The outer suburban marginal seats will almost certainly swing to the Coalition on Saturday. And I'm sure many of the Left intelligentsia think they have the reasons for the swing all worked out: voters in the outer suburbs are uneducated, 'aspirational' cashed-up bogans who only care about their mortgages, negating their working-class origins and keeping asylum seekers on the sunny shores of the pacific islands.
The problem with that explanation is that interest rates are low, the standard of living appears to be steadily improving and the ALP has lurched to the right of the Coalition on boat arrivals. Why then would these voters all now be trending toward the Coalition when all the indicators suggest they should be happy with the incumbent?
The standard explanation is that outer suburban swinging voters are so ignorant they have been tricked into backing the Coalition by the corporate press, or that they are so self-interested they are willing to see people lose their dole simply so they can have a few extra plasma screens on their walls.
Let me paint a different picture for you based on personal experience. The ALP's electoral fortunes in Melbourne's outer south-east broadly reflect what has been happening for the party across western Sydney over the past two decades. Since the late 1980s there has been an overall long-term trend to the Coalition in these seats, though they have swung back to the ALP several times over the last few elections.
Like many who live in these areas, I am a swinging voter with no real party affiliation. I live in Pakenham, which sits on the edge of Latrobe, a marginal ALP seat expected to swing back to the Libs, and McMillan, an outer-suburban, semi-rural seat which is becoming a moderately safe Liberal seat. Adjoining Latrobe are two other tightly held, politically volatile seats, Casey and Aston, held by the Coalition by less than 2 per cent — they generally swing back and forth, but have been trending to the Coalition since the late 1980s.
I suspect the reason is that the neoliberal agenda of the last 30 years has brought clear gains in wealth and quality of life for people in these electorates. Life is good and getting better. Incomes and education levels are above the national average. Personal wealth is increasing, largely through the value of their homes. More and more children from these electorates are going onto university, and while jobs are becoming less secure, the cost of living has remained relatively low. People in these electorates want more of the same, only better.
The outer suburban economy is largely dependent on manufacturing and retail, two industries which have suffered since 2008 under Labor and which are particularly sensitive to Government policy. People want to build up their businesses and get more work — they are less interested in symbolic politics, social justice or 'social engineering' than good jobs, a strong economy and less Government regulation.
Rather than materialism, Australia's suburban neoliberalism operates on a clear principle of fairness; that your pay-offs should be consummate with your efforts. This upwardly mobile suburban sense of fairness is on the face of it hard to criticise — if you work hard, you should be rewarded. Perhaps this is why the ALP's flirtation (under Gillard-Swan) with old-school 'wealth redistribution' didn't resonate as much as the Coalition's 'growing the pie'.
The truth is that of the two largely neoliberal major parties, these swinging voters seem increasingly to see the Coalition as the more competent and philosophically coherent party to deliver on their promises.
The problem for the ALP is an acute one — how does the party embrace Australia's increasingly wealthy suburbia while not neglecting its core principles of egalitarianism and social justice?
Mark Latham wrote in the Australian Financial Review: 'The corrosion of Labor's culture has produced a crisis of Labor identity. The party is confused on economic policy, not knowing whether to embrace former Prime Minister Paul Keating's legacy of micro-reform and productivity growth or to accede to the sectional demands of union/factional bosses and the anti-competitive comfort of industry welfare.' This is the ALP's great unsolved conundrum and remains between them and a long-term hold on power.
For Treasurer Chris Bowen — who explicitly rejects notions of class and socialism — the broad idea of 'social liberalism' has the potential to be flexible enough to serve the needs of the vast majority of the electorate.
He may be right; the ALP's social liberal-democratic project is not lost on the marginal outer-suburbs just yet. The 2007 rejection of WorkChoices showed that marginal voters are not exactly free-marketeers. Fairness still prevails, even if notions of equality are diminishing. But in the end pragmatism and perceptions of competence play a much greater role than hard-fixed ideologies.
Luke Williams is a freelance journalist who is studying law at Monash University in Melbourne.