The ACT has usually been a bastion of free-thinking, vaguely leftist politics for decades. Support for the republic, the heroin trial and euthanasia has been higher here than the rest of Australia.
Yet, voters have delivered one of the most right-wing parliaments in the country. With the result of the last seat in Ginninderra announced yesterday, we have seven Liberals and two Osborne independents forming a majority in Assembly, with no ameliorating influence of Michael Moore or the Greens needed. How is this so?
It is because the Labor Party did not deliver an electable alternative.
To quote a column published a day before the election: “”By excluding the mild Labor Right from Labor’s ranks over the past six years, the Labor Left might succeed in delivering the whole territory into the hands of the Christian real Right. A high price for ideological purity.”
Okay, I was chided at the time for daring to call the Osborne Group Christian Right. Fair enough. But they are certainly not atheistic left. At the very least they are socially conservative. Moreover, we should count the three grey cardigans in the Liberal Party as part of the Christian Right (non-athetisic left, or socially conservative) majority.
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