Ok, this will probably be long, sorry!
Panthera, you strike me as a pretty typical traditional conservative. Fairly conservative on social issues but willing to shift over time, conservative on economic issues, but with a bit of environmentalism thrown in. Concern for the environment is not uncommon amongst traditional conservatives. Your problem would be that the LNP are no longer traditional conservatives. The New Right as we used to call them are not the same as former LNP PMs such as Menzies, Gorton, Fraser et al. Labor have also shifted as the world has changed. If Labor still relied on "working class" voters who go to their factory job each day then they would get 5% of the vote since we no longer have manufacturing.
If you really want a good look at what is changing in terms of traditional party affiliations I can recommend Capital and Ideology by Pikketty. It is 1,200 pages and if you haven't read his Capital in the 21st Century that is also very good but more economics focussed. Plenty of other books I could recommend too but my light reading is not the same as most peoples'!
Now, you may have noticed I like a bit of data and am not averse to some graphs made by Excel, so here's what has actually been happening in Australian elections. I am going back to 1949 when the Liberal Party first contested elections (The Nats, as the Country Party goes back to the 1920s and the ALP back to the 1890s).
It is an interesting picture.*
Let's start with the major party share of the primary vote, so this is coalition and ALP added together, and it is a very significant graph:
As you can see there has been a big drop off especially in the last 5 elections, but possibly starting in the 1990s. Back in 1951 the major parties got 97.9% of primary votes. In 2022 the figure is 68.5%. This election is the first time it has ever dropped below 70% and the trend is clear.
So, what has happened to the primary votes? Let's see:
Clear drop in the primary votes of the major parties. Most of it is going to the Greens with small numbers to the UAP and One Nation. It is not so easy to graph the independents (by definition) but you can see the fall in the major parties' primary votes in 2022 has dropped more than the minor parties have risen, that is where the independents' votes come from. Plus, it is correct that voters in the Teal electorates voted strategically, just in my seat of Goldstein the ALP vote dropped from 28.31% in 2019 to 10.52% in 2022 - that's strategic voting and strategic (lack of) campaigning by the ALP in Goldstein. Also worth noting is that Greens voters also voted strategically in Goldstein - down from 14.04% in 2019 to 7.47% in 2022. So, some of the drop in the ALP primary vote, along with a limitation in the rise of the Green vote, is actually a shift to strategic voting for independents where ALP and Green voters knew their preferred party could not win. I know this as I normally vote Green, but voted for Zoe Daniels this time.
Despite the fall in Primary votes it has remained the case that third parties or independents have not been able to get seats in the House of Reps. Single member electorates make this very hard even with preferential voting. But, have we hit the point where the major party primary vote has gone down to such a level that they are losing their grip on House of Reps seats? Well, maybe, this election will see a lot more electorates represented by independents or minor parties (bear in mind the graph below does not reflect the win for the Greens in Melbourne):
Look at the green bar in the graph. For most elections it is zero, occasionally 1 member of the HoRs from other than ALP or Coalition, but the rise from this election is simply astounding.
Ultimately a major party wins the election (for now anyway), which, with preferential voting, is why we look at the 2 party preferred vote. It isn't always the case that the major party with the larger 2 party preferred vote wins (again a function of single member electorates) but it does occur most of the time (not in 1954, 1961, 1969, 1990, 1996 though - has to be close for this to happen, 50.7% 2PP in 1954 is the biggest discrepancy), here's the 2PP vote:
Hope that helps with some interpretation of the results.
A lot of this data came from here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_federal_elections and I got the minor party primary votes from the AEC website where you can get results back to 1996.
We live in interesting times. If the major party share of the vote continues to fall expect to see less majority governments. Not a bad thing if you ask me.
DS
*NOTE: 2022 results are not finalised, in particular the seat count does not yet include the seat of Melbourne the Greens will win because the 2 candidate preferred preferences are not yet counted. In a few weeks everything should be finalised and I can update this.
