The Chaser Report - Teal and Loathing | Lech Blaine

Episode Date: June 8, 2022

Writer and journalist Lech Blaine joins Charles and Dom to talk about his recent article in The Monthly 'Teal and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail'. Lech comprehensively unpacks the election past from the perspective of a group that usually goes unheard - the voters. Lech's article can be read here: https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/may/lech-blaine/teal-and-loathing-campaign-trail#mtr Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. It is Wednesday the 8th of June of 2022, Dom Knight and Charles Firth. And Charles, our guest today has actually done what we didn't do during our daily election podcast. Yes, yes. He's travelled around the country, talked to actual voters. Oh dear. We tried to keep that out of our podcast, didn't we?

Leck Blaine's got the cover story in the monthly. It's Teal and Loathing on the campaign trail. It's very, very long and detailed and has quite. reporting so it's a bit of a change from the usual focus of this podcast yeah so maybe if you're a regular listener tune out now you know you don't want to hear this one catch up with you in a sec the chaser report news you know you can't trust like welcome to the chaser report yeah thanks guys thanks for having me you've been everywhere what did ordinary people think of scott morrison because that seems to be the crux of your essay uh there there was i'd say

there were some surprising people who, like, still were quite sympathetic towards him. Usually people out, like in regional areas, older people. Even Labour voters would be like, oh, he's at a tough run. And then you'd talk to anyone who was sort of in a more metropolitan area or who had been closely affected by lockdowns or vaccinations, and they were basically like, fuck Scott Morrison. I hate that guy so much. And that became like this repetitive thing where if I had a report to everyone who said,

fuck scomo, like it just would have been like 80 odd people. Wow. So you did talk to... So you talked to most of his colleagues. Yeah, right. No, so, like, I reckon the essay probably has about 10% of the conversations that I had. So I sort of had to try and, like, pick the ones that, like, I guess, encapsulated the mood of different places. But, like, I could have written, like, a 30,000-word essay of just these, like, really amazing quotes from people, like, wandering around and stuff.

It's a weird approach to journalism to go and actually talk to people. Well, shouldn't you have just sat behind a desk and just intuited the vibe of, the nation is that what you're supposed to do it's so i'm from um i'm from queensland uh i lived in bundy recently before moving to sydney and then um came to sydney i notice whenever i go home uh whenever i talk to people from home about any given issue is completely different to the sort of consensus that i like now that i'm in sydney i'm sort of like moving through the media world like it's a very different uh viewpoint like not not there's you know Brisbane still has its university educated, progressive people, but there is still like this deep sense of parochialism and

like, uh, yeah, willingness to take the piss out of like the leadership and leaders and what an unusual journey you are in Australia, about a move in in Bundaberg without seeming like a wanker from the inner city. That's, um, cling to that way you can. Yeah, well, it's like it's probably, uh, it's probably diminishing. I can't, I can't be the, I can't be the outsider from Queensland, um, for too much longer after moving to the east and so it's the coffee like in they had this place called indulge which was like unbelievable they um it actually closed down but um they they used to no demand no they weren't serving rum it was uh it was it was it was super popular it had like um they used to have like kingfisher on um like omelets and shit so like

it was uh it was really uh it was probably probably better than any of the cafes that i've been to in sydney so but i'm not just saying that from a parochial point of view this is really interesting because i think the media in their attempt to try and make this kind of a horse race, as you describe in the essay, they didn't really get that a lot of people in Australia had just had enough of the guy. Yeah, or had just had enough of politics in general. Like, I was up in Bilaueila, which didn't go into the piece because I just sort of had to prioritize the seats that had changed hands.

