Easily the most exciting thing to happen during this federal election campaign has been the British referendum result to leave the European Union.
Yet until it happened most of the Australian media and public were completely unaware a vote on something as important as this was taking place.
The story of Brexit will be talked about for years to come. Brexit has many economic implications for Australia, but in the context of a likely win for Malcolm Turnbull in Saturday's federal election, it's worth examining some of the potential lessons for our domestic situation.
Brexit proved ideas and values still matter in politics. At its core the Brexit vote was about ideas and values. "Accountability", "community", and "democracy" are inchoate but vital concepts that are not in the vocabulary of the experts who preached Britain's economic collapse if it had the temerity to leave the European Union.
As David Kemp wrote in these pages on Thursday the key question of the referendum was "the extent to which the British people had control over many of the key economic and social policies affecting them. One might be forgiven for thinking that democratic control over major policies affecting the people was of little or no importance, at least so far as the British government and the country's political parties, financial and commercial institutions, and the most voluble of the various lobby groups were concerned."
As politicians are drawn from an ever-shrinking gene pool, often they're more likely to reflect the views of an elite political class, rather than the views of the people who voted for them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in how the British public voted compared to parliamentarians. Of the public who voted in the referendum, 52 per cent voted "Leave". However at best, no more than around 180 out of 650 members of the House of Commons, would have voted that way, i.e. less than 30 per cent of MPs supported "Leave".
In a country where voting is optional, both the turnout and the total number of people voting was higher than at the British general election last year — 72 per cent of the eligible electorate voted in the referendum, compared to 66 per cent at the election.
Britain's Brexit experience has been replicated in Australia, most notably with the republic referendum in 1999. Despite a "Yes" vote being overwhelmingly supported by the sort of people who backed a "Remain" vote in the UK, Australians said no to a republic by a 55 per cent to 45 per cent margin.
Malcolm Turnbull was on the wrong side of the republic referendum. Assuming he's still prime minister after Saturday he will need to be careful not to be on the wrong side of public opinion too often.
Turnbull and the Coalition have been anxious during the election campaign to stay firmly within what they perceive to be the boundaries of current public opinion. Hence there's been practically no mention of industrial relations reform and repairing the budget has been pushed out to the next decade. Fear of upsetting the public and in response to a Labor scare campaign forced the Coalition to abandon a modest proposal to streamline Medicare's data-processing operations.
In his next term Turnbull is going to have to choose carefully the issues which he'll push the boundaries of public opinion on, and which he won't. So, for example, the Coalition's assessment that the electorate is agnostic about industrial relations reform is probably correct — but unless, and until, the Coalition makes the argument for change, public opinion will never shift.
One issue that Turnbull has committed to making the case for change on is Indigenous recognition in the constitution. He's said a referendum on the question is achievable next year. Whether Turnbull will be able to convince the public that the idea that all Australians should be treated equally under the law should be overturned remains to be seen.
Despite leading the Conservative Party to a strong election win a little over a year ago David Cameron was forced to resign after he fundamentally misread the attitude of the British people to Europe.
In modern Anglo-Australian politics leading your party to victory is no guarantee you'll keep your job long enough to contest the next election — as is demonstrated by what happened to Cameron, Kevin Rudd, and Tony Abbott.
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