The flipping of Wentworth just marks a the morphing of the two major parties which started long ago.
The Labor Party now represents the rich and the welfare dependent. The Liberals represent the Deplorable worker and what’s left of the Middle Class and there aren’t many of those in the seat of Wentworth. Turnbull was the perfect fit for the seat as it transited from being a safe Conservative Seat to a safe Collectivist-Virtue-Signalling Seat. He was the Labor-guy badged as a Liberal. Kerryn Phelps is the “ideal” replacement — the Labor-Green candidate badged as an Independent. This made it easier for doctors-wives, lawyers and journalists to vote for an option which was essentially Labor-Green, but had the appearance of being “smarter” and above all the riff raff.
Kerryn Phelps essentially stands for a Get UP approved Labor Green Christmas Wish List: More renewable parasites, death to coal, pandering to collectivist UN committees, a ban on fossil fuel donations (but no ban for government cronies who take big-government funds and donate it to big-government parties.). She wants to restore funding to The ABC because $3m a day is not enough. Heck, they lost 5% a while back.
The vote in the wealthiest electorate in Australia is still underway, but whatever happens, it tells us nothing much about most other electorates. Should the national policy on energy change because of 1,500 voters in the wealthiest seat?
Labor calls for National Energy policy to be set by 1,500 voters in richest seat in Australia
Thus proving that the NEG was really a Labor Policy all along.
Polls show climate and energy policy was a key factor in voters turning their backs on the government in the blue-ribbon Sydney seat on Saturday and electing independent Kerryn Phelps.
The largest poll ever done in Australia was the 2013 election where the only party ever to run in Australia on a blood oath of “no carbon tax” won 90 seats and blitzed the opposition. What’s changed since then? Electricity prices have hit bleeding point, we have more unreliable energy than ever, and watching Australian black-outs has become an international sport.
Liberals could still win the next Federal Election but almost certainly won’t
The hottest two topics in the electorate are electricity prices and immigration. If the ScoMo team grew a spine they could simply copy the Abbott tested formula. It’d be even more popular now than it was then — see Brexit, Trump and Dean.
The Jellyfish-Liberals are trying to satisfy the centre of the climate debate but polls show there is no “centre” anymore. This is the graveyard where losing teams hunt for votes. The centre used to be the place where most people were, but in the artificially polarized climate debate it’s a vacant lot now. The undecideds split long ago into the skeptic camp or the gullible feedlot.
As long as Liberals pretend wind and solar are useful, they can’t defeat the fake claims that wind and solar are cheap. So they get consigned to be the crew that “cause” expensive electricity with policy uncertainty and because they don’t support more renewables. Jellyfish Liberals are called almost the same names they would be called if they were out-and-out “deniers” of the climate religion. Pandering to the namecallers is a losing game.
Nick Cater:Weird, wealthy Wentworth is not the real Australia
A by-election in Sydney’s eastern suburbs is no place to test the national temperature, any more than dipping your toe into a glass of chardonnay at the Bondi Trattoria can tell you if it’s warm enough for a swim.
Wentworth is a land removed from the daily struggles faced by other Australians, a place where rising electricity prices barely touch the hip-pocket nerve, where God’s own airconditioner blows gently off summer waters, and “action” on climate change, by which they mean “subsidies”, boosts the share portfolio.
Few Wentworth residents could tell you the price of petrol, just as few know the full horror of the word “commute”…
It is home to 210 surgeons but not a single animal slaughterer. If you live in Wentworth, your meat is boned elsewhere.
Wentworth is home to 731 of them [journalists], the third highest concentration in the country, beaten only by the neighbouring seats of Sydney (962) and Grayndler (837).
The Wentworth result shows people are sick of both big parties. But it tells us nothing about solving the energy crisis or changing the climate.
*Headline changed. It was “Labor calls for National Energy policy to be set by 1,500 voters in richest seat in Australia” but after watching the ABC repeat how “polls show” voters care about climate change, the more important message was the line about the 2013 election.