And also, everyone who works for the monthly just has to go to Bilauea. Yeah. And so it was really interesting because we're at the pub, and I was with some of the organizers for the Home to Billow campaign, and they brought a couple who were national voters. farmers and so the one the two consensus at the table were um bringing the family back to bill wheeler and we hate fucking gotcha questions so um like that that came from the farmers as well and they were talking about albin like they there was a bunch of things that didn't like albinisi but they were like the one thing that they sympathised with him about was uh these gotcha questions

wow that's fascinating yeah which i'd relate to because if you'd been through school and you're not a little smart-ass know at all wouldn't you have flashbacks when you saw that just being Put on a spot by some annoying teacher. That's what I'll make the farmer said. The first thing he said was, mate, I can't ever vote for Labor. I've heard that Albanesey's going to make Bill Shorten the agricultural minister. And so that was the rumour going around Bill Wheeler. And then he was like politics should be about ideas, not a pop quiz,

which is like, yeah, it was interesting coming from someone who was like shit-caning Albanese otherwise. And a point that was lost on most of the press gallery. Yeah. Well, it's, and I'd get like, then I'd dip it, dip in. of the campaign then dip out to like go around and um my own perceptions would change of like what was happening in the campaign depending on like which mode i was in so i i was definitely at the start of the campaign was like oh albinesey could lose the election because of this gaff like it because i was consuming just constant twitter um like newspaper articles and that sort of thing and then

a lot of people that i would talk to not only did they not bring up um like the gaff they barely knew who anthony albinesey was so like that like that wasn't necessarily like it If you don't even really have awareness of the guy, that sort of stuff's not really registering. So did you find that the people who were more sympathetic towards Scott Morrison and Scott Morrison's plight, had they engaged less in the sort of rough and tumble of the last three years? Was it a sort of more of a perception? Like, you know, there was lots of comments during the campaign on box pops in regional areas where it was sort of like, well, we came through the pandemic.

quite all right so he needs he deserves another three years because he got us through and and to anyone who had lived in cities like no he was against us though and wa in particular and in melbourne you know like if you're in the cities it was like you knew that no he'd been trying to undermine the efforts to sort of control the virus so um like my brother still lives in bunderbergen as a car dealer up there and i would call him throughout the pandemic and he was just sort of like what pandemic so it just wasn't really happening. God, it would have been nice to be in Queensland. I don't know why I say that, but regional Queensland would have been incredible for the past two years.

And so, like, regional Queensland boom. Like every, like beef, the drought ended, commodity prices were going through the roof. Lots of people were moving there from down south. So house prices in these, like, regional areas were going through the roof as well. So people actually felt like, compared to 2019, where everyone in Queensland was just fucking, like, ripable, people were a little bit more relaxed. That didn't mean there was still people who, didn't like Morrison, but people didn't feel they'd been as affected by the stuff-ups.

It's very interesting that that farmer that you spoke to was still angry about Bill Shorten three years later. The only thing he wanted was not having Bill Shorten anywhere near his life. Yeah, and the, like, the fact that there was this, because he'd been to a National Party lunch during the week, and he was like, yeah, mate, first thing Albanyese is going to do was make Bill Shorten the agricultural minister. That's like it. And people up there just have this.

And it's amazing how this perception of Shorton over a long period of time was created, and it was so toxic, even though in a lot of ways him and Albanesee is a creature of the party as well. But he was just received way more, seen as a way more amicable figure than Bill Shorten. Like, even if people didn't know a lot about him, they didn't think that he was a bad dude who, like, wanted to do harm to them. It's a pretty amazing loss when people are still eight years laughed. you've had any influence. Okay, so Morrison, basically, this giant wave of anti-Morrison sentiment

was largely missed by everyone. What about when you went to marginal seats? Because this is, I mean, if someone's in a safe nationals electorate, it doesn't matter how much they hate Morrison or whatever if the seat doesn't change hands. You were on the teal story as well and some of the shifts going on there. What did you detect elsewhere in terms of how the election was won and lost?

Well, it was so when Morrison and the Liberals were sort of backgrounding they had this marginal, like marginal seat campaign where they're going to go after these out of suburban Labor seats. And I, and because I'd grown up in similar areas, I sort of felt like there might actually be something in that because I, like, I appreciate the way that people are a little bit more socially conservative. They're much more economically anxious.

