The mirage of the One Nation surge

This episode of New Politics was released on the 27th of March,

2026, and produced on the lands of the Wongal and Gadigal people.

The Liberal Party has collapsed in South Australia but is this a temporary setback or more

splintering of the centre-right? If one nation and the Liberal Party keep fighting over the same votes,

are they locking themselves out of government forever? The Labor Party did win

the South Australian election but it provides more evidence of the demise of the Liberal Party

and there's still some more pain to come. I'm Eddie Jockovich. I'm David Lewis.

All of this is coming up in this big episode of New Politics.

And just to remind you that New Politics is produced by independent media,

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way to support independent journalism.

It's very important that no one confuses tonight's result as adulation.

Instead we should see it as only being an invitation. An invitation to continue

to work our guts out for the next four years.

But for the first time there's a flash of orange in the Red Sea of Parliament,

Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party achieving its best result anywhere in Australia for decades

and the country is on notice.

The South Australian election was held last weekend and it all went according to plan.

The Labor Government was returned to office with a massive majority.

The Liberal Party was reduced to a minor party and was outpolled by one nation.

And if you'd been following all the headlines from the mainstream media,

you could have been mistaken into thinking that one nation could actually one

be election. There was a talk of a massive surge that there's been an earthquake in the

electorate, a seismic shift and aside from acknowledging that the Labor Party won the election and

premier Peter Mellon Oscars had been returned. There wasn't too much noise about this

victory. Now David, there's no question that there are some big stories that come out of this

election. The massive loss of votes and seats by the Liberal Party. They'll probably end up with

around six seats or so. That's still not great. But another big story is One Nation receiving 22%

of the primary vote. That's big news. But the even biggest story I think is that even after

all the focus on One Nation from the media before the election, during the election and after the

election, even after all of that and even after they won 22% of the primary vote on the night of the

election, they only won the one seat. So that's one seat out of 47 seats. They might end up with

one other seat as well. But if you go into an election and you come out of it,

winning just one or two seats, that's not really such a great result, is it?

And the first thing that we've got to unpack here, it's not a phrase I love, but here we are,

is that it is a preferential system. And so the primary vote isn't necessarily the big thing to

focus on, except you're right, when 22% of people say we want this party in a 47 seat parliament,

you're looking at about eight seats, seven or eight seats, which is more than the liberal party one.

And every time the national party swoop in with their 13 seats nationally, 13 to 14 seats

nationally, and the Greens do better at the primary vote than the national party and they come out with

maybe no seats. You don't get a lot of the right complaining about this, but suddenly it's turned

on them and one nation don't get any seats. Or maybe there might be one or two last I heard that

there were a couple seats where they might win. It's still not, it's still not clear yet. So they

did do very well in the seats that they haven't won yet are very close. So that's that's something to

consider too. Again, I'm just looking at this purely from numbers. I'm not endorsing one nation

policy at all. I think they are a sham party with very bad and destructive policies. But when

we're looking at it as suffologists, the numbers are all that really matters. The policy analysis

can come later. I didn't actually know that I was a suffologist, but I'll wear that badge very

proudly. But it also, I think it's a question about whether we are looking at the failure of the

electoral system or whether it's just a case with misunderstanding how the referencing system

actually works. But people want to have the debate about the electoral system not being

representative. Well, I think that's good. I think we actually should reform the system to get more

representation from the minor parties. But this is exactly how this system is meant to work at the

moment. I don't fully agree with it. So you either work towards changing the system and that's

a long-term process or you start understanding how the current system works. In the short term,

you work within the way that the parameters are currently working. So in each, see, preferential

voting is actually very fair. But I think collectively it's not working out to be fair or representative.

And I guess that's why we have the Senate, which is far more proportional to balance everything

out. But because the voting patterns have changed and there's more political participants out,

there are even the ones that we don't like. Well, I think there probably is a good case

to change the overall system. And countries like New Zealand and Germany, well, they use

proportional systems, mixed-men and parliaments. We've also got this in Tasmania and the ACT.

That's actually a better reflection of the vote. And maybe it's time that Australia seriously

considered it for federal politics. And you refer to this before, David. The point is that the

Greens have had to live with this imbalance for decades and never seriously made a push to change

it. But now that the central role is experiencing the same thing, suddenly it's this big crisis.

