Who should gig economy types vote for?
Does Albo or ScoMo better represent the interests of those of us who hustle?
Anthony Albanese and his mother
The first interview I ever did in my first proper journalist job was with Tanya Plibersek. I’ve subsequently interviewed her, from memory, a couple of times. She was always perfectly pleasant and professional, but I always found her a little too Head Prefect-y to warm to.
It may be the case her colleagues and the ALP rank and file feel the same way – despite her ticking all the progressive political leader boxes – female, empathetic, photogenic, polished media performer – she’s yet to end up in the top job. Of course, that’s likely to change if Albo falls short, Shorten-style, on the big day. (Despite the polls, I’m inclined to believe another Don’s Party-type defeat is a real possibility given the Australian voters’ historical reluctance to entrust the ALP with control of the treasury benches.)
Albo and your humble correspondent in 2013
Meeting Albo
I’ve also interviewed Plibersek’s long-time frenemy Anthony Albanese a couple of times. (Despite or because of their similarities – they are around the same age, entered parliament around the same time, have adjoining electorates and both started out in the Left faction before ‘moderating’ their youthful commitment to socialism as they climbed the greasy pole and accumulated substantial real estate portfolios, the relationship between Albanese and Plibersek has never been “terrific”.)
One of the things you discover as a journalist is there is often a yawning gap between the public persona and private behaviour of newsworthy figures, but with Albo what you see is what you get. Possibly due to his humble start in life, Albo lacks the ego of most of those who aspire to govern a nation. Unlike Whitlam, Hawke, Keating and Rudd, he never appears to have believed he was destined for prime ministerial greatness. Indeed, when I last interviewed him during the 2016 election campaign, he even briefly mused about getting out of politics and leading a quieter life. I found Albanese to be warm, unpretentious, articulate and intelligent. I came away liking him, as many people (from all political backgrounds) who’ve met him in person do.
I suspect Albo could turn out to be a Labor version of John Howard – an uncharismatic plodder who, after a long and often demoralising apprenticeship, becomes a surprisingly skilled, popular and long-serving prime minister.
Even though I’m not sure whether it’s in my economic or cultural interests to vote Labor (see below) – put a 1 in the ALP box on my ballot when I voted early a few days ago.
Progresstopia: no country for old, white men
While I did ultimately vote for Albo, my tiny pencil hovered in mid-air for quite some time before I filled in my House of Representatives ballot paper. As a basic bitch, 50-year-old, heterosexual, Anglo-Celtic male who also happens to be a free speech absolutist partial to debating rather than deplatforming those I disagree with, let’s just say I long ago ceased to be part of the natural constituency of the contemporary Left.
But Albo has wisely kept his distance from the nutty wokery that many of his constituents in suburbs such as Balmain, Enmore and Marrickville have so enthusiastically embraced. (Tellingly, unlike his UK counterpart, he didn’t fall in a gibbering heap when recently asked to define the term ‘woman’).
Plus, even if I was inclined to cast an angry white man protest vote against those who insist there are 58 genders, there’s little reason to believe that voting for the evangelical Christian heading up the Coalition would do much to change the direction of the culture. The Coalition has won – or, in one case, drawn – eight of the last nine federal elections. Nonetheless, is anyone seriously suggesting the Australia of 2022 isn’t profoundly more socially liberal than the Australia of 1996? (Younger readers may be interested to learn progressive poster girl Julia Gillard baulked at gay marriage while it was a, at least nominally, Liberal PM that facilitated it.)
How can gig economy types vote for their economic interests?
Given the diversity of their backgrounds, it’s pointless trying to work out which side of politics best represents the cultural interests of gig economy types. Theoretically, working out which political party best represents their economic interests should be more straightforward.
But is it?
On paper, gig-economy types – like their small-business-owning cousins – would seem to be natural right-wingers. In my experience, even the ones who feel the need to announce their pronouns on their LinkedIn bio and put an Acknowledgement of Country statement on their website tend to be pick-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, take-control-of-your-own-destiny hustlers.
Indeed, anybody who isn’t the self-reliant, make-your-own-luck type isn’t likely to be attracted to being self-employed in the first place. And they definitely aren’t likely to last long as a freelancer/contractor/consultant if they don’t have plenty of get-up-and-go and a willingness to take the initiative.
To put it terminology fans of Thomas Picketty might recognise, gig economy workers would appear to slot far more neatly into the ‘Merchant Right’ rather than the ‘Brahmin Left’; to be aspirational businesspeople eager to get ahead in life rather than egghead intellectuals intoxicated by grand theories.
There’s something to this, and I’m sure plenty of my fellow gig economy workers do have a Thatcherite worldview. But – and maybe this is just down to the kind of Balmain-Enmore-Marrickville circles I move in – I haven’t found microbusiness-owners to be as rabidly right-wing as their small-business-owning petite bourgeoise counterparts.
If I was a 50-year-old, Anglo-Celtic, heterosexual male who, say, owned a butcher shop, I’d almost certainly be voting for ScoMo and loudly lamenting the fact the post-Work Choices Coalition had gone to water on industrial relations reform thereby making it much harder for me to fire underperforming or insolent employees.
But like most gig economy types, I don’t employ anyone on an ongoing basis apart from myself. What’s more, I exist in a no-man’s-land between being an employee and being a business owner. My customers hire me to do work for them – in many cases exactly the same kind of work they have hired employees to do under their direct supervision – but we have a client-contractor relationship rather than an employer-employee one.
(There’s been some debate during this election campaign about whether that’s a distinction without a difference. But I’ve now spent a lot of time as both an employee and a contractor and, IMHO, the power dynamics are significantly different, even if the tasks you’re completing are exactly the same.)
Those of us in the gig economy exist in a political no-man’s-land between Capital and Labour, with our interests not clearly represented by either the employer-championing Coalition or the employee-championing ALP.
Money talks
I suspect, as is the case with most Australian citizens, most gig-economy denizens vote according to how much money they are currently making and how much money they imagine they will be making in future.
If I was to play armchair psephologist, I’d hypothesise that those operating at the Paris end of the gig economy (think software developer) and earning in excess of $150,000 would vote Liberal or Green, those operating at the arse end of it (think Menulog deliverer) and earning under $50,000 would break for the ALP, and those in the fat part of the bell curve earning between $50,000 - $150,000 (think content provider) could swing either way.
Then again, I could be completely wrong. Political commentators often have been over the last six years.