And so I had this chat with this guy named Brad, who's in the essay, and I didn't get his final thoughts. But I saw him at the Ipswich Jets Leagues Club and, and, he was one of the guys who was just like, fucks, go-mo. Like, he voted for the LNP for the first time in 2019. Metal worker, traditional Labor voter. Should have, was like the ideal person that Morrison had in mind when he was thinking of these, like, out of suburban, quiet Australians.

He's in the seat of Blair, which Pauline Hanson ran in in 1998 and got like 35% of the primary vote. So this was like one of the key seats along with like Parramatta and Kerrangamide in Victoria where the Liberals thought to compensate for the teal seats, they'll flip all these red seats um and then yeah guys like brad i messaged him the night before the election and i was still sort of like what the fuck is going to happen tomorrow uh and i said mate who did you vote for who did you end up voting for because when i spoke to him he was like fuck the liberals fuck labor fuck the greens i don't know who i'm going to vote like i just don't know who i'm going to vote for

and so i messaged him night before election and he said um i'm voting for i voted for labor so he did a he did a pre-pole and so what he said was which sort of took my breath away he was like I voted for, I'm still worried that Labor are going to introduce new taxes. Like that was the thing, the bad thought that he had about Labor, like this gut instinct. But he was like, the Liberals have no vision for the country. I'm actually, I'm hoping that Labor will do more for renewable energy and treat Aboriginal people a bit better. And this bloke, like, he's like big red-headed metal worker covered in tattoos.

He's like, if you wanted to try and pigeonhole people or stereotype them based on how they appear, you'd think that he was going to be very sympathetic towards Morrison's sort of dog whistles and all this different shit. And the blokey act. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And so, but I think a lot of these voters in 2019, especially in Queensland, where there were these massive swings against Labor, a lot of it was economic anxiety. And then I think, uh, both sides of politics maybe overestimated how much it was based on cultural issues or, uh, climate change and that sort of but when Labor took some of the heat out of those issues and really presented as a safe pair of hands on the economy,

they weren't going to increase taxes, people felt a bit safer going back to them. I had a friend who saw some of the Labor's internal polling after the 2019 election, and about six months before this election, we sat down chatting about it, and he said, look, on one perspective, you could say that, Morrison is a master campaign strategist, right?

That is one way of interpreting 2019 because they are behind the whole time and then on election day they sealed the deal. The other interpretation you could have is that the polls were wrong the whole time. He was ahead the whole time and then he just barely scraped through and he's actually a terrible campaigner.

But less terrible than a genius. To be fair, he had to beat a guy who had a very ambitious and scary program. And who was rating minus 40 on net positive approval? And so you had the shortened factor, the policy factor, and then you had Clive Palmer who pumped all this money into his campaign for no real gain in votes, but just to freak people the fuck out about Labor. And then News Corp as well.

So, yeah, I certainly possibly over-invested in this idea as, Morrison had one and all these people purely through his, like, persona. When I think, yeah, as I said, I think a lot of people were voting based on economic anxiety. And the smart thing that he did, the persona made people feel comfortable. They, like, they didn't know much about him. So they saw him as just like a, yeah, this. He was an empty container. Yeah.

And you could project anything that you wanted onto him. Put a whole bunnings in it. Whether you're a religious voter in, like, the out of suburbs of the capital city, whether you're a coal miner in, like, Cessnock or Gladstone, there was, yeah, he was just able to sort of like send little hints here and there to all these different groups of people to say, I'm your guy. Well, it's interesting also the kind of disconnect that you chart between what's in voters' minds because you've actually asked them on the day and what people in the media think.

