Loading So the equation for the main parties is almost identical. A net gain of five seats for Labor and four for the Coalition will deliver a working majority after the appointment of a speaker. Recent history does offer some encouragement for the Coalition. Bob Hawke’s Labor government won four seats in net terms in 1987, while John Howard’s Coalition government collected two seats in net terms at the Tampa election of 2001. But those governments were led by the same person who brought them to office, and the elections were held in the analogue era, before the internet unleashed its digital hell on politics, and trust in our institutions went into freefall. The baggage Scott Morrison carries into his first campaign is that he became prime minister in a coup, the second on his side of politics in three years and the fourth this decade. The farce of Morrison’s ascension will surely be weighed by voters. Can they trust the Coalition to govern like adults in a third term, when its guiding principle in its first two terms was tantrum? If Labor’s record in office is anything to go by, the Coalition faces a reckoning on May 18. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten finds himself in the equivalent position to Tony Abbott six years ago: unloved by the public but on the cusp of power on his own, uncompromising terms.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten finds himself in the equivalent position to Tony Abbott six years ago: unloved by the public but on the cusp of power on his own, uncompromising terms. Loading If Labor prevails, Shorten will have overturned a century of political practice in Australia. Our habit as a people has been to swing to the centre left when we wanted to be inspired, and revert to the conservatives when we sought comfort and relaxation. Only five Labor opposition leaders have taken office at a general election: Andrew Fisher in 1910 and again in 1914, James Scullin in 1929, Gough Whitlam in 1972, Bob Hawke in 1983 and Kevin Rudd in 2007. All rode a wave of community enthusiasm, carrying ambitious reform programs. Shorten is cut from a less charismatic cloth. The times surely demand a leader who is willing to talk up the nation, and reconnect new and old Australia. To date, Shorten hasn’t been able to answer that call because it is beyond his rhetorical, and emotional, range. He is a product of his apparatchik age, graduating from student politician in the late 1980s to union organiser in the 1990s. His main occupation before entering Parliament at the 2007 election was national secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union.

Morrison, like Shorten, is a product of the apparatchik age. He entered Parliament in the same election in 2007. If we are to be honest with ourselves as a country, the fact that Morrison became prime minister after just 11 years in Parliament, and without a meaningful career before politics, is evidence of systems failure. Replacing him with Shorten at the ballot box doesn’t fix this structural problem, it reinforces it. Morrison is still searching for a positive argument to make to the electorate. He can’t campaign on his predecessors’ records, because there is no policy achievement to point to. The Coalition has ducked the big challenges of climate change, urban congestion and the population divide between our booming cities and ageing regions. Morrison can’t even run on his former portfolio of immigration. He was slow to come to this realisation, but he now appreciates that another referendum on border protection would be counterproductive for the Coalition because it would gift what remains of the Liberal middle class base in Sydney and Melbourne to Labor. Voters may be about to remove a federal government but without enthusiasm for the alternative. Credit:Jonathan Carroll This election will be decided along cultural lines, but with a twist. Victoria, not Queensland, will be the swing state because Melbourne’s decade-long surge is slowly redrawing the electoral map in favour of the state most comfortable with multiculturalism. The biggest story of modern politics to this point has been the rise of Queensland, and the end of the reform era. Both are related. Interstate migration since the 1980s has seen a literal transfer of power north, from Victoria and especially NSW to Queensland. Electoral redistributions between 1987 and 2016 cut four seats from NSW and another two from Victoria. Queensland added six to its total in that period.

The first tangible sign of the shift was at the 1996 election, when the Coalition won more seats in Queensland than Victoria, and Pauline Hanson first entered the Parliament. Howard was able to govern without Victoria for four terms because he held his home state of NSW. But that rugby league alliance crumbled when Howard lost government, and his own multicultural electorate of Bennelong in 2007. Sydney and Melbourne are receiving the lion's share of skilled migration from China and India, and this is bringing them closer together, and separating them from the rest of the country both economically and culturally. Inevitably this will nudge the pendulum back to where it was before the emergence of Queensland, with elections once again decided in the mortgage belts of our two largest cities. Queensland does not need to lose seats to lose influence. It is the realignment of Sydney and Melbourne, where more than 40 per cent of the total population lives, that is transforming our politics. Whether this removes the roadblock to reform remains to be seen. Illustration: Simon Letch Credit: The cultural divide, and the existential threat it poses to the Liberals as a governing party, is best illustrated by sorting the Parliament into three zones, ranked from largest to smallest: first the cosmopolitan south-east of NSW, Victoria and the ACT; second the frontier states of Queensland and Western Australia; and finally the outsiders in South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. There are 88 seats in the south-east. Labor holds 48 after the latest redistribution, the Coalition 36, the Greens hold one and independents share the remaining three. Tellingly, the majority of those Coalition seats (21 of the 36) are in NSW and Victorian electorates where more than half the voters are aged 55 years or over. If Labor were to pick the low-hanging Liberal fruit in the younger, more socially progressive electorates of Melbourne and Sydney, it would still leave older Australia on the other side of the cultural divide, represented by Coalition or independent members on the floor of the Parliament and in the Senate.