Voting confusion - which party of last resort?

Still, what could be more inner-city liberal these days than the “immorality” of consumption?

This goes to the heart of the cosmopolitan middle class’s love affair with green politics, which are all about the illusion of personal choice and the performance of a certain kind of ethical comportment.

While green politics owe their formation in this country to the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation’s popular resistance, in support of local residents’ groups, to opportunistic development around Sydney in the 1970s, there’s not a trace of this history in the self-representation of The Greens today.

The Greens will never win the popular vote because, like every middle class before them, they’re contemptuous of popular taste. Like every middle class in history, they see popular desires and aspirations as the expression of a brute sensibility in need of moral refinement.

For this reason it’s never occurred to them to try to turn their politics into a popular movement - by advocating, say, the need to develop an electric-car industry that could lead to the creation of huge numbers of jobs.

Instead, because theirs is ultimately a project not of political but of moral reform, they want us to stop driving cars!

That’s a message that will never catch on, and until The Greens confront this reality they’ll continue to represent little more politically than an organised expression of the inner city’s historical aversion to suburban tastes and values.

They may look forward to holding the balance of power in the Senate for the time being, but a double dissolution could soon put short shrift to that.

Organised snobbery, in a word, should never be mistaken for a political project, and The Greens should take care not to think that “smug” is a good look.

Meanwhile, out in the suburban shopping centres, no one was quite sure whether to vote Labor or Liberal.

Latham’s partial explanation for this was that Gillard and Abbott both ran safe, uninspiring campaigns that left voters with no real alternative with which to align themselves.

But the deeper reason, I think, is that voters were rightfully confused.