Like, it becomes self-perpetuating. People say, oh, it's a big mistake. He didn't know the unemployment numbers. And then that goes through the campaign without ever being actually tested to see whether it was on the minds of anyone at all who it's actually going to vote. And from what you've discovered voters are thinking far more holistic. about policy, about people's actually lives, rather than the kind of horse race. And you write about this a bit too, the way that it sometimes gets reduced to a horse race

rather than looking at where people want the country to go. And one interesting aspect of this that you picked up on was all these liberal voters switching to the Greens. And you had a bit of a sense of that before what was a shock to everyone on election night, the notion that quite a few seats in Queensland went to the Greens, which certainly was a bit of a fever dream probably from Adam Bantt beforehand, but you kind of saw it coming. Well, when Bant predicted that that was going to, that they were going to win these three seats at his National Press Club address, and I've lived in Brizzie on and off for five or six years, so I know the place well. And I thought, Metropolitan Brisbane, a lot of these seats

aren't that different to the Metropolitan seats in Sydney and Melbourne. So it's not, like, they're quite different to going up to Capricornia or Dawson or Flint. But I still thought it sounded pretty over-optimistic. And then when I got up to Brissy, I had this conversation with Paul Hilton, who I quote in the essay, and he's a grandson of a Labour MP, rural Labour MP,

the son of a trade unionist who went into accounting and became pretty well off and was loved John Howard, but he was like, again, fuck Scomo. And he said something really interesting, which is, I don't know any trans people, but fuck, it must be tough to be a trans person. So purely, like, through his hatred of Scomo,

he, like, found an allyship with trans people. What an amazing way to build acceptance of diverse sexualities. And so I was like, oh, this guy's going to vote for Labor then because he was a swinging voter. He'd voted for Labor before. He's got a family connection. And he was like, man, I'm going to vote for the Greens, like with a bit of like an enthusiasm in his eyes.

And yeah, I think that there was partly the Teals had awoken this sense of like people in these seats wanted something new. Like this guy believes he might be economically conservative in some ways, but he believes in climate change. he believes in like different social policies and so people like that just haven't really been given an option before and then the Greens have been on the ground

for a long time working quite assiduously within the community they run like community gardens and Griffith and stuff they were there for the flood recoveries yeah I heard they were for years not doing this incredible ground game of social services would come in and people would say oh look no the Greens have already given us a food delivery packet

I mean that's pretty impressive levels of work to win yeah and it's sort of like sets I come from like a devoutly Labor background, so my dad would be rolling in his grave to know that the Greens won seats in Queensland. But I think that it's a positive thing for politics to see the fruit of that active engagement on the ground. And it's good for democracy that people who don't feel like they're being represented within the two-party system are being given an option. And that sort of like sends a message to the major parties on both sides

and gives them like an incentive to actually do the grassroots work. Because actually, if you think about it, polls have consistently shown that 75, 80% of people want more action on climate change. And the two-party system actually doesn't deliver that. And the two-party, the problem is that the two-party system, the Labor holds three seats in the Hunter, and then the LMP hold three seats in central Queensland. So they're the six seats that are directly affected by, heavily affected by coal mining. And so neither party feels like they can afford to lose those three. seats on either side. And so that, in a way, is held up the ability to give voters in the

inner city or metropolitan areas what they want on climate change, which is more action. The Chaser Report, less news, less often. Should we just talk about the whole Catherine Deave's transgender strategy? Do you think that Scott Morrison thought that it was his tamper? Did he really, yeah, did he really think that was going to be a thing that turned red electorate's blue. My understanding, having chatted to liberals on background, was that, and he'd cut himself off from a lot of them, so, like, it was hard to know exactly what he was doing, but their sense

was that it was basically a fuck-up to put Deaves in there. He didn't put too much thought into it, and then it turned, like, he probably had a sense that she had these, like, social conservative bones, but, like, it wasn't part of this grandmaster strategy to flip all these seats. Actually, I guess it does check out that he wouldn't have actually. done the work. Done the work. And so there'd been another woman there

who was supposed to be running in Roringa, but then she fell out because she just got sick of getting fucked around. And so Deves came in. All this stuff happened in the context of a lot of disillusionment in the inner city. And so I think Morrison was basically found this

strategy and ran with it. Like it gave, because I spoke to a liberal a few days before the election. And I was like, mate, like Labor's a little bit anxious just because Morrison just keeps on going back to these, like, Corangamite and, like, Western Sydney and what, like, is there actually anything in this? Yeah, yeah.

