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One of the less appealing features of Australian politics is the reflexive reaction to election results, in which the winners are hailed as geniuses and the losers are dismissed as hapless dopes. Over the years, the directors of the winning campaigns have even been given a chance post-election to expound on their brilliance in an address to the National Press Club. Their explanations of what happened have then been accepted as holy writ by the media.

To be sure, winners deserve to be grinners. The Labor Party is now in office, so it got more than a few things right. But every election result contains complexities and surely this election more than any in living memory was overflowing with them. The national electorate has hedged its bets.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese addresses the first Labor caucus meeting at Parliament House.Credit:James Brickwood

There are still two seats undecided, but the provisional count suggests that the Coalition lost 19 seats, Labor picked up an extra nine, independents seven and the Greens three. The Albanese government has a majority of one or two.

Theres been a lot of talk about the disruptive force of the teal independents and whether the Liberals need to steer left or right (mostly right, say their media boosters) but less discussion about what the rise of the Greens will mean. The Greens look set to have 12 senators and, if they want, will be able to thwart much of the governments legislative agenda.

This doesnt necessarily mean the new government cant go on to a long and happy existence; performance and events will determine that. But there are lessons in this result for all sides and they mostly go to beliefs, philosophy and policy. One question parties should be asking themselves is: when it comes to ideology, how much is enough?

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The downfall of the Coalition government proves yet again that politics must ultimately be about more than power. Weve been here before. Theres a strong parallel between the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison government and the Fraser government. Both served three terms. In both cases, prior to taking office the Coalition struggled to cope with being consigned to opposition and the fact the public had elected and then re-elected a Labor government.

Apart from Malcolm Turnbulls brief, ill-fated attempt to work with Kevin Rudd on an emissions trading scheme in 2009, the Liberals and Nationals during both eras squandered their opposition years. Sure, they destroyed their opponents within two terms, but they didnt have the debates about how to re-equip and develop a fresh policy perspective. Once back in office, they didnt set out to do much. All they knew was politics. All they had was politics.

By the third term, voters wanted something more forward-looking. Neither Fraser nor Morrison could provide that. Morrisons philosophical and ideological vacuity was not an accident. He was chosen out of panic after the Liberals had worked through Abbott, whose most successful setting was negative, and Turnbull, who was said to be too left-wing but was not, having agreed to stifle many of his inclinations to win back the leadership.

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The Greens could fatally wound Labor, as they have done before - Sydney Morning Herald

Several prominent liberals took to social media to praise the anonymous individual who leaked the Supreme Courts reported draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization Monday night, which appeared to show that the Court intends to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The unprecedented leak revealed that the majority of justices had reportedly agreed in a December vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, which protects abortion as a constitutional right, though the vote is not yet final and may still change, according to Politico. Some liberals praised the move as a heroic last-ditch effort to derail the Courts decision.

As we started discussing here, it is shocking both in substance and also shocking in terms of what it means about the court, and what it means about the stakes here that someone was willing to do this, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow saidlate Monday. It is just a remarkable thing.

Some liberals saw the public outcry over the leak as a good thing, noting that it could put pressure on justices to reconsider their decisions. (RELATED: States Considering A 15-Week Abortion Ban Anticipate Overturn Of Roe)

Is a brave clerk taking this unpredecented step of leaking a draft opinion to warn the country whats coming in a last-ditch Hail Mary attempt to see if the public response might cause the Court to reconsider? said Brian Fallon, executive director of the liberal group Demand Justice.

All Democrats need to show the same urgency as the clerk who apparently risked his or her career to sound this alarm. Those on the inside know best how broken the institution is. We should listen, Fallon added.

Seriously, shout out to whoever the hero was within the Supreme Court who said fuck it! Lets burn this place down,wrote Ian Millhiser, a senior correspondent at Vox .

A leak like this has never in the modern history of SCOTUS. It is a massive deal that someone thought the public deserved to see what was going on in their chambers. A hero, Jezebel senior reporter Caitlin Cruz said.

