And, Australia votes for climate action this time

Winning power is the easy part of politics. It’s what you do with it that counts.
That’s going to be the challenge for Australia’s new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, after a striking election victory that has swept the right-of-center Liberal-National Coalition from power after nine years.
The scale of victory for Albanese’s Labor party looks surprisingly modest. As a share of the governing House of Representatives, it’s likely to have the smallest majority for an incoming government since 1931. The extent of the calamity for the Coalition, however, is unprecedented. Once all the votes are counted, it will struggle to end up with many more than 55 seats in the 150-seat House. That’s on par with the losses for Labor in 1996 and 2013 that locked it out of power for a decade. Relative to the size of the House, the Coalition is likely to have its lowest seat total since it first won power in 1949.
Worse still, it’s a defeat based on a sortie deep inside its electoral heartlands. The outcome is comparable to how the reddening of the US Senate and Electoral College delivered victory to Donald Trump in 2016 and has given the Democrats a shaky grip on power since 2018. Similarly, the British Labour party has found itself locked out of once-solid seats as the Scottish Nationalist party and the Brexit-aligned Conservatives penetrated its so-called “red wall” since the 2010 election.
Outgoing Prime Minister Scott Morrison invited this disaster by pushing the formerly center-right Liberal party in a more solidly conservative direction than even his predecessors attempted. Women in particular revolted, due to the sense he’d turned a blind eye to allegations of assault within Parliament and his own cabinet. About three-quarters of the Coalition’s federal politicians going into Saturday’s poll were men, whereas women made up half of Labor’s legislators.
That shift has been most visible in a swag of half-a-dozen affluent inner suburban seats across the east of Sydney and Melbourne. These areas have been the bedrock of the Liberal party since it was founded during World War II,
and will now be held by the so-called teal independents, mostly professional women focused on gender, anti-corruption, and above all climate.
It will be hard for the Liberals to find a path back to power without regaining these teal electorates — but over the past decade, voters, angered with the top-down, centralising tendencies of the major parties, have tended to hold onto their independent and minor party candidates for years at a time, rather than treating them as mere protest votes. Of the seven such candidates elected to the House since 2013, all except populist mining baron Clive Palmer are still in Parliament, having won re-election multiple times.
That all sounds like good news for Labor — but the challenge will be in how it uses its victory. While Albanese is likely to end up with a majority of the Parliament, it will be a narrow one, easily eroded at the next election due in 2025. Interest rates on Australia’s indebted households, especially in “mortgage belt” outer suburban seats where Labor’s majorities against the Liberals tend to be thinner, are set to rise at their fastest pace since the 1980s.

—Bloomberg