And they were like, well, the polls just aren't, like, our internal polling just isn't showing that. But possibly what's happening is they just need to give him somewhere to go because they can't, they can't actually send him into, like, North Sydney or Wentworth or Goldstein. Like, they need, like, and so. So they just said, go to these ones. Go to these ones. You can't do any harm.

Yeah. Go to these ones and, like, look like, going to win. Yeah. You can't, the worst thing you can do, like, I think that they knew that they were heading towards the loss, but the worst thing that you can do in a campaign situation is, like, just be like, oh, we've lost. So imagine, imagine doing all that, kind of cut all those machinations to try and stop local

pre-selection and just be like, no, no, we're not, no, we're not going to, Alex Hawke's not going to turn up to the meeting, we're not going to do it, we're going to parachute in our handpick candidate. And then at the last minute, we're like, oh, she'll do. What's the worst thing can happen? Amazing. But look, you've identified a lot of anger towards Morrison that I think hasn't been really discussed much elsewhere. But you also talk about Albanese in the way that Labor tried to make him essentially non-scarry and make him the non-shorten.

And you describe how the kind of fighter aspect of his personality that were a big part of his persona early in his career were kind of tamped down during this campaign. What were some of the ways that they packaged Albo to be an acceptable, you know, devil you'd hate less than the other guy? Well, yeah, when he became leader, because he'd run in 2013, won the party vote but didn't get the caucus vote. And so he narrowly missed out to shorten. And then when he came up in 2019, I was sort of being a massive rugby league fan and coming from a sort of like diehard Labor family, I was looking forward to this Tory fighter, like leading the Labor Party, which is probably isn't really, what the electorate wants in reality like even within even within seats where people might culturally associate with those things they're very economically anxious and they don't want any like

old mate brad like he's a like historically a labor voter but he is scared that labor he's like internalized this idea that labor increases taxes and wants to take your money and so labor needed to whether to win an election they needed to not appear like a threat that could have been someone with more charisma might have like excited journalists more but they also might have freaked out people who are very like who are under mortgage stress or rental stress and who have this like deep anxiety that laborers are a bit out of touch and sort of want to just want to look after people in the in the cities and so he he changed his rhetoric he obviously changed his appearance over a long while and he ended up really looking and sounding like um just a middle of the road

politician, which in some ways is what he has become. Like, he's been in Parliament for a long time. He's not exactly the same person that he was in 1998, let alone, you know, um, 983. And so, yeah, I think that, um, partly it's just his own progression and the change of his personality. He didn't say on election night. Ha ha, ha, sucked in.

Fuck the Tories. Yeah. Which he could have easily done. No. Um, it was so disciplined and sort of like, uh, yeah, he was, he was really, um, it was a bit the Rudd textbook, wasn't it? Because if you think back, and we know what Rudd became, but if you think back to Rudd's pitch in 07 was very much, you know, I'm an economic conservative.

He really wore all these very conservative suits. He just wanted to be not that much more, not scarier than Howard. And I guess Alba followed the same template. He followed exactly. Like he was really close to Rudd and he definitely, like that, he definitely followed, like thought of Rudd as the model for winning. He didn't quite have Rudd's public profile and the, this amazing sort of affinity that Rudd was able to kind of with.

Fewer sunrise appearance. Yeah, like he's not, Rudd on camera is, even he was a bit dorky, but he was always so full of self-belief. He always seemed like he knew that he was the best person around the country. I don't think Albanese had that, but he definitely, he definitely wanted to provide reassurance to a whole heap of voters who might be anxious about Labor, and that's definitely something that Rudd did. But also, it might make Alba a bit of a better prime minister in a way. Well, this is the thing. He must be the first incoming PM since who would be the last. last one. He didn't think they were God's gift to the universe. I can't think of one. I think, um, I think Gillard probably had a bit of that.