Some legal experts speculated that the leak may have violated the law. Mike Davis, a former clerk for Justice Gorsuch, said the leaker was likely guilty of felony obstruction of justice.

Editors note: This story incorrectly identified Mike Davis as a former clerk for Justice Samuel Alito, rather than Justice Neil Gorsuch. The story has been accurately updated.

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Liberals Cheer On SCOTUS Leaker Who Shattered Court Norms As Hero

It is time that my Liberal-National colleagues in Canberra hear the message from the Australian people. The values that the Liberal party represents enterprise, liberty, opportunity, a strong economy and a secure country are as important today as at any time in our history.

The Liberal party suffered massive defeats in our heartland not because these values stopped speaking to the electorate but because the electorate stopped hearing a Liberal party speaking for these values.

Moderate Liberals lost their seats because their electorate thought they hadnt done enough on the issues that mattered to them. Its important that the moderate Liberals still in Canberra now find their voice and assertively represent centre Australia. Great MPs do not put party before principle because political parties are the principles MPs stand for.

Too often the previous government indulged in culture wars, egged on by the rightwing commentariat; failed to hear, respect and act on the concerns of women; and pretended facts for example, that humans are causing climate change didnt exist.

And the facts are these: women earn less than men for the same work; women retire with half the superannuation as men; women take on vastly more of the load when it comes to caring for our children and our seniors. One woman dies every week in Australia as a result of domestic or family violence.

No party can stand for liberty and opportunity if it fails to see these issues and want to address them. A party which truly stands for liberty empowers women and affords them the same dignity, opportunity and respect it affords men.

Similarly, no party can seriously say that it stands for a strong economy and a secure country when it is failing to act on climate change.

Climate change risks an environmental catastrophe. It wont just be future generations who will judge our leaders on the action we take a pretty clear judgment was handed down on Saturday night.

Some will say we cant go further on these issues because of the base. Lets be clear, the traditional Liberal party base watches more ABC than Sky After Dark.

Not a single one of the Morrison governments lost seats went to a rightwing party or candidate. One Nation and Clive Palmers United Australia party performed poorly while Labor and the Greens snatched seats.

These seats are not coming back to the Liberal party until the issues these voters care about are sincerely addressed.

Sincerity does not mean some tweaks. It means supporting universal, affordable and accessible childcare so that women do not have to choose between having children and having a career. It means acting on sexual harassment at work. It means speaking out against dangerous anti-vaccine and Trumpian conspiracies.

It also means adopting science-aligned emissions reduction targets of between 45% and 60% by 2030 and developing the policies to achieve it. The science says that the black summer bushfires were the beginning, not the end. The fact is that, until the federal Liberal partys policy position responds commensurately to the climate challenge, every record-breaking natural disaster over coming years will make that policy seem out of touch with the challenge at hand.

Not only is it possible for the Liberal party to respond to the challenges of the moment the Liberal party should be the natural party to take action on climate change. It is a core conservative value to act as a custodian for future generations and, with our wind and sun, no country has more opportunity from the worlds push to decarbonise than Australia.

In New South Wales, we are building renewable energy zones, have set a 50% emissions reduction target by 2030 and have legislated our electricity infrastructure roadmap. The roadmap will reduce Australias greenhouse gas emissions more than any other policy in Australian history.

I announced the roadmap with Dom Perrottet at a solar farm in Dubbo when he was treasurer, and with the then deputy premier, John Barilaro. This landmark policy was supported across all the wings of the Liberal party, the National party, the Labor party, the Greens and the independents. We built that coalition by ensuring we reduced emissions in ways that supported more affordable, reliable electricity, and created thousands of jobs in the regions.

The NSW government, led by my conservative colleague and good friend, premier Perrottet, has also made no secret of the importance we place on promoting gender equity.

