Joe Hildebrand: Liberal-lite version is a teal mistake

The Liberals’ grand idea to form a party within the party to take on the influence of the teals shows a lack of understanding of the current political landscape, writes Joe Hildebrand.

Former PM Scott Morrison's idea for a new Liberal 'lite' brand to recapture the Teal vote is a mistake. Illustration: Terry Pontikos

Scott Morrison’s reported plan to create a separate Liberal-lite brand to take on the Teals in affluent inner-urban seats would be a great idea. The only catch is it’s already been implemented by the Teals themselves.

And it is precisely this fact that makes the Teal problem so confounding for the Coalition.

For anyone who missed it, the former PM’s thought bubble was mentioned almost in passing in a long story in The Weekend Australian by Sharri Markson about exactly what went wrong in the Liberal seats that fell like dominoes to the Climate 200 independents.

The idea is that the Coalition would officially become a united Liberal National Party across the country — as it is in Queensland — while a new party would be created under a separate banner to win over the genteel leafy suburbs that were once Liberal heartland.

It is telling about just how blindsided the Liberals were, and how shell-shocked they still are, that the supposed plan to fix it is in fact just a description of what happened.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaks to the media in the lead up to Josh Frydenberg’s budget update during the pandemic in July, 2020. Picture: Mark Kolbe

As incredulous as it may have been for anyone actually familiar with the campaign, the Teals were at pains to convince voters in their blue-ribbon seats that they were in fact Liberal-lite: A nice, clean, shiny Clayton’s alternative to the incumbent MP — the Liberal you have when you’re not having a Liberal — without having to get their hands dirty by voting Labor or Green.

The candidates were the political equivalent of Stepford wives — perfectly presented, two dimensional and free of any complicated history or political baggage. And needless to say it worked a treat.

Portraits of Teal Independent Allegra Spender and her supporters pictured at Bronte Beach after winning the seat of Wentworth.

The only problem for the Libs with this supposedly Liberal-lite brand is that it was in fact being run by former operatives for GetUp and the Labor Party and there is no way on God’s green earth that they were ever going to go into coalition with the LNP.

And so the solution being floated is to create another Liberal-lite brand that really is Liberal-lite to take on the existing Liberal-lite brand, which is in fact Labor-lite, and that the lost Teal voters will rally back to this newly-created brand specifically created in order to form a coalition with Peter Dutton’s LNP.

Call me crazy but I’m just not sure how you sell that.

The hope seems to be that the LNP could engineer the sort of arrangement it jealously eyes between the ALP and the Greens, in which Labor routinely gets a lower primary vote than the Coalition but then gets propelled ahead by Greens preferences.

Greens Leader Cassy O'Connor walks past Labor David O'Byrne in the Tasmanian parliament. Picture: Chris Kidd

But this is deeply misguided and emblematic of the flawed understanding by conservatives of the Labor-Greens relationship.

The first thing to note is that this was a relationship that developed organically in the political wilds. It was not concocted in a laboratory.

And it sure as hell wasn’t concocted for the ALP’s benefit. In fact over the past decade or so the Greens have caused far more damage to the Labor Party than the Liberals have.

Opposition cabinet

They blocked Labor’s ETS in the Senate in 2010, thus precipitating the downfall of Kevin Rudd. They forced Julia Gillard to implement a carbon tax, thus ensuring her downfall as prime minister, and they then publicly denounced the Gillard government and tore-up their supposed “coalition” agreement with Australia’s first female prime minister.

That was what they did to the last Labor government. As for the current one, the Greens took two seats that Labor was hoping to win from the Libs and were the only party to actually knock off a sitting Labor MP.

Greens’ Stephen Bates talks to media at Kangaroo Point after knocking out Labor for the seat of Brisbane in the federal election. Picture Lachie Millard

In other words the Greens aren’t the ALP ally that conservatives see them as and seem to be trying to recreate as per ScoMo’s suggestion.

They aren’t Labor’s solution to the Teals — they ARE Labor’s Teals. They are doing to Labor what the Teals are doing to the Liberals. They are the cuckoo in the nest, the parasite in the host.

And so the best thing both Labor and the Liberals can do to these inner-city infiltrators is to starve them of sustenance — simply jettison and abandon them.

Labor has already won majority government despite the Greens eating into its seat count. And this was without winning the outer suburban seats that it really should have if it’s going to be the natural party of government for mainstream Australia.

Seats like Lindsay and Longman in outer Sydney and Brisbane respectively.

Despite the across-the-board swing to Labor, Longman barely moved a millimetre, while the Penrith-based seat of Lindsay actually swung towards the Liberal party.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaks to media during a press conference at Parliament House in 2019 regarding claims China tried to plant an operative as an MP in a seat in Federal Parliament. Picture: Tracey Nearmy

If Labor can prove its economic and national security credentials, it could win over these electorates in time and, if it does that, it will reign for a thousand years.

Likewise the Coalition is already eyeing the outer suburbs as its foundation for rebuilding, not the well-heeled gentry of Wentworth and Kooyong.

Labor must fight tooth and nail to make sure the LNP doesn’t become the defacto party of suburban Australia.

And so where does this leave the Teals and Greens? Exactly where they should be: Perched high on the ivory tower of utter irrelevance.

Why not just leave them there?