Hildebrand: While the right consumes itself, Labor is winning

Conservative Liberal powerbroker Walter Villatora has quit the party to launch Reform Australia, despite a graveyard of failed right-wing parties littering recent political history, writes Joe Hildebrand.

Mr Villatora has previously run campaigns for former Prime Minister Tony Abbott and former NSW Premier Mike Baird. Picture: Christian Gilles

There was once an old joke photo of a fridge stacked with stubbies and the caption: “What’s missing from this picture?”

Turn the page and the answer would reveal itself: “That’s right, another beer!”

This also seems to be the solution that those on the right always turn to in their moments of crisis: Let’s start a new party that will attract true conservative voters from across the land.

Of course Australia is already brimming with parties to the right of the Liberals but, like the fridge full of beers, there’s always room for one more.

Walter Villatora heading to the Liberal Convention at Rosehill Racecourse.

Thus conservative Liberal powerbroker Walter Villatora has torn up his membership to launch a new party called Reform Australia, modelled on Nigel Farage’s party in the UK.

Villatora is a man of substance, having run campaigns for Tony Abbott and – at the opposite end of the factional spectrum – Mike Baird.

However he now says that the Liberal Party has “lost its way” and has registered a Reform Australia website and expects to formally register the party in coming weeks.

So what happens next? He might want to ask my good friend Cory Bernardi, who did the exact same thing less than a decade ago.

In 2017 Bernardi quit the Libs in dismay and founded the Australian Conservatives.

The party was disbanded two years later having failed to trouble the scorers in any upper or lower house seat – not counting the one Cory himself vacated.

Clive Palmer leaves the Brisbane Magistrates court. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Likewise the Palmer United Party was going to be the next conservative force in Australian politics and yet almost as soon as it entered parliament on a tsunami of advertising bankrolled by the billionaire, it crashed on the rocks, with splits and defections aplenty.

Even with all the spending in the world it now boasts only the Buddha-esque smile of Ralph Babet in the Senate, for whom Victorians are free to vote if they please.

Then there was Family First, which, as the name suggests, offered social conservatives an option in South Australia and Victoria and briefly had members in the state upper houses of NSW and WA. It collapsed in 2017.

It was then relaunched in 2021 by political exiles from the South Australian Labor Party and is now run by former Australian Christian Lobby head Lyle Shelton, fielding candidates in SA, NSW and Victoria.

And then of course there is One Nation, which exploded on to the scene in 1998, imploded in the years that followed, and is now once more riding at record highs in the polls.

In other words, if conservatives to the right of the Liberal Party are looking for somewhere to park their vote, it’s not like there is a lack of options.

The problem is that these options either self-combust because of internal dysfunction or a lack of policy cohesion or they simply disappear because of a lack of electoral support.

One Nation is currently the exception to this rule but that’s only after a similar boom bust cycle. Remember David Oldfield? Mark Latham? Barnaby might want to drop them a line.

Even so, if anyone is going to challenge the Coalition as the major right-wing force, it is surely going to be it. Why didn’t Villatora just sign up with it instead of bringing his own snag to the sausage sizzle?

And yet even so that remains unlikely to transform Australian politics because One Nation’s boost in support has come virtually entirely at the expense of the Coalition. It is not flipping Labor voters – whose numbers have grown enormously – but cannibalising voters already on the right while sending others closer to the centre into the arms of the ALP.

It is this structural death spiral that is at the heart of the right’s problem, not a lack of conservative parties to vote for. In fact there is a veritable smorgasbord for voters to choose from – and even all their votes combined don’t come close to threatening Labor’s grip. There is no great hidden conservative majority just waiting for an outlet.

They are already voting and there is simply not enough of them.

Likewise anyone who points to Trump or Reform UK simply has no understanding of the Australian compulsory preferential voting system. Getting out the vote simply has no impact here and so energising and mobilising your base is effectively meaningless if you are not meeting mainstream and often apolitical voters where they are – not where you think they should be.

Likewise pointing to Tony Abbott – another friend of mine – fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the 2013 election. It was Labor’s unprecedented and toxic dysfunction that handed the leadership to Abbott, and he lost it soon afterwards because having fixed Labor’s mistakes, glimpses of his intense conservatism – such as reverting the AC honours to knights and dames – spooked voters.

Turns out it was a one knight stand.