The Erosion of Trust

The major parties are bleeding support and everyone in Canberra knows it.

Primary votes for Labor and the Coalition have been trending downwards for years, and the 2022 federal election drove the point home: together they barely scraped 68 per cent of first-preference votes.

That is the lowest combined share either side has recorded in the modern era. The rest went to Greens, independents, One Nation, the Centre Alliance and a handful of others.

In seat after seat, especially in the cities, voters deliberately parked their primary vote elsewhere and only let it flow back to a major party through compulsory preferences.

That is not a ringing endorsement; it is a polite way of saying “none of the above, thanks”.

Trust has been eroding for a long time. Essential and Newspoll have tracked satisfaction with the major parties in the low thirties for years now.

When the Resolve Political Monitor asks people whether Australia is heading in the right direction, the “wrong direction” number often sits above 50 per cent.

People are not walking away because they have suddenly discovered minor parties; they are walking away because the majors keep giving them reasons to.

Some of it is straightforward incompetence: the sports rorts affair, robodebt, the continuing failure to build enough housing or keep power prices under control.

Some of it is the sense that both sides have drifted away from the concerns of ordinary voters.

Labor’s prolonged internal argument over the Voice to Parliament soaked up political oxygen while cost-of-living pressures mounted. The Coalition spent a decade arguing with itself about climate and energy policy and still has not settled on a coherent line.

Both parties have embraced social positions (on identity, gender and culture) that large parts of the electorate either do not share or simply do not care about when grocery and mortgage bills are going through the roof.

As the base narrows, the incentives inside each party room shift toward keeping the loyalists happy rather than reaching out to the disillusioned middle. That, in turn, makes it even harder to win back the voters who have left.

The two-party system survives in Australia largely because of compulsory and preferential voting. Even with minority primary votes, one of the big two almost always forms government.

That institutional advantage is now the only thing keeping the duopoly alive.

Expect both sides to defend it fiercely in the years ahead.

We have already seen proposals to raise the membership thresholds for party registration, cap third-party campaign spending, or change public funding formulas in ways that favour incumbents.

Labor has flirted with voter-ID laws; the Coalition has talked about tightening donation rules that would hit new entrants hardest. None of these ideas are being sold as attempts to lock in the status quo, but that is what many of them would do.

The longer the majors delay genuine reform (clearer policy positions, less factional warfare, a willingness to tackle housing supply and energy security head-on), the more seats will fall to well-organised independents or disciplined minor parties.

The trend is already visible in state elections in Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia.

Australia is not facing a sudden revolution, just a slow, steady fragmentation.

The old duopoly is not going to vanish overnight, but it is going to have to fight harder, and dirtier, to hang on to the privileges it has taken for granted for generations.

Thought for the Day