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September 5, 2013
Focus groups now form the core of modern politics geared at and for the margins and the marginals. As Peter Hartcher points out if the opinion polls tell us who's winning the election (Coalition) and who's losing (ALP), then focus groups tell us why.
The ones Hartcher sat in on in western Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne had a simple reason---Labor had its chance and it has blown it.
Alan Moir
Underneath that judgement is a disturbing sense of hollowness of party politics and its diet of simplistic slogans, and a gnawing sense of powerlessness of the voter. The voter has little sense of being a citizen in a democracy. There is deep distrust of the political class, combined with more demanding expectations of it, and a turning inwards.
This sense of powerlessness and disengagement persists even though the suburban lifestyle has increasingly become associated with a certain kind of political subjectivity that was class-prejudiced, exclusionary and racist in the extreme.
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People are struggling with constant change and increasing inequality in a market economy and they get political puffery from the political class.
So we have the anger.