Antic is formidable, and Liberal moderates know it | David Penberthy
The next 48 hours could change everything for SA Liberals as they prepare to settle their election blame game, writes David Penberthy.
Opinion
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The next 48 hours will be hugely important for the South Australian Liberal Party.
Battered and bruised after being trounced at two elections in as many months, delegates will limp along this weekend to the Adelaide Convention Centre for the party’s annual general meeting to vote on key office bearer positions.
The backdrop is the debate within the party about the nature of their loss at both the March state election and May federal election.
The manner in which this debate is handled, and the final line-up of personnel as positions are filled, will determine whether the party can use this weekend as the springboard for a bounce-back, or slip instead into another interminable round of sniping and division.
Put your money on the second scenario.
This meeting risks being one of the great toxic showdowns in party history with the potential to affect the looming preselection of some of the party’s big names.
The psychology of it is terrible, too, in the back draft of the pitiable one-term collapse of the moderate-dominated Marshall government.
Having seen their grip on state power vanish in record time, then seeing moderate candidates fail in the federal seat of Boothby and run close in Sturt, the party’s progressive members appear listless and despondent, whereas the conservatives are emboldened and enraged.
And the right-wingers are coming in large numbers, thanks to one of the more inept moments in political management the state has seen, the party’s initial decision last year to go to war with the influx of new Christian members who flooded the party in protest at social policy under the Marshall government.
Outgoing party president and former MLC Legh Davis oversaw this tactically silly effort when several hundred would-be members had their memberships put on hold amid claims from moderates that these people were part of a branch-stacking exercise led by Senator Alex Antic.
Undoubtedly, Antic has played a big role in corralling disaffected Christian voters who were angered by the support of senior Marshall government figures (especially former Attorney-General Vickie Chapman) for late-term abortion and euthanasia laws.
But the truth is, if people of faith who hold strong views on those issues cannot join the Liberal Party, what party is there for them to support?
The censorious nature of the moderate-dominated party in trying to bar them confirmed the suspicion of conservatives – namely that the party had drifted so far left that in its local form it would black-ban new members on the grounds they shared the exact same religious views as former prime minister Scott Morrison.
Rather than holding back the tide, the ostracising of these members has acted as a recruitment tool.
Some 1000 new members have joined, swelling party ranks to about 5500, and all of them are right-wingers, meaning it is highly likely that the conservatives will, as of this weekend, have complete control of the branch that for years has been synonymous with the likes of Marshall, Chapman, Christopher Pyne and Simon Birmingham.
The ascent of the Right has already been confirmed with the faction taking control of the party’s women’s council. In a first act regarded by some as provocative and even stupid, the new women’s council leadership surprised everyone at a meeting last month when controversial failed Warringah candidate Katherine Deves was flown in as a guest speaker. Deves of course is famous for her outspokenness about trans issues, describing trans children as being “surgically mutilated” and likening the issue to the Holocaust.
Her presence was seen by moderates as absurd, especially as she did so poorly trying to win Tony Abbott’s old seat, with many progressives seeing her less as a crusader for women’s rights than simply cruel to troubled people whose gender identity has zero impact on the average person’s daily life. There is also similar angst over the fact that, Friday night, right-wing shock jock Alan Jones will be here in town to give a rev-up pep talk at an event organised by Senator Antic.
In Antic, the party’s Left has a formidable foe, and they know it, as some people have even been speculating as to whether he could be expelled from the party for withholding support for the Morrison government last year in protest at vax mandates.
Antic is not only unfazed by the criticism, he wears it as a badge of honour, as he has nothing but contempt for the manner in which the moderates squandered their electoral mandate during Covid-19 and set Malinauskas up to govern at what will probably be great length.
For what it’s worth, my take on all this is that the Liberal Party is currently grappling with the wrong question.
In light of the SA and federal losses, the party is having an ideological discussion around whether it lost touch with voters because it is too left wing or too right wing. No party with two factions can answer that question without self-destructing.
The losses of Marshall and Morrison were in my view less ideological than political.
In the main part, Marshall lost because of a pandemic, and Morrison lost because of his personality.
Debating the question of ideology is rendered even more fruitless by the fact that Marshall lost as a moderate and Morrison as a conservative.
The truth is that political parties perform best when they set all this factional claptrap aside and just concentrate on governing. The best example of this in Australia is an obvious one, and it ran all the way from 1983 to 2007, firstly with the consensus-driven approach of Bob Hawke, and then from 1996 onwards the Broad Church of John Howard, where the likes of Amanda Vanstone and Robert Hill sat happily at the same cabinet table as Nick Minchin and Alexander Downer.
The biggest risk for the SA Libs and fledgling leader David Speirs is that, while state Labor can say it’s getting on with governing, the Libs will from this weekend onwards end up talking about themselves.
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