Last year we started a review into womens opportunity led by Sam Mostyn of Chief Executive Women. I may have commissioned that review, but it was something that Dom had started working on as treasurer. And it is something which we will respond to in next months budget.

The Liberal party is at its best when its meeting the challenges of the time with principles which have stood the test of time. That is what the NSW Liberal-National government is doing, and that is what I hope to see a newly elected Liberal-National government in Canberra do in three years time, having learned the lessons of last weekend.

Original post:
Liberals still in Canberra must find their moderate voice and assertively represent the centre - The Guardian

Pandoras Box, 2021. Marcel Dzama. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Art: Marcel Dzama

On Wednesday, the Washington Posts Taylor Lorenz reported on the disastrous rollout of the Department of Homeland Securitys Disinformation Governance Board. Announced on April 27 with a hazy remit to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, the initiative generated immediate fierce backlash from conservative pundits and politicians who compared it to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwells 1984. The expert tapped to lead the board, Nina Jankowicz, faced a wave of ferocious, viral, and often personal attacks online as well as scrutiny over her past statements seeming to betray her partisan sympathies. Now, just three weeks later, the Disinformation Governance Board is no more, and Jankowicz has resigned.

According to Lorenz and her sources (other disinformation researchers, as well as staffers in DHS and on the Hill), Jankowicz was taken down by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating and was undermined by a flat-footed, timid response from the Biden White House. The campaign against Jankowicz and the board, Lorenz writes, was a prime example of how the right-wing internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them. In other words, the Disinformation Governance Board was undone by a textbook disinformation campaign.

This version of the story is richly ironic and tragic. As one Hill staffer told Lorenz, Ninas role was to come up with strategies for the department to counter this type of campaign, and now theyve just succumbed to it themselves. But from another perspective, the rights campaign against the Disinformation Board resembled any other successful advocacy effort to halt a government initiative. As with most activist endeavors, some of the facts were fudged, innocuous statements were deprived of context and tendentiously interpreted, those in charge were depicted as cartoonish villains, and a more complex story was reduced to a fairy-tale struggle between the forces of good and evil not great, but when it comes to political messaging in our polarized age, par for the course. (I can recall quite a bit of Manichaean simplification happening during the Trump years.)

Obviously, I sympathize with Jankowicz. No doubt she faced an astronomical volume of right-wing nastiness, dishonest attacks on her reputation, and genuinely disturbing threats. Im sure the administration could have done more to insulate her from the backlash. But other than that, I dont see how a fully operational Disinformation Governance Board could have prevented this outcome except via the very means conservatives (mistakenly?) feared it would possess. If, as Lorenz is careful to note, neither the board nor Jankowicz had any power or ability to declare what is true or false, or compel Internet providers, social media platforms or public schools to take action against certain types of speech, then how would it have prevented right-wingers from tweeting terrible, dishonest things about Jankowicz? Lorenzs reporting seems to arrive at a Catch-22: The rights campaign to depict Jankowicz as a government censor amounts to disinformation only if she and the DHS were indeed helpless to stop it.

I know, Im being slightly glib. The truth is, I think its important for smart people to analyze the ways in which the architecture of social media facilitates and incentivizes witch hunts and the dissemination of hateful, dishonest content. And the government likely has a role to play in coercing tech platforms to prioritize the public interest over the profit motive in crafting their algorithms. But I dont think it requires any great leap of conspiratorial thinking to find fault with a disinformation board under the aegis of the DHS. Government officials whoever resides in the White House are professional liars. They lie haughtily in the interest of national security, sheepishly in the interest of saving face, and passionately when their jobs are on the line. Would Jankowiczs office have been empowered to counter disinformation coming from her own department? Or only from those criticizing it? And what would its remit have been under the next Republican presidency? As one conservative writer put it, Its not clear to me that Democrats have fully reckoned with the non-negligible possibility that Donald Trump is in charge of the new Disinformation Governance Board in 2 years.

