(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

“It’s not the despair… it’s the hope!” John Cleese whines in Clockwise. I think the sentiment is originally from Pascal’s Pensees, but you gets what you gets. Progressives and rusteds are having the first real feels that we might be in this. 

They’re/we’re resigned to Labor’s no-target strategy, the odd choice of a 43% target (the meaning of everything plus one?), and the hope that the Coalition has become such a disgusting rabble that enough people in some key seats will be persuaded that some sort of order must be restored.

They quietly expect that victory has become likely. Here’s one small and one big reason why they probably shouldn’t. 

The big one is the peculiarities of the array of marginal seats, peculiarities few seem to have commented on, except in the most general and undifferentiated terms. Yet the way they have fallen offers little comfort for Labor, and a lot of fat for the Coalition. 

The crucial fact is that the Liberals are defending only two ultra-marginals and one very marginal — Bass, Chisholm and Boothby (0.4%, 0.5% and 1.4% swings required) — and they’re all weird, contrarian seats. 

Bass being in northern Tasmania is a land unto itself, a place where national issues compete with vegetable canning, bicycle paths (against), docks demarcations in Devonport, encroaching Satanism (in the shape of Dark Mofo), and multiple state Aussie Rules leagues, etc. There’s no simple way to win Bass. 

Chisholm in Melbourne’s south-east was solidly Labor for 20 years under Anna Burke (after decades as a Liberal heartland), and its moderate liberal remnant, loathing what the Liberal Party has become, would have kept it so — had not Box Hill and surrounds become a de facto Chinese city with a strong Liberal, anti-socialist base — especially among its many CCP members. It may well go more Liberal in ’22. 

Boothby, in the Adelaide Hills, is the ultimate fainting-and-smelling-salts seat, continually shocked — shocked! — at the Liberal Party’s doings but last voting Labor in in 1947. Liberal dissident Steele Hall held it for 20 years.

Nicolle Flint is not recontesting, and defenders are running hard on a “left-misogyny” charge after Extinction Rebellion graffitied her office. A recent friendlyjordies vid calling her, inter alia, a “whiny little bitch” is going to be oh-so-helpful — and was dutifully telegraphed on in News Corp.

After Boothby — on a 1.5% swing — Labor hits a reef of 3.1% and up, starting with Braddon in north-east Tasmania, another seat sui generis (issues: hospitals have a higher death rate than Mogadishu, why can’t I ride a quad bike in the Tarkine, football leagues). 

Now look at Labor’s marginals, and there are six seats under Boothby’s 1.5% swing — from Macquarie, mountainy west of Sydney on 0.2%, to Blair (1.2%), ex-urban Queensland “bikie-kept-stripper’s head-to-give-to-Jesus” headline territory. After that, there’s another eight seats, from Dobell on 1.5% to the notorious Hunter on 3%, made tougher by Fitzgibbon being returned to the jungle. 

Even discounting the likelihood of strong pro-Coalition swings, there is enough idiosyncrasy in the very-marginals to give Labor reversals: Macquarie is going increasingly happy-clappy as the Hillsong crowd rolls west, Corangamite (1%) on Victoria’s surf coast is going ever more bougie, and Blair will be dope for anti-vax UAP vote transfer Lab-to-Lib.

There’s also Indi, which the Libs could take with a 1.4% swing (although Labor could compensate by regaining Melbourne with a — checks notes — 21.8% swing, hahaha).

So the Coalition has a lot of paths to pull off some surprise holds and gains, and Labor has fewer paths to win in its own right.

It has some advantages: the new safe seat of Hawke, the possibility of getting Flinders without Greg Hunt — yes, even Hunt has an incumbency premium; usually 3%, in Hunt’s case I would guess immediate family — and the Libs losing Higgins to the Greens.

But Labor may lose McNamara (the old Melbourne Ports — I hate these crappy honorific namings… Latham, Colston, Orkopolis, Milat) or even Richmond in northern NSW to the tree-huggers (does anyone still call them that?) to even it out. Labor would rather lose to Peter Dutton. 

Really, to be sure, even of plurality, Labor needs to get eight to 10 seats in on the pendulum, allowing for gaps and reversals — which takes them to Robertson, north of Sydney. Our hopes live and die on the edge of Dubbo. As always.

And, as promised, the small reason why not, a sort of sandwich-de-merde digestif. That would be Asmar v Albanese, the court case by the unions at the core of the Centre Unity-Industrial Left put together by Adem Somyurek, challenging federal Labor’s right to make preselections in the suspended Victorian branch. 

Asmar v Albanese was knocked back in the Supreme Court last month, the Supremes unsurprisingly telling the plaintiffs that they don’t intervene in badminton clubs or political parties. Diana Asmar (Health Workers Union head) and her co-plaintiffs are appealing — in a strictly legal sense.

But the Industrial Left (the CFMMEU and the RTBU) have dropped out, with word that they have made a deal with the socialist left-cons (the Conroy right, ostensibly headed by Richard Marles) to float RTBU head Luba Grigorovitch into the state seat of Kororoit, soon to be vacated by Marlene Kairouz, one of Somyurek’s hapless lieutenants, whose own case against the ALP leadership was also chucked out. 

Grigorovitch would be an undoubted asset — and her enemies in the very left RTBU are gathering, disquieted over her talk-of-the-town relationship with venture capitalist Ben Gray, uber-rich scion of a Liberal family. Her elevation would mean the CU-IL alliance has come to a clattering end, signified by the departure from politics of Jane Garrett, once future premier of Victoria, currently pickled in the upper house. 

Asmar v Albanese is thus now visible as nothing much more than the ragged forces around Bill Shorten and the AWU making a last stand, to hold on to something in the party — especially on the chance that Labor loses in 2022 and (zing!) Bill’s back, y’all. 

There’s almost no chance the appeal will win, but if it did, landing in February, Labor would be thrown into chaos — and all amid the tough marginal struggle outlined above. Is this ragged faction of the right about to perform one last anti-service to the forces of Labor? 

Like clockwork. Not the despair, the hope.