Voters across the world are resentful, angry and lashing out

The end of the year is a good time for many things. Enjoying time with your family, taking a holiday, or contemplating a new year’s resolution or three. It’s also a good time for examining who won and who lost this year in the grand theatre of politics.

This year’s biggest losers have been political incumbents. Across the world, voters have been punishing governments, booting out long-term and short-term governments alike.

In the United States, things were so bad for the Democrats that the President abandoned his re-election campaign part way through, leaving it to his Vice President to run. Harris chose to run a campaign centred around the need for change … although given her senior role in the incumbent administration, it’s hardly surprising this message didn’t resonate.

In Britain, the ruling Conservative party was obliterated; losing more than 250 seats on a 20 percentage point swing. There were also rather significant voter backlashes in Europe, particularly in France.

Closer to home, the QLD Labor government was turfed out with a 7% swing against.

Of course, each and every election has its own issues, some of which we will touch on later. What is clear is that voters across the world are resentful and angry at the mismanagement of governments and are lashing out.

High on the list is the explosion of inflation following the pandemic. Voters have always punished governments for falling living standards.

Worse still in the eyes of many voters is that governments continue to focus on narrow issues instead of taking decisive action to fix the cost of living problems. Many governments have spent more time this year talking about online hate speech, transgender issues, and other culture wars debates than addressing real economic problems.

While some voters are impassioned by these concerns, most have little patience left. The culture wars are secondary to security and economic prosperity.

The failure of an economic agenda brings us to another one of this year’s losers, one who has gone from the penthouse to the outhouse: Treasurer Jim Chalmers.

The Treasurer started off like a house on fire, boasting of the first surplus delivered by a Labor government in a generation and with grand plans to remake capitalism. However, like a house that is actually on fire, the key structural supports have started to collapse.

The budget has plunged massively into deficit, exposing Labor’s flabby spending agenda. Chalmers’ near constant jaw-boning of the RBA has failed to generate a single rate cut to take the political pressure off.

Worse still, the RBA has seen through his flimsy accounting tricks on inflation, making it harder to credibly claim that the government has done anything substantial to reduce it. To be fair, such a claim was always somewhat incredible, as the government has done little other than stoke inflation since taking office.

As for grand reforms? Little of the government’s economic agenda has passed and what has passed (for example their housing policies) will achieve little anyway. The Treasurer may still harbour dreams of giving capitalism a makeover, but such dreams may prove to be ephemeral.

On the other hand, big winners on the economic front were the economic nationalists. Trump and — especially — his running mate JD Vance have made it clear they believe trade is a game of winners and losers.

It would be wrong to attribute this to ideology, on Trump’s part at least. He isn’t really driven by ideology in any meaningful way, certainly in an economic sense. His lodestar is ‘the art of the deal’. In that sense tariffs are just a tool, a way to beat your opponent into taking a bad deal.

But that doesn’t extend to those around Trump. Indeed, many are believers in an economic policy that is effectively a fusion of older schools of thought: the protectionism favoured by unions in the mid-twentieth century, and the mercantilism of conservatives a century earlier.

No doubt some are just grifters, professing undying belief in whatever idea seems like it would advance their career fastest. But many no doubt believe tariffs and other protectionist measures will genuinely bring manufacturing jobs home.

Despite the paucity of evidence to support their claims, these ideas have quickly gained traction. So much so, that economic liberals left and right have been left floundering in their wake.

Unfortunately for the grifters, the true believers and the populists more broadly, their hoped-for utopia is indeed no place. Trade has enriched countries that have embraced it. It is not responsible for the wholesale destruction of communities in the rust belt.

Even if the manufacturing returns, the jobs can’t. Machines do the manufacturing now, not people.

The big question mark going forward in Australia is the Teals. It’s very close to put up or shut up time for the community independents. They need to start demonstrating influence over policy. If they lose ground at the next election, or fail to gain any significant influence in the next parliament, their momentum may well drift away.

In many ways, 2024 felt like a transition year. If 2020 and 21 were the lost years of the pandemic and 22 and 23 were the crashing wave of economic reality breaking across the world, 2024 may be the year we started to see the post pandemic normal becoming established.

In 2025 it will be interesting to see if things settle down or if the cards are thrown up in the air again.

Simon Cowan is Research Director at the Centre for Independent Studies.