Nostalgia’s a powerful thing and it’s a well-known phenomena that people tend to yearn for a better time that they missed the first time around.
That’s our young people are home-dying their hair, wearing flannel shirts and forming grungey bands with big distorted drop-tuned guitars and angsty vocals.
Also, reanimating the Australian Democrats.
The Australian Democrats Party received registration from the AEC today. Look out election 2019, the Australian Democrats are back! pic.twitter.com/RRz40VczPg
— Australian Democrats (@AustDems) April 8, 2019
You might have missed it in the pre-election hype but the party that once boasted that their mission was to “keep the bastards honest” is back, and they’re using fonts which… look, maybe they’re taking that “nineties” vibe too literally?
In case you don’t remember the last time they were a force in Australian politics, they were the largest party in Australia after the Coalition and Labor, getting a Greens-sized vote nationally.
By the end of the nineties people were seriously talking about them as being the sensible centrist future of Australian politics, particularly under the leadership of Cheryl Kernot.
Then she quit to join Labor (and to have her affair with foreign minister Garth Evans inspire the above highlight of Keating: The Musical) and her successor Meg Lees cut a deal with John Howard to allow the introduction of the GST (despite the protests of much of her party) and Australia went “oh, they’re not a party of principle at all, they’re dealmakers like everyone else” and promptly stopped voting for them.
That was despite the heroic attempts of subsequent leaders Natasha Stott Despoja – you remember her, she was famous for being the youngest ever senator at the time and wearing Doc Martens boots into parliament – and Andrew Bartlett, who was famous for quitting as leader after being drunk and belligerent in parliament and later reappeared as a Greens senator.
By 2008 there were no AusDems in parliament or anywhere else. They were deregistered as a political party in 2015 when they couldn’t scrape together 500 members.
Still, given that over a quarter of voters polled by Ipsos least week said they’d vote for a party other than Labor or the Coalition, you’d think there would never have been a better time to be a centrist minor party.
Provided that you ignore the existence of the Centre Alliance who have an MP in the seat of Mayo and two senators and yet are never discussed with anything other than a “who? They’re doing what?”