But the upshot is that voting in the lower house in Australia, you don't get necessarily the

rewards for the amount of votes that you receive, but where those actually votes are received.

And that's in the seats. And I think that's what the big difference is.

Yeah, Australia has a very good electoral system. And it's run very well. We're very

lucky that we've had an AEC that an electoral commission that resisted the reforms that certain

governments wanted to put through. And the AEC is used all around the world because it knows how

to distribute this stuff fairly and accurately and show there's anomalies and there's mistakes and

there's things that, but that's because all human systems have that. And there's not that many.

If anyone is here is working for the AEC who's listening to us, you are appreciated and you are

keep up the good work. I think moving to MMP, the risk, sorry, MMR, the risk is that we are now one of

that we are currently one of the most over-governed countries in the world. And I don't want to come across

as a conspiracy lizard person sovereign citizen type here, but we have 152 representatives in the

lower house, another 76 in the upper house, plus state government, plus local governments and

territories. We don't like for representation. One of the big issues with MMR is we're adding another

two or three members to each. Do we expand the boundaries of the seats? They're by not really

solving the problem, or do we accept that we've got to have double the number of members of parliament

in the lower house? And then how does that affect the Senate? Do we then have to knock the Senate up?

And the Senate has worked fairly well over the last 120 years with people from the same state

being representing totally different parties. And so, yeah, if we move to there, the only other issue

is of course, by elections, it's probably easier to keep the standard in the Senate, of course,

you don't want to trace everyone in the state for a replacement.

But I guess if someone does resign or dies while they're in office, well then that position

would go to the next person in the ballot. But that's one way of looking at it.

Yeah, or you could have just a standard election for the vacancy at that sort of local level.

It's difficult to drag the whole state in to do that. That's why in the Senate we have that

replacement. The party of the person who is made the seat vacant gets to nominate their

replacement. And if it's an independent, they get to nominate who or the premier actually does,

that that's on our advice of the party. And of course, there are all systems that were developed

over 120 years ago and state governments in Australia have been around for a long time. But

I guess overall, they would be the minor details that we'd have to sort out. But anything that

relates to getting better representational or a more clear political representation,

I think that would be a good thing. Yeah, yeah, I think the better represented we are,

the better we are represented, which sounds redundant, but it's true if we have two members

per seat. And for those seats in which there's an opposition member and a government member

representing, it means that you can be assured that your side will be heard. But it also means that

the parties work a bit better together because you don't want to annoy the person in the same seat

as you too much. So it, and certainly there'll be a lot of seats where you'll have two labor

party members. You'll have two liberal party members, possibly. You'll have two independence

or what or two green members. But there'll be a lot of seats. It'll be a labor green. There'll

be a lot of seats where there'll be liberal or country party, or national party, one nation.

And that's okay. And there'll be the few that will be government opposition. And that will force

people to work together a bit. The Senate tends to be a much friendlier chamber than the House of

Reps because they're all on committees together. They're all representing the same state,

so they've got to be a bit more friendly. You've got to get along to get along. And I know that

a lot of senators don't actually represent their status such, but they still congregate together

in the same areas, etc. So that might break down the bad oppositions we've had in the past who

just say no to everything, thinking that's what opposition is. Suddenly you've got to work with

people who are probably reasonable too. One nation is moving closer to claiming more seats,

amid the fallout from the election, which has stunned Australian politics. One nation looks

likely to win nudgery on York Peninsula and is ahead in Hammond, McKillip and Runger,

all regional electorates. But I will say to Peter Melnarskas,

I'm still in South Australia now. I am leaving tomorrow to go to Canberra to continue my duties,

but guess what mate? I'm leaving to use some landmines. They're called one nation, members of parliament.

