‘A pox on both your houses!’

That famous line from Romeo and Juliet looks like being dusted off by voters at next month’s federal election.

Like Shakespeare’s character, Mercutio, who curses the families whose rivalry has left him mortally wounded, the Australian public feel badly let down by Labor and the Liberals.

People are hurting, and angry, and they want vengeance. A pox on both your houses! And it may just happen.

With the release of the recent Newspoll, political pundits are predicting that for the first time in Australian history, neither Labor nor the Liberals will command even 40 per cent of the primary vote when the polls close on May 21.

This would effectively end the two-party system that has dominated Australian politics.

Newspoll shows Labor at 37 per cent and the Coalition at 36 per cent. Never have both major parties been in the thirties so close to polling day.

The remaining 27 per cent of voters have indicated they will vote for one of the minor parties, or for an independent. (Greens 11; Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party 4; One Nation 3; Others 9).

That’s more than a quarter of the electorate who have given up on Labor and the Liberals.

Let me give you three suggestions as to what is going on.

Firstly, people are irate about the assault on civil rights that the nation has endured over the past two years. Many have been alarmed at the rapid expansion of power embraced by both parties under the cover of Covid. Power that they have not given back.

Never mind that somehow, as if by magic, the need for Covid restrictions all but disappeared the moment the election was called. People are angry about what was done. They have not forgotten, and they have not forgiven.

Our Liberal Prime Minister will argue that it was the state premiers (most of them Labor premiers) who oversaw harsh lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and border closures. But the fact remains he was Prime Minister through it all and set up a National Cabinet to federally co-ordinate their Covid responses.

And he didn’t even whisper an objection.

When peaceful protestors were being shot with rubber bullets, the Prime Minister said not a word.

When law-abiding citizens were being visited by police over innocuous social media posts, the Prime Minister stayed silent.

When parents were separated from dying children and when families were banned from attending loved one’s funerals, the Prime Minister was missing.

Labor premiers (predominantly) turned the country into a police state while the Liberal Prime Minister looked the other way.

A pox on both your houses.

Second, people are angry that both parties are intent on crippling our economy by signing up to the United Nation’s climate suicide note.

Conservatives once trusted the Coalition to save Australia from climate policies that would end the competitive advantage we have thanks to abundant and easily accessible supplies of coal and gas.

But the Liberals, like Labor, have now committed to Net Zero emissions. The result is Net Zero votes.

A pox on both your houses.

Third, while not quite championing the LGBTQ+WTF madness that is infecting our country’s institutions (as Labor do), the Liberals lack the courage to oppose it.

The Prime Minister won’t sponsor a Bill to protect women’s sport, though personally he shares the views of blah blah blah. Whatever. When push came to shove, he moved.

When Liberal candidate Katherine Deves spoke out about the need to protect women’s sport, a dozen Liberal MPs demanded she be dis-endorsed.

Meanwhile, the Labor leader agreed, but through gritted teeth, that men cannot get pregnant, almost as if he was too afraid to say it with any conviction.

The media class think the transgender issue is trivial. It’s not. People in the suburbs – with children in public schools where this thing is being pushed – want an end to the confusion brought on by fringe activism.

But neither Labor nor the Liberals have the courage to take a stand.

A pox on both your houses.

The polling has barely shifted in the two weeks since the election was called. Political staffers and campaign strategists know this, and they are worried. People have made up their minds and are barely watching the campaign. We could care less.

The Australian public, bloodied and bleeding from a tumultuous couple of years, will finally have their say on May 21.

What will they say?

‘A pox on both your houses!’ seems likely.