Mugged By Reality
For the Victorian Liberal Party, public infrastructure offers only threats.
This week Melbourne reopened a small piece of infrastructure that had been closed for refurbishment. The Campbell Arcade is an underground walkway and shopping precinct that connects to Flinders Street station. It was closed because Melbourne is almost finished constructing a new metro line through the city and the new Town Hall station will connect through to Flinders Street via the Campbell Arcade, and so a new underground walkway off the arcade was being built.
This may seem like some very minor local news not really worthy of a dive into the larger ideas currently pushing and pulling at global politics. Yet in his ridiculous response to the reopening Victoria’s Shadow Transport Minister, Matthew Guy, revealed a worldview and approach to politics that is currently consuming conservative politics throughout the Anglosphere – the construction of dark dystopian fantasies as some strange kind of emotional balm.
Matthew Guy: “It’s just another location in Melbourne for us to go and get mugged by people who are out on bail.”
This is an extraordinary thing to say as the city moves towards what should be the celebration of a new metro line and the advantages that it will bring to the city. The party is so addicted to whinging and Chicken Little hysterics that Guy cannot help but use the reopening of public infrastructure as an opportunity for baseless fearmongering.1
We are fortunate in Australia that one of the golden rules of politics – coming across like you hate the people you wish to govern is not going to win elections – still holds true. It’s a rule that should see the Labor Party reelected in Victoria next year.
For a little more context:
Unlike in the United States, there are no “red states” and “blue states” in Australia. Governments change hands regularly and this is a very good thing. But since 1999 the Liberal Party2 has only won a single term in Victoria. The state is now generally considered a “Labor state”, but I would argue this is not due to any demographic or ideological considerations, but simply due to the Liberal Party making themselves so thoroughly unlikeable, and finding new and inventive ways to set themselves on fire almost every week.
Rather than do the necessary self-scrutiny to understand why the party is so unpopular, the Liberal Party – encouraged by, and beholden to, their media cheerleaders – have instead decided to construct a completely artificial and hysterical reality about Victoria as a coping mechanism. To them, the state has become a cross between North Korea and Somalia, simultaneously a totalitarian dictatorship and a lawless, gang-infested, snakepit. Apparently, you leave your own house at your own peril.
This is, of course, absurd to people who live in the state, and also to those organisations to devise liveability and safety rankings for cities around the world – where Melbourne ranks consistently in the top 10. It’s also not borne in the most recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics – where New South Wales (pop: 8.5 mil) recorded double to the number of police proceedings to Victoria (pop: 7.1 mil), despite having a population of only 1.5 million more people. And Queensland (pop: 5.6 mil) had 50% more police proceedings than Victoria, despite having 1.5 million less people.
So what is going on here?
The Liberal Party, both in Victoria and federally, are refusing to understand that what is good for ratings and readership of their sympathetic media is now bad for the party’s electoral prospects. This is a difficult problem to overcome. There has always been a symbiotic relationship between political parties and the media, and to divorce from this relationship can feel like an existential threat. Even with all the new tools of modern communication. The Liberal Party feels it would have no place to go without News Corp and clownhouses like Channel 7. But the party is now pitching themselves solely to these media outlets – which need aggressive and negative headlines for a core readership and viewership – and not pitching itself to the broader public, who find this kind of hysterical politics off-putting. Australia’s compulsory voting makes this strategy a losing one.
This catastrophising about the state of our societies has become an animating feature of conservative politics throughout the Anglosphere. In the United Kingdom both the Conservative Party and Reform UK are in a battle for who can declare the UK to be a failed state in the most deranged manner. And then there is, of course, Donald Trump’s “American Carnage” – a fantasy about endemic crime overrunning American cities.
Much of this is driven by an inability to handle the emotional disorder of a rapidly changing world. This leads to a fretting about both the present and the future, and a deeply held perception that the past was safer and more comfortable. The past is a “culturally safe space” for these parties and their core supporters. Addressing this perception of a “broken” UK in the Financial Times this week, Janan Ganesh, highlights that nostalgia has an incredible weapon to use against the present.
“What makes nostalgia so hard to argue against is that it is an ever-moving target. People pluck their favourite bits from different periods — the homogeneous culture of the 1950s, the industrial peace of the 1990s, the rampant growth of the pre-crash noughties — and combine them into a single fictitious moment. This isn’t just a sleight of hand. It makes it impossible for the present to “win”. Twenty twenty-five has to go up against a Best Of, a compilation from the last century or so.”
Alongside this, there is a psychological trick in how we react to the reporting of crime. Australia is a very low crime society, therefore any crime can feel confronting to us. Crime is being reported in the media because it is so infrequent. You never want to live in a society where crime isn’t being reported because there’s too much of it – where it is deemed an expected and normalised part of life, and therefore not newsworthy. But when crime is newsworthy it makes us feel like it is pervasive.
Also writing in the Financial Times this week, John Burn-Murdoch, called this our “crime paradox” – that both Britain and the US are recording their lowest rates of violent crime in decades, but everyone feels as if their societies are falling apart.
This is an easy manipulative tool for politicians to use. Particularly conservative politicians who have always tried to ramp up people's fears in order to position themselves as people’s security. The problem for the Victorian Liberal Party – as Matthew Guy demonstrated – is that they can’t help but over egg the pudding in a city that has become highly attuned to their bullshit. So while the government continues to dig tunnels, the Liberal Party keeps digging themselves holes.
Matthew Guy was a senior minister in the one government the Liberal Party formed in Victoria between 2010 - 2014. Since then he has been opposition leader twice. He was generally seen as one of the more serious people inside the party. But the internal party incentives are increasingly seeing him being drawn into this kind of rhetoric.
For American readers, the Liberal Party is Australia’s main conservative political party. This may seem jarring to read. There’s an explanation in this piece here.