And I found the media narrative around one nation quite fascinating, but it was also quite

predictable. And on one hand, one nation is a political gimmick pretty much. They've got that

basic populism. And I'm sure that they take themselves seriously, but they haven't really

got any serious policy agendas except for things like cutting immigration and making Australia

white again or making it all white again. But on the other hand, well, this is what people have

actually voted for in the electorate and in democracy. That's all that really matters. And

you just don't get ignored because it's inconvenient to us or people who don't like those

particular ideologies. And there's a little bit like fascism and Zionism. You have to

argue the case against what this is or what people are presenting. And maybe that's what hasn't

happened in this sort of situation. But the media has been pushing Paul in Hanson for many years,

and maybe this is the end result of this. But in practical terms, like it still gets back to that

one thing, winning one or two seats, that's not such a big deal. That's not exactly a political

earthquake that the media keeps talking about. As far as seats one, it might be as far as the

primary vote is concerned. And I'll accept that it's a change in voting patterns. But it's also a

pattern that the media has helped to create. And people like Paul in Hanson and Barnaby Joyce,

well, they just haven't appeared out of nowhere. They've been amplified. They've been normalized.

In many cases, actively promoted across mainstream media outlets for many years. And we have to

remember that since Paul in Hanson appeared on the scene all the way back in 1996, she's actually

been out of politics for most of that time. And even when she wasn't a member of Parliament or

a senator, the media, the sunrise on seven west media or channel nine, especially, well, they've

played a big role in pushing her agenda. And with the South Australian election, I guess we have

the double whammy, the media dialing Paul in Hanson on one side and then the train wreck of the

liberal party on the other side. So it's got time to look at who won the election when you've got

all this other chaos going on around you. Yeah, if you've watched the working dog program

front line recently, it has lasted much better than it should have. It's 30 years old now, I think.

And it still is how current affairs works more or less. Some of it's softened a little bit that

not quite as overtly sexist as they were or overtly racist as they were. But they interviewed Cheryl

Kono on it, but they also interviewed Paul in Hanson. And it's a very good episode to help the

media to account. Yes, I use Anafobic and she says, please explain and he can't explain it,

which was what I noticed at the time too. It's all right to point out somebody else was a literacy

but make sure you know the meaning of the word. But she has that remarkable survivability

that really comes from having a very soft press. A press that didn't laugh her out of existence when

she suggested a 1% tax on each part of the car manufacturing, which would have made cars

something like $3 million each. When she that doesn't react in horror that calls it,

this is what we're all thinking. When she says things like autistic kids shouldn't be allowed in

mainstream classes. They're too disruptive. All of them apparently. And of course, when she says

hideously racist things and the most recent one being good Muslims, or they're not being

any good Muslims. Not being any good Muslims. What does that mean? And then how does that

Joe with our relationship with Indonesia, which is often frosty and fractures? If she got into any

real influence, Australian foreign affairs would have to work extremely hard to assure the biggest

Muslim nation in the world, which is Indonesia, that she didn't mean it, or that her views are not

held by most Australians, or that it was just political rhetoric or what have you. It's any

defense I give of the, or any argument I give in favor of the system is by no means an endorsement

of one nation. If you're thinking of voting for one nation, don't, it gives you cancer.

And I can say that because that's the level of evidence that they use.

Now, a lot of people have been asking, asking, we do like to be asked all of these questions and

we've got all the answers. I'm not sure if they're right, but we do have answers. But the question

is, what does this one nation vote actually mean? Is it this ideological shift of the entire

electorate or the community? Is it a shift to the right or a protest vote? What exactly is it? But

I think when you look at it closely, it's probably a mixture of everything. It's anti-establishment.

There's a backlash against costs of living pressure. There's a deep distrust of the major

parties as well. There's a bit of anti-immigration feeling there as well, even though the state

governments can't actually do anything about immigration levels. There's a bit of sovereign

citizen vibe going on there as well. But overall, I just don't think that this is a shift to the right.

I think it's a shift within the right itself because it's pretty much a shifting of the

deck chairs. David, I don't want to bring up that Titanic analogy, but Pauline Hansen was originally

from the Liberal Party when she first came into parliament all those years ago. Cory Bernardi,

he's actually the leader of one nation in South Australia. He used to be in the Liberal Party.

Barnby Joyce, he used to be in the National Party. So I think that's what has changed. These people

were part of the coalition at one time in their political career or initially in their political

career. They've shifted over to one nation and that vote has shifted with them. And I think that

explains some of the increase in the primary vote for one nation. These people have come over from

the Liberal Party or the National Party. And whatever we might think of the Liberal Party, there's a

veneer of respectability within the electorate for that party. And if it's former members or if a

member of the Liberal Party or National Party, if they join up with one nation, that gives the

one nation party a veneer of respectability. I think what's happened is that the Liberal Party,

particularly in South Australia, particularly in Western Australia, particularly in Victoria,

and looks like New South Wales has fractured so much that it's losing voters until an alternative

is sorted out whether through a brand new leadership with policies that do actually resonate

with the electorate or a brand new party. I think we're finding that some voters who would have

voted Liberal have gone to the Greens. Some have gone to one nation. Now there's a spread there.

