save for you "forgotten Australians" in the outer-suburbs of the capital cities, to whom Dutton pledged his strategic fidelity in the run-up to 2025. This suggests continuity with Morrison's failed tradition of partitioning the nation into warring interests - left versus right, 'real' Australians versus 'suspicious cosmopolitans' who frequent the "dinner parties, cafes, and wine bars of the inner-cities".

Whether this was merely a rebranding of Morrison's "quiet Australians" - a distinction freighted with a seething victimhood the Right otherwise decries, remains unclear.

As founder of the modern Liberal Party, Robert Menzies had first ascribed special virtue to a section of the community he argued was electorally large yet politically disaggregated against a more organised industrial class. Menzies called them the "forgotten people" - foremen and middle-managers in the private sector, the self-employed and, importantly, the homemakers.

Indeed, in a kind of paternalistic proto-feminism, Menzies' "forgotten people" designation was self-consciously directed at the electoral heft of women. In them he recognised voters not defined by trade or occupation nor viewed primarily as economic units. People who managed household spending and thus felt price rises most keenly, who had no union or political party advocating for them, and who fostered values like family, community, frugality, law and order.

But the world has changed markedly since then and Liberal Party has, too. In fact, Dutton need not have looked beyond his party's most hallowed territory to find his lost constituency. In 2022, the real forgotten people turned out to be the Liberal Party's hitherto most loyal base - its best donors, its rank-and-file members and most successful MPs. You know, actual "liberals".

Perhaps Dutton might remember Ronald Reagan's favourite saying: "Always dance with the one that brung ya." Giving up the Liberal heartland - the seats held by former Liberal leaders such as Menzies, Andrew Peacock, John Hewson, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop - surely makes the task of reaching 76 seats much harder in 2025.

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The wider politico-media complex has similarly struggled to imbibe the full meaning of a dual contraction of primary vote support - an outcome which might, in time, come to be seen for what it actually was - a great re-enfranchisement.

Pejoratives like elitist, idealist and even somewhat ludicrously "populist", have been bandied about in opinion pages to describe the new crossbenchers. In one tortuously hackneyed effort during the week, teal supporters were pilloried for life behind the "goat's cheese curtain" and for being people who "indulge in $300 Vitality Boost injections instead of breakfast in the bourgeois enclaves that elect Greens and teals".

That's a direct quote. And here's another: "Sure, duck a l'orange requires organic cane sugar in the sauce, but why not virtue signal to your elitist base by helping obese poor people by making them pay more for their Big Mac and Coke?" Beyond indulgent, such critiques are simply embarrassing.

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This was a voter-led revaluing of policy over a failed politics, of representation reimagined not by the adolescent tantrum-movement Clive Palmer tried to engender, but by an educated sensible centre. You know, people who read newspapers.

Having turned their rhetorical and policy focus on the resentful fringe, Liberal leaders had succumbed to the populist allure of grievance, while completely missing the burning dissatisfaction in its heartland.

Astonishingly, given their moralistic Menzian invocations of memory, Liberals had "forgotten" Liberal women vote, as do young people. Hell, even some men care about gender fairness, sustainability, First Nations recognition and the future of the country.

Gentrification was always thought to threaten the ALP as it lifted the working class into the middle. Who knew it would split the Liberals first?