Below is a copy of my Gnala Article as published:

This election was a bruising moment of realisation for both parties that the Australian electorate is tired of being taken advantage of. Held on the 21 May, the Coalition was soundly defeated, however this absence of votes did not pull Labor to victory as much as expected instead it created a rise of a third power in Parliament.

Australia runs on a two-party system (some people will point out the existence of the National, LNP, and others, however I am setting them aside for now), with the main two parties being the Coalition and Labor. However recently there has been growing momentum for change in this area. Whilst before the 2019 election there were independents in parliament these parties had platforms that directly contradicted both of the major parties (The Greens, and Bob Katter). In 2019 though Independent Zali Steggall defeated Tony Abbott in the election her policies were aligned with those of the Liberal Party. Traditionally people on the left would vote Greens, left centre Labor, and right centre Liberals. But here was a person with policies mostly like the Liberals who was winning.

The Labor and Liberal party didn’t take much note of this election anomaly at the time, putting it down to the unpopularity of Tony Abbott, with some within the party even forecasting that it would be within Liberal hands in three years. However this was not to happen.

The goal of the Liberal party at this election was to turn the focus as much as possible away from themselves as people, and onto their ‘strong economic policies’. Morrison described it as being like going to the dentist, you don’t necessarily like them, but you trust them to deal with your teeth.

Labor, however, was eager for this to be a referendum on Scott Morrison figuring, wrongly to some extent, that those turned away from him would turn to them.  This likely contributed to a Labor victory, but in some seats voters would have turned against Scott Morrison by voting for a  so-called teal Independent, which instead contributed to their success.

As a result of the federal election, Labor have 77 seats, the Coalition 58 seats and 16 were won by Independents. This is an unseen amount of Independents in parliament and represents a large movement away from the two major parties, especially by professional women. Some of the major parties may have lost their seats for being ‘out of touch’ however a lack of moderates might reduce the ability of the parties, and especially the Liberal party, to come back – but the question is as voters, do we want that?

In WA there have also been some surprises, quite a few of which are linked to the popularity of Mark McGowan and the Labor party in this state. This even led to the seat of Tangney falling to Labor. Given that normally there is a stronghold of support for the Liberal Party in the West, we have seen a huge swing to Labor.

Now a simplified word on something else that is in the news recently, explained with a bad metaphor:

Imagine you own a magic orange tree, it is magic because every day of the week, without fail, it produces 13 oranges. Now you don’t need 13 oranges a day, so you agree to sell these to your neighbour, now you agree to a contract for 2 years, where each week you will give him 10 oranges, and in exchange you will get $5. That leaves you with 3 oranges for your own purposes, which is more than enough.

Now say one week your friends are coming over and because you have the magic orange tree you decide to throw an orange themed party, the only problem is that you need 10 oranges to throw this party, but you only have 3 oranges to make this with, and you can’t use any of your neighbours’ oranges because you signed a contract to the effect that you couldn’t reuse any of his. This means you now need to go to the store and buy the oranges even though you actually own enough oranges for this purpose.

Guessed the crisis? It’s the gas crisis.

Currently in Eastern Australia a shortfall in gas has caused the prices to absolutely balloon, with problems for absolutely everyone, and like the example above, it’s not that we don’t have enough gas it’s that we sell our gas to the international markets, so we then need to repurchase more expensive international gas to make up any shortfalls.

Now if you haven’t heard about this crisis then you are not alone, see in WA we have various mechanisms in place to prevent situations like the above, the most relevant being that of the Domestic Gas Reservation where the government specifies that 15% of produced gas in WA must be sold within WA, ensuring enough reserves for our own needs.

This is just one of the problems that the new government is facing and will be a test for the new parliament about how effective they actually are