They get 22% of the vote, apparently, and they get one, maybe two seats. And this is the same issue

that the Greens face. The Greens are in a little bit better a position, I think, because they do

have a rural vote and an urban vote. Whereas one nation, you won't get a significant one-nation

vote south of Taramara, west east of Emu Plains, north of Wollongong in New South Wales, and

Melbourne's Perth Adelaide's the same. They're just not appealing to the urban voters.

Queensland's a bit different. And again, not because Queensland is a whole bunch of rednecks,

it has managed to sort out its centre-right issue by merging the two parties.

And they got a bit like in that they were able to organise properly when the Labour party ran out

of steam. The Labour parties run out of, or is running out of steam in Victoria, but I don't know

it's going to happen there. The Liberal Party in New South Wales isn't running out of steam,

but it's not working terribly well. They got rid of the leader's speakmen. But we've got a problem

in that the biggest voting bloc in Australia isn't represented across, which is the urban

voting bloc, isn't represented across the full political spectrum, or at least not effectively.

Now, when I say that, I'm fully aware that we have the teal candidates and the pre-teal candidates.

Starts with Rebecca Sharkey and Helen Haynes and Zali Stegel, who weren't teal exactly, but got

in for the same reason that the later teal candidates did. You know, that's a good thing.

I think it's very possible that we are heading into a very Italian situation where we will have

lots of minor parties who are really independent, forming these huge unwieldy coalitions for a while.

I think that's, I'm not saying that's definitely what's going to happen, but I think that's

well within the realms of possibility. I guess going back to that issue of the

preferencing system, because those things will be the theme of today, you know, that preferencing

system is so unfair because we didn't win the sort of thing. And as we discussed before,

I think it is a fair system, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be reformed. And we wrote a

book about all of this David fixing Australian politics. And I mention that because every time I

mention it, we get a couple of sales during the week. So that's the book fixing Australian politics.

But it's a good book. And while you're there by a couple of others, they're all good books.

Of course they are. And I did apply some figures based on this mixed member system,

such as the one that exists in New Zealand, had a little bit of spare time during the week. And

it is a little bit rough, but at the state level and all things being equal. But if

MMP or MMR existed in South Australia on Saturday night, all things being equal,

Labor would have won 20 seats, one nation around 10 seats, liberals, eight greens around five seats,

independence five. So they would have been a parliament that more closely represents how people

voted. So the Labor Party would still win the election, but it would have to form a coalition

with the South Australian Greens and maybe one or two of the independence. But at the federal level,

because I had a little bit more spare time than I expected, David. And I had a bit more

data to work with from the 2025 federal election and haven't factored in the Senate vote,

but at the federal election, and again, all things being equal, Labor still wins the election if we

have MMP, MMR. Labor still wins the election, but not as comfortably. It gets around 61 seats.

Liberals and LNP get around 49 seats. Nationals have seven seats. The greens win 22 seats,

and one nation gets 11 seats. And once again, Labor would have to form a coalition with the

Australian Greens to govern, and wouldn't Anthony Albanese love that, he could call them the Greens

political party all day long. But I think this is just a far more representative government. It might

not be as stable, but I think it would result in better government. So if you've got a Labor

Greens coalition, Labor wants to join the war with the United States and the Israel against Iran,

the Australian Greens would say, no, we want to have a parliament revolt on that before we proceed.

Renewable energy superpower that Anthony Albanese keeps talking about, but hasn't actually

delivered, will the Australian Greens force him to actually do it? Housing policy,

implement that instead of talking about it and arguing with his negative-giving

changes, implement that too. Now, generally, I don't think very much of the Liberal Party,

I think that's pretty obvious and I think even less of one nation. But the point is that if two

parties combined are pulling in 41% of the primary vote, not only getting around 10% of the

seats, that's not a healthy democracy. And in the same way, if Labor and the Australian Greens

collectively received around 46% of the primary vote, which is what they received at the 2025

federal election, mainly one 10% of the seats, will I be pretty pissed off about that? So

sure, we can say that this is how the system works at the moment, but it might not be working

well enough. We can also look at Labor's lower primary vote as a thing too. Yes, Labor

Stormtune was an extraordinary victory from Peter Melanoskas, but it's not that higher primary vote.