Gillard, perhaps, yeah. All the other, all the other men, goodness me. That all was like, by God. Did Fraser? Frazer, Frazer wasn't, uh, quite so effusive, but he definitely was born to rule and from like, had like a sense of destiny in that he was supposed to be running the country. Holt, Holt was, um, no, I'm serious. So it wasn't Holt quite a sort of humble. Yeah, he was more, he's definitely more gregarious than the traditional, like, liberals, like he was sort of, yeah. I think Frank, Frank, Ford didn't really have tickets. Anyway, so, but it is true.

He's certainly talking about having a... Edmund Barton. Frank Ford went to my high school in college, actually. Oh, really? He was prime minister for like eight days or something. He's up on the honour board with Jonathan Thurston. Amazing. Oh, wow, that's high-prose thing. No, but it's certainly interesting, just looking at his style

and the way he's sort of acted in the job since coming in, certainly talking about being collaborative. And if he doesn't think, I'm God's gift to politics, I'll solve every problem myself the way Rudd did. It might well be more effective, though. think it's a good model and I think that he'll run a really good cabinet process. He's not like a OCD, no-it-all, like detail necessarily. We saw that. And we saw that. But the thing that made him like could make him a bit of a liability on the campaign trail, it can actually make him a

really good leader. He's like not going to be breathing down everyone in cabinet's neck about what's happening. He'll be able to like outsource, which is something that Hawke, who certainly had a sense of destiny, but Hawk was really good at running that cabinet process. And the other The other thing that he has in common with Hawke is that the Hawk government came in in 83, which was quite soon after Whitlam, and Labor was so traumatized by what happened to Whitlam that it gave them like a sense of discipline and unity. And they had experience. They weren't like they were sort of knew.

You had ministers who had been in government before and knew how easily you could fall out of government. That's something that I don't think that Rudd was necessarily surrounded by in 2007. It was easy to get a bit ahead of themselves and to think that you could knife a prime minister and that people, a Labor Prime Minister and that people would sort of this drug it off. One of the most interesting candidates you spoke to, someone who might actually really change,

just the way the Parliament looks and functions, is Zanetta Mascaranis from W.A. And you sort of encapsulate her life story as a bit of a study in their contradictions of modern Australia. And it's just interesting to think that the fault lines in Australian politics might actually change from this election and on an ongoing basis.

We have more women, we have more people of colour in the Parliament. Can you tell us a little bit about her? Because I've got to say, I didn't follow her very closely during the campaign, and perhaps I should have. She was just so interesting and so down to earth. And, yeah, was able to talk about policy, flip between policy and the personal really seamlessly. Like it was, and the interesting thing about her is that, yeah,

she's a woman of colour, but she's not pitching herself as, like, the woke candidate that maybe certain sections of the media would try and pigeonhole her as. She comes from a rural Western Australian background. She loved her upbringing. Her dad was a fitter and turner. Her mum was a kindie cleaner. They were devout Catholics.

She married the son of a preacher. So she now lives in metropolitan Perth, but she's worked on mines for a lot of her adult life. And also within the climate change space. So she brings us together all these things which aren't supposed to go together. And I think that that's essentially, like I think that Labor can do more. But they did it like, you look at the cohort of MPs. that were elected in Perth, like very diverse, but also from very humble backgrounds and

able to speak in a way that doesn't sound like politicians. And I think that the diversity thing isn't just a positive in terms of reflecting modern Australia, which is, it's amazing that it does that. But it's also a really clever way to symbolise to voters. This person isn't like a member of the media class. Because they don't look or sound like the traditional idea of the white man politician whom a lot of Australia across both sides of politics absolutely hate. What a tragedy that Christina Keneally couldn't parachute into that seat. I think that that Keneally is the textbook case for what the Labor Party shouldn't be doing and Zaneda Mascaranis is a textbook case for what they should be doing.

We need more dolphin trainers as well. That's true. He's a legend, yeah. Let's talk finally like about the Teals because in terms of remaking the fault lines, This was a huge one. We had the seats of, you know, most of the liberal prime ministers in recent memory going to independence. What did you discover when you went to those electorates and talked to those sorts of voters? Well, I live in Wentworth, so I, like, had...

