After the first teal tide, I said Liberals must change forever. Well, our time’s up

In the unforgiving and often brutal world of politics, defeat has long tentacles. Take the defeat of the Liberal Party candidate Georgia Ryburn in last Saturday’s Pittwater byelection by the teal candidate Jacqui Scruby.

Suddenly, a relatively inconsequential byelection result puts the focus on the job that Mark Speakman is doing as leader of the opposition in NSW. More deservedly, it again raises the capacity of the Liberal Party machine to run a winning campaign, even in its northern beaches heartland. Most profoundly, it is another case study in a two-party system in decline.

The teal tide has risen further, now extending up the northern beaches. Credit: iStock

Speakman is running an unspectacular but “steady as she goes” parliamentary team. If ever there were a marathon rather than a sprint, it is the race run by long-term opposition leaders. While an opposition leader’s report card invariably reads “can do better”, that call is ultimately made by the leader’s parliamentary colleagues.

The word around Macquarie Street is that Speakman is safe in the job. He leads a parliamentary party looking more for a safe pair of hands than bells and whistles. He has certainly got until the next election, in March 2027, to prove himself. That’s a marathon.

But what about the Liberal Party organisation? Unlike political leaders, major political parties don’t have a use-by date. They are fast-dyed into the political fabric. To the chagrin of elected politicians, party-machine operatives often avoid the fallout of defeat or dysfunction, regardless of their performance. The flak is typically reserved for the politicians, forgetting that the party machine has a crucial role in who wins the hard-fought democratic race.

After the May 2022 federal election, referencing the spectacular teal victories in Liberal Party heartland seats in NSW and Victoria, I wrote: “Australian politics has just changed forever. It’s now time for the Liberal Party to change forever.”

The party organisation had failed its own key performance indicators. The core business of a political party is to build a large membership, the orderly conduct of preselections, putting feet on the ground between and during election campaigns, and fundraising.

The 2022 federal election saw the most significant realignment in Australian politics since federation. The parliament has 20 crossbench members. As I wrote then: “The [federal] political pie chart now has three roughly equal slices, rather than two, based on first-preference votes. While the third slice of the pie chart has been a work in progress for decades, the Liberal Party was walloped in its heartland by an unprecedented third force of independent candidates, now known colloquially as the ‘teals’.”

Enter Jacqui Scruby in Pittwater, the only teal MP in the state parliament. The new member for Pittwater is just one example in a long-running and profound change in Australian politics.

Minor parties and independents have, since the advent of the Democratic Labour Party in the 1950s, all but taken the two-party DNA of Australian politics to the brink. The rock-solid, 40- or even 50-something per cent primary vote for the major parties has morphed into a shaky 30-something per cent. This is no aberration. Political hard-heads across the spectrum diagnose that this profound change reflects a cultural failure.

The electorate is fatigued by adversarial, two-party democracy, where politics is dished up at people rather than with them. Political parties have failed to embrace membership, fundraising and user-friendly structures that make them part of local communities. Political parties should rely on large numbers of small donors rather than small numbers of large donors. The vast amounts thrown at the Voice referendum should tell us how not to do democracy.

And let’s not ignore perhaps the most potent factor of all – a preferential voting system that is heaven-sent for minor parties and independents. But preferential voting is here to stay. So it should be.

The Pittwater defeat is another kick in the backside for a Liberal Party that struggles to learn from its organisational mistakes. It shines a light – again – on the need for organisational reform. In his day as premier, Nick Greiner was fond of reminding his colleagues that their party was keen on reform for everything but itself. That mindset remains.

These are the more boring, nuts-and-bolts essentials of politics: building a strong membership, running preselections effectively, getting nominations in on time, raising funds. These are required to make “a lean, mean fighting machine”, as the Liberal Party once described itself. It’s not.

These boring things are the difference between winning and losing. Ask the federal Liberal MPs defeated by teals in 2022. They were outnumbered, outspent and ultimately voted out. Liberal polling booth workers tell a similar story from Pittwater last Saturday, clearly not helped by the child sex offences levelled at, and denied by, the departing one-term member.

The most significant organisational challenge for the party is to make itself a true mass-membership organisation. The truth is that “feet on the ground” in Australian politics is the domain of the left, underpinned by the likes of unions and environmental causes. And let’s not forget GetUp!

The challenge for the Liberal Party is to stop whingeing about these organisational failures and do something about them. As it celebrates 80 years since its establishment by Sir Robert Menzies, this challenge cannot be beyond the party. After all, federally, it remains the most successful party in Australian political history, having been in power with the Nationals, or their predecessors, for 51 of the past 75 years. Despite this, the same party is crippled by factionalism, an ageing and declining membership, and chronic financial challenges.

Focus on the defeat in Pittwater will be shortlived. It will be a very brief chapter in a very long volume that tells the story of the slow but steady decline of a two-party system that failed to modernise with the electorate it represents.

Michael Yabsley was a minister in the Greiner government and a federal treasurer of the Liberal Party. He is the author of Dark Money – A plan to reform political fundraising and election funding in Australia.