Adversarial reviews
Read it from the other side
Four strategists, four traditions. Each was asked to attack the New Australia platform from their own ground -- centrist, conservative, libertarian, progressive -- and to name both the wins and the campaign-ending mistakes.
A policy program is only as strong as the best case against it. These four reviews read the same manifesto through four different electoral frames. Together they map where the platform has broad support, where it splits a coalition, and where it would need to be argued -- or abandoned -- to win. Read them in any order; a perspective switcher at the top of each review lets you jump between traditions mid-argument.
Want the bird's-eye view first? See the worldview map for a radar-chart comparison across four axes before you read any one review in full.
- CentristMedian-voter strategist
There is a genuinely electable core inside this manifesto, but it is buried under approximately twelve simultaneous constitutional revolutions and a philosophical framework that will alienate more voters than it converts. The strategic task is extraction and sequencing--pulling out the popular, deliverable reforms and leading with those, while parking the constitutional ambitions for a second or third term when political capital and public trust have been built.
Read the full review → - ConservativeCentre-right base strategist
The platform is a ready-made base-mobilisation package and a ready-made base-fragmentation device. Run unreformed, it will deliver a higher primary vote in the Coalition heartland than anything since Howard in 1996, and it will hand marginal outer-metropolitan seats and every remaining teal-facing seat to the crossbench for a generation. Winning government requires extracting the parts that unify the Coalition (family, border sovereignty, nuclear, integrity, deregulation, emergency-powers reform) and burying the parts that split it (resource-fund nationalisation, flat-tax entrenchment, Medicare retreat, firearms, Paris withdrawal, republic). The conservative electoral opportunity is real; the risk of a ruinous factional war inside the Coalition before a single vote is cast is greater.
Read the full review → - LibertarianClassical-liberal strategist
There is no other platform in Australian politics that a libertarian strategist could endorse ninety percent of in good conscience. There is also no other platform whose remaining ten percent so directly threatens the liberty-of-future-generations principle that sits at the heart of any serious classical-liberal tradition. The strategic task is to hold the line on ends and be disciplined about means--accept all of the reform where it frees persons and property from state power, resist the parts where the state reaches back into conscience, association, or the constitutional discretion of future citizens.
Read the full review → - ProgressiveLabor / Greens / Teal strategist
There are at least five policies in this manifesto that the Australian left should be trying to steal. There are another six that the Australian left should be campaigning full-throatedly against. The strategic task is to force the public debate onto that first list and refuse to let the second list define the conversation. Whoever holds the ground on housing, resource rents, and integrity will win the next decade of Australian politics; this platform hands that ground to whoever messages more cleanly.
Read the full review →
These documents are working drafts. They are written to be argued with, not agreed with. See also the draft constitution, which is the instrument the reform program points toward.