But the other pernicious problem with liberals fixation on disinformation is that it allows them to lie to themselves.

Trumps ascendance in 2016 posed a painful psychic challenge to liberal elites. It suggested the possibility that many millions of Americans were motivated by deep, venomous dissatisfactions with the world they had helped create, that our cultural disagreements were profound, not superficial, and that our perspectives were practically irreconcilable inversions of each other. Political reality seemed to tilt on its axis. How could a man who appeared to them so transparently abhorrent and clownish be welcomed by others as a savior or at least as a tolerable alternative to the status quo?

Disinformation was the liberal Establishments traumatic reaction to the psychic wound of 2016. It provided an answer that evaded the question altogether, protecting them from the agony of self-reflection. It wasnt that the country was riven by profound antinomies and resentments born of material realities that would need to be navigated by new kinds of politics. No, the problem was that large swaths of the country had been duped, brainwashed by nefarious forces both foreign and domestic. And if only the best minds, the most credentialed experts, could be given new authority to regulate the flow of fake news, the scales would fall from the eyes of the people and they would re-embrace the old order they had been tricked into despising. This fantasy turned a political problem into a scientific one. The rise of Trump called not for new politics but new technocrats.

Like other pathological reactions to trauma, the disinformation neurosis tended to re-create the conditions that produced the affliction in the first place. (Freud called this repetition compulsion.) By doubling down on elite technocracy and condescension toward the uneducated rubes suffering from false consciousness liberals have tended to exacerbate the sources of populist hostility. As Joe Bernstein documented in Harpers last year, the antidisinformation industry has attracted massive investment from wealthy Democratic donors, the tech industry, and cash-rich foundations. Hundreds of millions of disinfo dollars are sloshing around the nonprofit world, funding institutes at universities and extravagant conventions across the world. Last months Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy conference was headlined by Barack Obama and featured Anne Applebaum, David Axelrod, Jeffrey Goldberg, and a lengthy list of other academic, journalistic, and political luminaries. Im sure very interesting ideas were discussed there. But gathering the leading lights of liberalism to an auditorium at the University of Chicago so that they together can decide which information is true and safe to be consumed by the rabble outside strikes me as a hollow exercise in self-soothing, more likely to aggravate the symptoms of our legitimacy crisis (distrust and cynicism) than resolve any of its impasses.

Dont get me wrong: There are obviously hard problems to be worked out regarding technology, speech, and democracy, and I have great respect for scholars working in that nettlesome nexus. But as Bernstein put it, the new class of disinformation experts, however well intentioned, dont have special access to the fabric of reality. If faith in our institutions is to be restored, I dont think it will be accomplished by stigmatizing doubt or obstructing the dissemination of falsehood. After all, faith is not a matter of fact and fiction.

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The Liberal Obsession With 'Disinformation' Is Not Helping - New York Magazine

It is pretty human to crave the approval of peers and to hope for more of the same, even if unconsciously.

But for political parties selling themselves as unifying forces of the middle, broad-based and representative, this way lies atrophy. And death.

Courting the applause of extreme media voices is a formula for narrowing a partys electoral reach.

Yet this is where the Liberal Party of Australia has journeyed over its nine years in office. First under Tony Abbotts ideological zealotry and then through various squalls and culture wars since.

After unsuccessful attempts to address climate policy by Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg the latter being the standout casualty of the 2022 reckoning the preference for clever politics over policy solutions has drawn the Liberal Party further from the great Australian middle, and towards gratifying the sharper grievances of religious conservatives and the electoral gains from suburban outsider resentment.

Throwing out euphemisms like the quiet Australians to camouflage his real project of demonising elites, Scott Morrison told a mining conference a year ago Were not going to achieve net-zero in the cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities.

It turns out this was a thumb in the eye to his own partys greatest asset, its rusted-on intergenerational base of cashed-up professionals in its heartland. In the year since, this support base has been not just ignored, but insulted.