Oh, you're one of them. I had, I knew, like, my street was discovered in Allegra stuff. So before I travelled away, like, I sort of knew what the ground was, ground swell was like. and so I think that what it does is it turned a bunch of these seats that the Liberal Party were able to take for granted into marginal seats and obviously they've lost them but like the Liberal Party had to go from being able to just focus relentlessly on outer suburban regional marginal seats to suddenly being spread across the inner city as well and like they obviously didn't end up being able to do that like it fundamentally changed the sort of campaign that they

were able to run it stretched their resources Frydenberg got bogged down in in Melbourne Melbourne, even though he's far more popular than Morrison and people really like really like him. So I think it's, yeah, it's changed Australian politics in the way, in a policy sense, I think, on climate change, but also in a campaign sense about what the Liberals will need to do next time around and the time after that and the time after that. But don't you think in some ways the tills are the DLP of the Liberal Party in that they really are the soft libs or the wet libs got frozen out. That's exactly what it was. Of the Liberal Party under Morrison. And I was thinking about the DLP during the election

because it's one of those things that it's become sort of like an accepted wisdom that Labor isn't the party of national government because Menzies was in for so long and then they've sort of been in and out since. But Labor would have been in a few times during that period if the DLP hadn't split and if they had have been able to maintain those voters. So I think that it's sort of like a prophecy. it's sort of like it should have been a warning to the Liberal Party about what can happen if you alienate a section of your support base for granted.

But isn't that a really fascinating thing going forward? Because if you assume that a lot of their seats are going to continue till for quite some time, and I imagine after the sugar rush of doing this, that may well happen, particularly if they're able to achieve the things that they say that they want to achieve, how do the Liberal Party have the Coalition more broadly actually navigate a path? Because it seems like you can't have both at once. You can't have the tight links with the nationals. You can't do what this whole thing, swing back to the right.

It doesn't seem to want to do. You're going to let those seats go indefinitely. So they are in this weird situation where they can't really stitch together a broad enough coalition. And this may be a long-term, you know, break for them. They may really have, Morrison may not have just lost the election, but actually destroyed the party's prospects for a decade or more. Yeah, I think that Dutton will be.

really disciplined and relentless opposition leader. Like, I think that he, in... Relentlessness is a gift that he has, I think. Yeah, and in economic uncertainty, I think that there will be some... He will be reassuring to some voters, but I don't see how, like, if Frydenberg had to have remained in Parliament

and become the opposition leader, I think that the Liberals would have been able to make a pitch to win back some of these teal seats at the next election, purely on economics, and by not being so sort of blinkered on climate change and the treatment of win, Mern, but I don't see how Dutton, Dutton is like Morrison,

but without the sort of, like, Daggy Daddick, like, he's not like a beer drinking, footy-loving sort of guy, and, like, he's from, he's not even, like, he's from, like, a fairway north of, like, not ages, but half an hour north of Brisbane. So he's, he's like, I don't see how he appeals to, like, the voters that the Liberals lost in his seats.

But if you really think that you want to put a Queensland cop in charge of the country, And that's what he is, right? That's basically what he's offering. And he's a, like the Queensland cop thing, he is probably the part where he does sort of cling to this. Is that his warm side? The Queensland cop side? Every man schick.

But he's like, in reality, he's a multi-millionaire property developer, which is a pretty good avatar for like the Australian, like society at large. Like everyone's sort of like, just pretending to be dinky sort of people. But meanwhile they own like, they have like enormous property portfolios. Look, it's a fascinating look at the election and how it was won and lost. I certainly learned a huge amount. From reading it, people should check out the monthly and, like, Blaine's essay, teal and loathing.

I don't anything said fear, but there was some fear, but also teal and loathing on the campaign trail. Thanks for joining us. Awesome, thanks, guys. Thank you. Our gears for remote microphones. We're part of the Acast, Creator Network. Catch you tomorrow.