The Coalition’s implosion after the Bondi sitting was not a sudden accident. It exposed long-running tensions between the Liberals and Nationals, intensified by polling anxiety, One Nation’s rise and the limits of Australia’s Westminster conventions.

Commenting on the chaos of the special post-Bondi sitting of Parliament, Malcolm Turnbull referred to the Coalition as a “smouldering wreckage”.

The government had set some traps for the Coalition, but they needn’t have bothered, because the party’s strategists brought it all on themselves. Prompted by Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce, they decided to use the Bondi murders as a way to attack Labor, and to portray Albanese as “weak”. They insisted on a quick recall of Parliament to enact laws against racial vilification.

Had they thought through the way it would play out, they would have realised that condemning the hatred of antisemitism while directing a hate campaign against the elected government carries dissonant messages. They would have realised that legislating against racial vilification is politically difficult, particularly when some of the Coalition’s support from the right can be traced to white supremacists and nazis. They would have recalled the problems raised by faith-based groups, and by free speech libertarians when the question of racial vilification had come before Parliament in earlier times: having promised so much they were bound to disappoint those Jewish voices calling for tough action. And they would have known that the National Party was bound to resist firearms control.

Unsurprisingly it all blew up over just a couple of days. That was a catastrophe waiting to happen, because the forces that tore the Coalition apart have been building up over a long period, concerning not only right-wing parties, but more basically the ‘Westminster’ conventions that have become increasingly detached from Australia’s political reality.

Each of the two parties........

© Pearls and Irritations