Yeah, that's right. Well, he got 37% of the vote. And 10 years ago, the argument he used to be,

well, you're not going to win an election unless you've got a four in front of your primary vote.

Now, he's getting these massive majorities with 37% of the vote.

As the price of fuel goes up, the value of a vote goes down.

It's, yeah, I think when you look at the raw figures, this is something that the South Australian

government needs to, I think, be wary of. It's not that well a seat. They were able to manipulate

the preferences very artfully, which is what Anthony Albanese's Labor Party in federal was able

to do. They didn't get that higher vote either, but they got, well, everybody voted for who they

wanted and said, if they can't get in, we'll vote for Labor. And this is one of the big existential

problems of the Liberal Party. People have stopped thinking that, oh, I'm going to vote for my

preferred candidate, but if they don't get in, I'll be happy with the Liberal Party getting in.

It's not happening on either side. In fact, it's totally collapsed on the Liberal side. It hasn't

collapsed yet on the Labor side, but if I was Labor, not only were giving free advice to the Liberal

Party, they didn't take any of it and look at what happened, but if I was Labor, I would be looking

at how do we improve our primary vote? Labor, I think, has some structural problems that aren't

apparent widely yet, but they're there if you look. I think it's possible we're heading to another

Labor split, but not yet. While they're winning, and it doesn't matter how they're winning,

I think it was Mark Latham who said, you only need one vote to win. Labor is in a good position.

When they start losing, we might start to, as we might start to see the split, as we've seen

with the Liberal Party, they were all very united and strong and powerful,

till the losses started coming through. And then the crack started to show much more visibly.

I will once you get those cracks happening in the veneer, that's when you start getting all those

defections, but we like it is, start seeing more defections to one nation from the Liberal Party

and from the National Party. I don't think anyone from the Labor Party is going to defect over to one

nation, although that's exactly what Mark Latham did. And this idea of defecting to one nation

might have seemed a bit of a far-fetched idea about a year ago, but it's not so ridiculous

today because we're actually seeing it happen in front of us. And there are a lot of hardline MPs

and Senators within the Liberal Party, and because the Liberal Party is falling apart,

one nation is starting to look more like a natural fit for some of these people. We mentioned

Corey Bernardi before. He was from the Liberal Party, Senator Alex Antich. He's within the Liberal

Party at the moment for how long we don't know, but he's hard-ride or far-right. And I can easily

see him or imagine him in the one nation chamber. And it's probably the bigger question about what

actually is the Liberal Party these days? And since the how era, it's been more or less the conservative

party, and it's become so conservative that it's destroyed itself. And Tony Barry from

Breadbridge Research, we call the Liberal Party of today the nasty party. And that idea of

means he's liberalism. Let's say he flushed down the drain. It was flushed down the drain

such a long time ago. Seventy-seven is the key year in Australia. Bill Hayden, becoming leader of

the Labour Party, with his smaller liberal approach to economics, and John Howard being appointed

Treasurer. That's where the shift really starts. And Goff Whitlam points the way in many ways.

He starts knocking tariff off things and things like that. But it was really when Hayden becomes

leader of the party, it allows for Bob Hawke and Paul Keating to come through. When Howard

becomes leader of the party, it starts a 15-year civil war, really, maybe a bit longer. And

about 15 years between the deconite soul of the Liberal Party, a redite soul, or really between

the Keynesians and the Neolips, and which the Neolips win. But they're now starting to lose,

because that philosophy is dying. My friend Andrew Shields has pointed out that it was the oil

shocks of the 1970s that opened the door to neoliberalism. Looks like it'll be the oil shock of

2026 that'll show it, that'll finish it off. And I thought that was a very, I'd like to take

credit for it myself, but he might be listening. So I better credit him properly. And that's part of

the thing that the philosophy that the Liberal Party built itself under from 87, has been shown

to have failed. And this is what is leading to its electoral collapse. New South Wales is going to

be very interesting, because you have a not very popular Labour Party, although it's leading in the

polls. Let's be fair. And a fragmenting Liberal Party. Victoria is going to be interesting. You've

got a very tired Labour Party. And I don't know that anyone would really seriously hold just

into Alan to account having followed one of the most all-time popular premieres ever into a

fourth election. It's not likely she'd be expected to win, but given the disaster that is the

Victorian Liberal Party, she might have to do it as a minority government. She just might do it.

