Campbell: Liberals facing a bleak future

The Liberal Party has lost federal and state elections, and doesn’t look like coming back soon. Why? Many Australians think the Liberals are losers, argues James Campbell.

What do the French and Greeks socialists, the Israeli Labour Party and the Italian Christian Democrats have in common?

The answer is that not very long ago they all strode their countries’ political landscapes like colossuses but are now basically kaput.

The reasons for their obliterations were, of course, many and varied but their end as parties of government was accelerated – if not caused – by the fact voters decided that they couldn’t win.

No doubt many people will be saying that a year after it lost government it is premature, if not silly, to wonder if the Liberal Party might not be in danger of going the same way.

Especially as, since it was founded by Robert Menzies in 1944, it has been more often in government than out, at least in Canberra.

But the circumstance of that creation, the disintegration of its predecessor the United Australia Party, is to be reminded that there is no reason the Liberal Party can’t go the same way.

Sir Robert Menzies in 1947.

What got me thinking about this was the most recent Resolve poll published in the Nine papers.

One of the questions that pollster asks regularly is ‘regardless of who you would like to win the next federal election, who do you think will actually win?’

The Coalition’s popularity was higher during the Covid pandemic. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Penny Stephens

Two years ago, a year into the Covid pandemic, 44 per cent of people said they expected the Coalition to win compared with 28 per cent who thought it would be Labor.

In its most recent poll taken earlier this month, these percentages were 60 per cent for Labor and 17 per cent for the Coalition.

The state-by-state breakdown was slightly more comforting for the Coalition, reflecting the relative strengths of the Liberal and National Party divisions.

In Queensland, where the LNP dominates federally, only 53 per cent of people think Labor will win, versus 18 per cent for the Coalition.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese Prime Minister with NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns, adding to the opinion the Liberals are losers. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Damian Shaw

In NSW it was 58 per cent to 19 per cent.

Before I get to Victoria, I should warn squeamish Liberals they need to look away now.

At the moment, a whopping 66 per cent of Victorians say they think Anthony Albanese is going to get the chocolates next time versus the 14 per cent who think Peter Dutton is in with a show.

It has to be said these numbers are not a great surprise, given the Liberals have just lost a by-election in suburban Melbourne that saw the number of its federal MPs drop to 7-out-of-39 Victorian seats (the Nats hold another three).

A whopping 66 per cent of Victorians say they think Anthony Albanese is going to win the next election. Picture: Wendell Teodoro/AFP

This result came six months after they were handed their second hiding in a row by the public at a state election that saw Labor actually gain seats after eight years in office.

In hindsight, what is clear to many Liberals I have spoken to is they believe that one of the reasons they believe they were thrashed is because a large slice of the Victorian public had reached the fixed opinion that they couldn’t win.

In recent times we have heard a lot about the Liberal Party’s problems with Chinese voters.

In the case of this community, their antipathy to the party of business was largely to do with the deterioration of the Australia-China relationship.

But what scares a number of Victorian Liberals is that, despite the obvious alignment between their party’s conservative values and those of other recently arrived ethnic communities, particularly Indians, they’re not voting for them in the numbers they should be.

Matthew Guyle th Liberal Party when it failed to win the last Victorian election. Picture: Ian Currie

The reason? They think the Liberals are losers.

Obviously things can change quickly, and Victoria isn’t Australia, but even so what has happened in the People’s Republic has national implications.

That’s because as the old line goes, Victoria is the Massachusetts of Australia. Unlike the Bay State, it has roughly a quarter of the country’s population.

In other words, if things get much worse for the party here, even if it does fluke its way to government in Canberra, it won’t have much of a majority and it won’t have much hope of being there for very long.

And it isn’t as though it’s travelling that well in other parts of Australia either, especially WA.

The alternative view, buttressed by history, is that these things are cyclical.

But it isn’t clear how useful history is as a guide to the situation we are in today because, as election after election shows, voters are less and less attached to the major parties.

Of course Labor isn’t without its problems either – its vote has been steadily declining, including at last May’s election.

As the Home Affairs Minister pointed out in 2019, since the 1970s, while “Labor’s primary vote has bounced around a bit” the trend has been “a slow persistent decline of almost 1 per cent per election”.

Perhaps the best way to think about the two parties is as two failing businesses in competition to be the last one in the market and, while for most of the last 20 years it looked as though the Liberals would be the winner, in recent times the tables have suddenly turned violently.

I suspect the Prime Minister understands how bad things can get for his opponents, which is why he has been giving interviews in which he is telling progressives to be patient.

Originally published as Campbell: Liberals facing a bleak future