Depicted as mere dupes for even considering candidates wanting swifter action on climate change, corruption, and gender equality, life-long Liberals rebelled, voting with their well-heeled feet.

On May 21 2022, Morrisons divisive strategy backfired spectacularly.

His personal appointment of the anti-trans Katherine Deves in Warringah (a once Liberal seat with the second highest pro-marriage equality vote in NSW in 2017) did not turn the election nationally, but its symbolism mattered.

It said everything about the slice of Australia to which Morrisons Liberal-Nationals government had become in thrall.

Dog whistling Devess harmful views to the marginal outer-suburbs where Morrison thought they might just resonate, was a moral low point in major party politics in Australia. But it was also an undiluted electoral disaster.

So how does the party of Menzies forgotten people and John Howards broad church read the result, and then re-tool for recovery?

That task is made far more difficult because so many of the partys leading lights have been washed away in Morrisons great electoral bungle. The most important loss is the aforementioned Frydenberg (it seems) because the erstwhile treasurer and deputy leader represented the articulate urbane centre-ground. Clearly the most gifted and saleable Liberal in the parliament, he was the heir apparent.

His absence highlights that even the early logistical decisions will set the course. Among the few remaining moderates, Simon Birmingham told Insiders on Sunday, who they choose to be leader will set the tone of the opposition, but influence its policy also.

Therefore, it matters. Assuming Frydenberg does not scrape through on a favourable postal vote surge, Peter Dutton is the both the most likely leader, and the most conservative.

His selection would inevitably take the Liberal Party further from its disillusioned traditional blue-ribbon supporters - certainly in Victoria but elsewhere also.

Voters who walked in 2022, would keep walking.

Here, the basic maths are crucial. It is hard to imagine the Coalition even getting to 76 seats in future without recovering some or all of the teal seats.

Read more: A narrow Labor win and a 'teal bath': all the facts and figures on the 2022 election

Yet history shows that good independents consolidate their wins, suggesting these seats would be very hard to recover at any time, let alone when policy and personnel options are this limited.

Besides, finding genuinely local, top-shelf female candidates who are both capable and willing to take on a Zoe Daniel or a Monique Ryan and who are prepared to campaign over almost a whole term, will be a supremely difficult task.

Making that commitment for a party with two more average conservative men running it (names like Angus Taylor and Dan Tehan have been mentioned) is even more difficult to picture. And if one of them is Peter Dutton, probably impossible.

This explains why Liberals are casting about for a woman to take one of the two leadership posts, probably that of deputy. Karen Andrews and Sussan Ley have been floated.

Surveying the carnage, Birmingham observed that the wellsprings of the weekend rout began a long time ago with the needlessly drawn-out marriage equality vote, (a full-blown culture war) and the rejection of the National Energy Guarantee championed by Frydenberg and Turnbull.Both political storms had registered negatively with soft Liberals in the heartland seats, leaving many distinctly unimpressed.

Yet as the beleaguered party considers its options, entreaties to double-down on the very things that alienated it from its base are already being aired. The logic can be well hidden.

A hardliner from South Australia, Senator Alex Antic, told Sky News on Sunday,

>The Liberal Partys experiment with the poison of leftism and progressivism must be over.

Other prominent conservatives on the network suggested Liberals who had become pale imitations of Labor were the ones defeated, whereas hardliners who stood up against climate policy and who oppose a First Nations Voice to Parliament, had been successful.

These were their takes after the most significant shift to the left by mainstream voters in memory.

They highlight the influence of ideology and what looms as a wrestle for the centre-right soul that lay ahead.

Sensible Liberals meanwhile, have some big decisions to make.

They could listen to the extremist voices in partisan media, remembering of course its what got them to here. Or they could be more self-critical.

In a democracy, its never a terrible idea to listen to what the voters have just told you. Their message wasnt hidden at all.

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Morrison's 'great electoral bungle' leaves the Liberals decimated and heading in the wrong direction - The Conversation Indonesia