Under normal circumstances, we'd be saying, yeah, they probably can't. They've lost a lot of

talent. They've got to rebuild the talent. There's a lot of good people in the party, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah. They're not ready. They're tired. They're running out of ideas. They need to

go into opposition and reset and put it in this case. You're not going to get a one-nation

government in Victoria. You're just not. Probably you might get won in Western Australia. You might get

won in Queensland. You might, but they're not likely either. Well, I guess the other point is that

well, yeah, we're speculating about elections in the future, but we've just had this one in

South Australia, and election results do give you clear data and information about how to proceed

with all of this. So you don't really have to speculate about these things too much. You now

got the facts on the ground, as I'd like to say, but you can see a natural formation happening here.

Liberal moderates may be the, and we're talking federally, but liberal moderates may be the

deals then on the other side. If you strip away all of the party branding and all that sort of

stuff and the fact that some of these are independence or whatever, if you just take all of that away,

you can see the liberal moderates and maybe the deals on one side, and then on the other side,

there's a conservative rum for the liberal party aligning with the nationals, Qatar, Australia party,

one nation, but the problem is that there just isn't enough of them, David. So if they ever wanted

to form government, they would still have to form a coalition amongst themselves, and then we're

back to where we first started. Another centre-right coalition with the same face is probably wearing

different badges, and I don't want to make this soil sound like a game of survival, but there might

be a few more splits and merges that are going to happen if the overall centre-right wants to

survive. Otherwise, it's just going to be a long, long time in opposition for them.

They really purged the moderates, and now they're fighting on the far right, which is insane.

The liberal party, of course, should be looking at the centre. You got a govern for the centre,

you can't govern from the fringes, and every time one nation says something outrageous,

the liberal party tries to outdo it, it seems. Now I will be fair, Matt Kahnavan did heavily

criticise Pauline Hanson's racism. So maybe there's hope, maybe, and the hope is from the national

party, still the most stable, despite the chaos it had, it's still the only seed it lost in the

last federal election went to an ex-national, Andrew G. So they're not as in dire straits,

as the liberal party is, and as the Labour Party will be when they lose, as inevitably,

at some point in the future they will. Having said that, anything can and does and will happen,

and yet predicting the future in Australian politics is really throwing a dice and hoping that

the numbers you guessed, except it's a hundred-side dice, and there's four of them, and you've got to

get the exact right for numbers to get anywhere. But all of the attention today has been on the

centre right, and people might be wondering, hang on, where's the centre left or the progressive

content, we'll get onto that soon, but the attention on the centre right is happening because that's

where all the chaos is, but the real question is, and you alluded to this before, David, could the

same thing happen to the centre left, and all the progressive side of politics, I won't call it

centre left, it's more centrist than centre left, but the progressive side of politics, or the

less conservative side of politics, and right now, right at this very moment, it seems very unlikely,

because at the moment, Labour is the dominant political party. It's probably going through its

most dominant period in its history, like federally, across most states of Australia, Western Australia,

South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, or though Victoria, not such a great position as

you explained before, David, the ACT, and all of these jurisdictions are in a real position

of real strength, and when you're in this sort of position, more political parties, they don't go

out looking for new parties, or trying to invent their political identity, and I can't imagine

Anthony Albanese and the Labour party holding all of those 94 seats in the lower house, and then

thinking, hang on, we better set up an alliance with the Australian Greens, or the Greens political

party who just hold one seat, well that's just not going to happen, but as you explained before,

David, politics does move very quickly, and just four years ago, 2022, four years ago, the coalition

held power federally, they were in government in New South Wales, in South Australia, they look

fairly entrenched, and maybe the coalition federally was a little bit wobbly at that time,

but now they're a complete mess, so four years into the future, could the Labour party face

the same fate, say in 2030 or 2031, it is very unlikely this stage, but four years ago when the

