Social fracturing

The rise of social media has fractured Australian politics as voters seek confirmation bias within their own echo chambers. By Nick Cater.

The epicentre of the 2007 earthquake in Australian politics may not, after all, have been the election of Kevin Rudd, the aspirant with the eager grin who promised the world and delivered somewhat less. With hindsight, the most portentous event in a largely forgettable year was Microsoft’s purchase of a stake in Facebook. Back then it was a place where pasty-faced geeks could hang out and pretend they had friends. The collaboration enabled the platform to become more mainstream and inspired its many competitors, each one unnerving in its own peculiar way.

The profound change in politics wrought by social media is evident in almost every liberal democracy. Debate has coarsened and contributions have become more emotional with less recourse to fact. Legislatures have grown capricious, positions polarised, boutique interests magnified, independents and minor parties emboldened, and the outcome of elections less certain.

It can be no coincidence that the rise in social media has coincided with the most mercurial periods in Australian politics since World War II, with six changes of prime minister in 15 years. Scott Morrison is about to chalk up a second miracle just by serving out his full term, an achievement first-term prime ministers could once take for granted providing they swam between the flags.

The intensity of personal attack on Morrison is greater even than that levelled at John Howard. It is almost entirely based on sentiment. Policy criticism is apparently old-school these days, even in newspapers that once prided themselves on promoting a reform agenda.

Morrison’s victory in 2019 sent his critics into a rage from which they have barely emerged. Their insistence that he will lose this time is driven by a seething resentment for the man who dared to prove them wrong. The ferocious attacks the Prime Minister has endured carry the hallmarks of ex-post-facto justification for an emotional response they struggle to put into words.

On no reasonable grounds could a prime minister be held responsible for bushfires, a pandemic, floods and poor late-night decisions made by junior members of staff after they’ve had a skinful. The visceral language in some Twitter posts by journalists and commentators, who have been around long enough to know better, suggests their assessment of Morrison’s prime ministership stems from gut loathing, rather than his actual performance.

The spiralling vortexes of online animus in which Morrison’s detractors congregated have served to inflame their indignation while weakening their judgment. They fall into the trap of confusing mainstream opinion with the consensus among the 10 per cent of Australians who use Twitter. Ironically, the innovation we once called the worldwide web has become a series of silos that have narrowed the outlook of those who dwell within.

The great paradox of post-Facebook elections is that the result seems eminently predictable to the cognoscenti, who seldom encounter anyone who thinks differently. Yet the balkanisation of civic discourse means the outcome is inherently less certain.

A steep rise in the none-of-the-above vote has made forecasting difficult, since preferences frequently take unpredictable courses. The share of votes for independents and minor parties has risen steadily since 2007 from a historical average of 5-10 per cent to 25 per cent at the last election, and polls suggest it could rise still higher. The decline in the primary vote for the major parties is unlikely to be reversed. If Morrison manages to pull off a primary result as large as John Hewson’s 44 per cent in 1993, it will be his greatest miracle yet.

Labor’s primary vote in the past four elections has had a three in front of it and the 33.3 per cent it achieved in 2019 was its lowest ever. The historical collapse began before the arrival of social media, beginning with the rise of the Australian Democrats in the late 1970s and accelerating with the rise of the Greens in the 2000s. Social media’s contribution is to accelerate the drift away from Labor at warp-speed and harden positions, lessening the chances of a reverse.

The Democrats and the Greens were havens for Labor’s intelligentsia as it became intolerant of the parliamentary Labor Party’s blue-collar leanings. Labor’s vote fractured at both ends of the political spectrum, however. With the rise of John Howard, much of Labor’s socially conservative, blue-collar vote began drifting to the Liberals, either directly or via parties such as One Nation. Labor has won few of those votes back, nor is it likely to.

Arguments came to a head on energy and the environment where the interests of the working and woke classes are impossible to reconcile. Today, the party with the highest proportion of university-educated Australians is the Greens, challenging the assumption that education makes you smarter.

Neither the Liberal Party nor the National Party are immune to the same tensions. The tension within the Coalition’s broad church frequently comes to a head on climate and energy policy. With hindsight, Morrison’s first miracle was not winning the 2019 election, but uniting the party along with Energy Minister Angus Taylor around an energy and climate position almost everyone in the Coalition was willing to accept, albeit through gritted teeth. Had he not done so, the attacks on Bill Shorten’s wide-eyed emissions reduction targets would have been blunted, and the Coalition wedged.

The internal tensions with the party have not gone away this term, surfacing on a wider range of policies, from religious freedom to vaccine coercion. With the hardening of positions, there is a growing intolerance for trade-offs and an increased risk of fracturing. The Coalition’s primary vote has fallen below 40 per cent only once, in 1998, when the arrival of One Nation played havoc with the conservative vote, notably in Queensland. Howard demonstrated his unique political tradecraft to recover from the blow, winning the following election with a substantial majority. Yet, significantly, he did not have to contend with the effects of social media and its tendency to strengthen tribal allegiance at the expense of a commitment to parties.

Like Labor, the Coalition risks losing voters at both ends, and cannot discount the possibility that a 30-something primary vote becomes the new normal. The political market is stuffed with new entrants making a plausible if morally weak case to use the election as a forum for the expression of moral indignation rather than a ballot to decide the next government. Morrison’s challenge in these uncertain times is to persuade them that the national interest comes first.