Peter Hartcher: The four horsemen of the apocalypse are coming. One for each political party

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

You've used all of your gift articles. 3 more will become available on the 1st of every month.

At this federal midterm moment, we can see that there are four horsemen of the political apocalypse on the horizon, one bearing down on each of the main political parties.

The parties share the same basic arithmetic problem. None are polling above 30 per cent of the primary vote. It’d be very hard for any of them to win majority government decisively while their primary vote is in the 20s.

Illustration by Dionne Gain But their individual disorders are all different, all potentially fatal.

Labor’s is a kind of delirium about where it is, what it’s doing and its purpose in office. This sort of delirium shares many symptoms with agnosia, the condition made famous by the case of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In that story by neurologist Oliver Sacks, his patient had lost the ability to recognise faces. Leaving the doctor’s clinic, he tried to grab his wife’s head, thinking it to be his hat. In this condition, your senses are working just fine and continue feeding information to the brain. But there’s a breakdown in the brain’s pathways to process the information.

Labor took office with an equity agenda. After nearly a decade of growing inequality under the Coalition, Labor wanted to redress the balance with higher wages for the low-paid and more services such as childcare and aged care. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wanted to be liked. Which political leader doesn’t? Or, if he couldn’t be loved, he was content with being merely not loathed.

But the world changed. A modest inflation problem has surged to become a serious inflation problem. Crucially, it’s not temporary. It’s entrenched. Handouts, subsidies and other such trinkets will only add to the problem.

The government is blaming the stratospheric oil price, caused chiefly by US President Donald Trump’s pointless war on Iran. True enough. But there are many things in this world that are true yet irrelevant. Such as this case. The cause is irrelevant. The only politically relevant question is whether the government is helping to fix it. Or not. It’s not.

This leaves the task solely to the Reserve Bank. It’s moving to stanch inflation by putting up interest rates. And it will most likely put them up again next week. That’s how the system works. Albanese can point the finger at the Reserve Bank, hoping to deflect blame, calling interest rates a “blunt instrument”. Well, prime minister, if you don’t like the blunt instrument, you have a variety of surgical instruments available to you.

Your government could help dampen inflation by cutting spending or raising taxes, distributing the pain as best you see fit. But you’re not doing that. Unless the government recognises the destructive face of inflation and acts accordingly, it will spend the rest of this term making excuses. Predictably, the electorate will react with rising frustration and fury.

Labor is suffering a crisis of mission. Its preconceived equity agenda has to be set aside to deal with inflation. You can’t be nice to people by pretending you’re helping them with gimmicks and excuses while high inflation and interest rates are crushing them.

If the government can escape its delirium and face up to the new reality, it will eliminate its $30 billion deficit by making serious cuts to spending or increases in tax. As urged by everyone from Ken Henry to Peter Costello. That would ease inflation, allow the bank to ease interest rates, and constitute the first step in setting a growth agenda.

Will the electorate like you for cutting spending or raising taxes? No, it won’t. But the voters have already turned on you. It’s not possible to be liked in hard times. So Albanese’s choice is to be unpopular for inertia or to be unpopular for fixing the problem. It’s not kind or fair to tolerate rising inflation. Everyone suffers, with only one group immune to its consequences – the very rich. How’s that for equity?

The Coalition’s horseman is dementia. It has lost any idea of itself. Look at the evidence of the past week. The party of free trade is resisting an important opportunity for freer trade, Australia’s free trade agreement with the EU. The Coalition dishonestly demands further negotiations, knowing perfectly well that there is no option to unstitch a painstaking agreement struck with the 27 national governments that make up the EU.

It’s take it or leave it. The Coalition is going to leave it, complaining that the Europeans aren’t sufficiently generous to the beef sector. This is pathetic; the Coalition overlooks the potential benefits to every other sector and the national interest.

Trump put tariffs on Australia. The EU, with 450 million consumers and an economy almost as big as America’s, is offering to eliminate tariffs on 98 per cent of Australian products. And all the Coalition can do is find pretexts for saying no.

And the party that proudly led Australia’s mission to civilise “social” media now rejects any such effort as “censorship”. First Tony Abbott, then Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison took sensible steps to minimise the worst effects of the Hate Machine and the violence it incubates.

This week Labor offered to negotiate with the Coalition over the bill that Labor has before the parliament, the Digital Duty of Care bill. But, in this case, the Coalition refused any negotiations. Once more, its objections are spurious. It’s suffering a crisis of identity.

“The Latin root of the term dementia means to be out of one’s mind,” says the US National Institutes of Health. “And dementia has been described as leading to affected persons losing their self and becoming non-persons.” This is the Coalition’s condition. By forgetting itself and trembling helplessly at the foot of Pauline Hanson, the Coalition is simply validating One Nation. And signalling its own irrelevance.

One Nation has its own horseman. It’s suffering from an entrenched case of juvenile delinquency. Its share of the primary vote has stalled. It can’t break the ceiling of 30 per cent that it enjoyed at the time Hanson addressed the National Press Club in June.

That appearance showed an ambition to be taken seriously. That’s what the party needs if it wants to take government. The Coalition and Labor might continue to fail so badly as to drive more voters to One Nation. But the party can’t count on that.

The divisiveness, the snide, hurtful, puerile smartaleckry that carried One Nation so far has reached its limit. Hanson today claims that she’s not racist. After 30 years of race-baiting of Asians and Aboriginal people, and anti-Muslim bigotry, she says there’s room for everyone in her big tent.

This week she called a press conference to promote her policy of allowing workers early access to some of their employers’ superannuation contributions. She didn’t even mention immigration. Her Victorian leader, Warren Pickering, campaigning for the November 28 state election, portrays One Nation as a reformed force. “There’s always going to be people that have concerns because they’ve maybe swallowed some of the previous prejudice or stigma associated with this party.

“Now, we are trying to break down some of that stigma, providing the open advocacy and allowing dialogue with all of our communities, regardless of their ethnic origins. So nobody need fear a One Nation government.”

So the party’s cartoons are an increasing embarrassment for the newly responsible One Nation. Hanson last week apologised for the cartoon lampooning Jacqui Lambie’s problems with vaginal prolapse.

This week, after the violent ramming of independent MP Helen Haines by a man driving a car, the party was on the defensive over its animation of a cartoon Bluey driving buses into people from other political parties. And its animations of Foreign Minister Penny Wong being stabbed and beheaded by Albanese. In an older cartoon, Bluey is dragged off and beaten up by “delinquents”. But we know who the real delinquents are. One Nation is in a crisis of credibility. It wants to be taken seriously and appeal for real responsibility, yet it’s led by a longtime racist and infused with the persona of a sniggering, smutty, antisocial 14-year-old delinquent.

Finally, the Greens’ horseman is its midlife crisis of relevance and meaning. Its vote is stuck at 14 per cent and its central purpose is an environmentalism of fading electoral salience. So this week its new leader, David Shoebridge, gave a speech pitching a $1000 tax benefit for workers. In his first appearance at the National Press Club, his speech failed to address any environmental policy. A real telltale.

All the parties have the benefit of time. With half a parliamentary term ahead, they all have the opportunity to cheat political death. Time to repent. And reform.

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

You've used all of your gift articles. 3 more will become available on the 1st of every month.