Liberal Party was in office, still in office federally and in South Australia, I don't think anyone

would have predicted that the coalition would only have 42 seats in parliament four years later,

and four years later just poll 19% of the primary vote in South Australia would be beaten by one

nation in the primary vote, so I don't see it happening, well it's not going to happen while

Labour is in office, but if you get some kind of breakaway faction from the Labour party, you did

happen in the 1950s, and sure they were in opposition when it happened, or if you get some left-wing

populist movement tapping into economic frustration, climate change issues, inequality, and those

issues that are pissing off the centre right at the moment, there's a lot of crossover into

progressive movements as well, but as you suggested, David, politics never stands still, so it's not

so obvious now, but I feel that the issues that have crumbled the Liberal Party, well they

could bleed over to the Labour Party, maybe not right now or definitely not right now because the

conditions for the Labour Party are not there as we speak, but the conditions might appear there

in later on and maybe not so far away. Archie Cameron, the national or the country party speaker

of the house for many years pointed out that in politics you conquer the walk one day and you

feather dust to the next, Harold McMillan in British politics, a week is a long time in politics,

the underlying fracture in the Labour Party is not really spoken openly, but it's there and that is

of course the position you hold on Palestine, and I think that's what the nearest precedent I

can think of is the Labour generally splits over religion, 1931 seems to be a separate, is the one

time Labour splits that it wasn't religion at the core because the Catholic Joe Lyons leaves the

party which is being led by the Catholic Jim Scullan, but the 1918 split or 1917 split over

conscription was really over Catholic versus Protestants, that Protestants tended to be in favor of

conscription, the Catholics tended to be against it, and that's because a lot of Catholics were

working class and they knew where the conscripted troops would come from. It's a little bit more complex

than that, but that's a big reason. 1956, the right Catholic faction splits and forms the democratic

Labour Party because they're very worried about communist influence in the Labour Party, not all

Catholics go of course, Arthur Colwell famously stays thinking that he can fix it from within. He

wasn't the only one, but Vince Garin, all of those leave to really just fill seats in the Senate

till 1975 or whenever when they finally get eased out, they have the old resurgence every now and then,

but they were basically seat warmers, the DLP, but nonetheless the split was real and feelings were

passionate. The split now over religion is your view on Palestine. Do you think Israel has a point

or do you not think Israel has a point? Labour Party official policy is to recognise Palestine,

which they did. It's not an ignore facts that might kick into my argument a bit, but very powerful

Labour figures are very much pro-Israel and very much pro-Zionist. This is what I think will

be the underlying split in the Labour Party once they lose power at the moment everyone's friends

because they're powerful because they're in government because they're doing very well. One of

the things too that Labour has that Morrison and Abbott and really Turnbull never really had was

that it's a fairly competent ministry at the federal level. We haven't had many scandals,

we haven't had many issues with spending and poor policy and that we've had a few that haven't

been an absolutely perfect government, but the Australian electorate likes competence and stability

and Labour has been able to give that mostly. Again, not to say that there've been this perfect

party of government we're living in a Australian utopia. So basically the split in the

Labour Party isn't going to happen next week, that's what you're telling us. I don't think so.

Although things expand in the Middle East, who knows? But yeah, but at the moment there's

everyone knows that you get better paid when you're a government back bench, you get better paid

when you're a government minister, you can actually and probably on OB-FARE, you can do a lot more

in government than from outside government. Oh, for sure. The other thing is that those 94 seats

that the Labour Party holds at the moment, they hold those until 2028 as well. That's another two

years. So things can change quite dramatically within two years. All of this might settle down,

might increase. We just never know, but the big point is that politics is a moving

feast. We just never know when things are going to change on the horizon. When things look all

rosy and you look at the horizon and think, oh, that's not going to change or nothing different

is going to happen, then it all changes when you least expect it. Yeah, it's insane. As I said,

it's throwing 400, trying to predict it, it's throwing 400-sided dice and having to get the

right numbers in the right order. It happens occasionally. But not as often as you'd think.

That's it for this episode of New Politics. Thanks for listening in. And if you value independent

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I'm David Lewis. See you next time.