All That’s Protecting CGT, Franking Credits, Negative Gearing And The Entire Post-Howard Wealth Model Is Now This Guy

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

The seismic but symbolically noisy drift of conservative voters toward Pauline Hanson's One Nation has been widely interpreted as a warning shot to the government. It is not, at least not in the way some cunt's dad prefers. In a preferential voting system, fragmentation on the right is less a cannon blast than a slow unproductive rearrangement. Votes wander and preferences leak. The splintering of the conservative primary can, in marginal seats, perform the cardinal sin of ultimately assisting the Australian Labor Party.

Labor strategists are therefore not pacing the corridors over One Nation's jingoism-fuelled ascent. The real theatre lies in the Senate, but the government’s mood is not especially anxious, too. With the Greens and a mouthful of independents inclined toward "structural fairness," reforms to capital gains tax settings, negative gearing and super concessions do not appear fanciful. They appear ultimately procedural.

Which leaves the Coalition confronting a problem less tactical than existential.

To oppose what it frames as an unfair generational re-wiring of Australia’s tax architecture, the party must first reassemble itself like paratroopers scattered over Normandy. This is not a matter of messaging but of a brutal revival that breaks every rib and cracks the sternum in two. After a heavy defeat and a thinning primary vote, the Liberals face what might be called a Jurassic Park dilemma. Whether to spend extraordinary sums resurrecting creatures that once dominated the terrain, in the hope that voters will again thrill at their roar.

In this retelling, mining magnate Gina Rinehart assumes a role not unlike John Hammond, the benevolent capitalist convinced that with enough funding and sufficient nostalgia, the old Costelloism giants can be coaxed back to life. The status quo that made them rich, can be protected. The difficulty, as cinema and recent elections both suggest, is that ecosystems change. Dinosaurs, however impressive, struggle in new climates.

The Coalition’s road back from near-extinction will require more than patronage and muscle memory. It will demand a persuasive economic story, a re-unified broad church and a vision that extends beyond booting Indians and controlling women's bodies. Until that occurs, the fate of the post-Howard wealth model may hinge less on outrage than on arithmetic and on whether the fossils can learn to adapt.

More to come.