Michael McGuire: Liberals have been hijacked by the hard Right

Peter Costello doubts he’d get preselected by today’s party, while Peter Dutton says Malcolm Turnbull made them unrecognisable to voters. The Liberals have lost their way, writes Michael McGuire.

It’s as clear an indication as you are going to find as to the weird rabbit hole the federal Liberal Party has found itself increasingly travelling down in recent years.

The one where it has transformed from being a Centre-Right political party basically interested in the economy to one that has been sidetracked from that main purpose into culture war side issues.

It’s inexplicable, lacking in any form of common sense and wholly self-defeating.

You don’t have to regard Peter Costello as the world’s greatest treasurer to acknowledge he has probably been the second most significant Liberal figure of the past 30 years.

Much of his record is contestable. By some measures, he is the highest-taxing treasurer in history, but he held down the job for longer than anyone else and oversaw a growing economy for a decade.

Judging him by modern political standards, his longevity looks as remarkable as that of Queen Victoria.

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But in an interview with The Australian last week, Costello said he wasn’t so sure the modern-day Liberal Party would even preselect him if he put up his hand today.

“I don’t know if I’ve got the right views anymore,” he said.

Peter Costello doubts he would be even preselected by the current-day Liberal Party. Picture: David Geraghty

By which he meant that essentially he was too socially moderate and too economically liberal to survive in the steaming wreck his party has become.

Now, Costello was joking when he made the quip but it was still an astonishing take on how the party has devolved since he quit not too long after the Liberal’s 2007 election loss.

He has also said similar things before about the increasingly factional nature of the party.

The shorthand for what Costello is saying is the Libs have been hijacked by the right wing of the party. People such as human Stobie pole Peter Dutton.

Around the same time of Costello’s lament, Dutton was giving interviews to Sunday newspapers about why Malcolm Turnbull was a failure as prime minister.

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There he was posing for pictures with that grin that makes him look like a hostage who has been told to smile by his captors, warbling on about how “the Liberal Party had become unrecognisable to our supporters’’.

He may be right about that, but perhaps not in the way he intended.

And even if he is right, how does it explain the cratering of the Liberal vote since Turnbull was ditched?

Turnbull had plenty of faults but he had his party running almost neck-and-neck with Bill Shorten’s Labor outfit before the pin was pulled on his leadership.

Also in his favour was that Shorten is seen by very few people as a credible leader.

Peter Dutton has said his party had become unrecognisable to its supporters. Picture: AAP/Darren England

Somehow, he has always managed to trail Tony Abbott, Turnbull and new boy Scott Morrison in the preferred prime minister stakes.

No easy feat, given the calamity the Liberal Party has been in since it was elected in 2014 to replace the equally woeful Labor administration of Kevin Rudd.

Now, the Libs’ chances of winning this year’s election seem as remote as the dwarf planet Pluto.

Which makes Dutton’s claim that Turnbull had to go in order to reclaim the Liberal base as nonsensical.

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But Dutton also said one of Turnbull’s problems was that he lacked political judgment.

Which is a bit like Nick Kyrgios accusing Bernard Tomic of not trying hard enough.

Perhaps the problem is no one really knows what the Liberal base is anymore.

Or perhaps the constituent parts of that base have now drifted so far apart that their differences are irreconcilable.

You have people like Dutton trying to hold the line for the conservatives in Queensland, which means a focus on fear and loathing, on migrants and crime.

Pushing the hard right line all the way to the edge where it sometimes runs into the kind of weird and deluded voters who approve of people like Fraser Anning.

But as the recent Victorian state election showed, that’s not an approach that will work everywhere.

All of which makes you wonder if Peter Costello will vote for his old party come election day.

Michael McGuire is a journalist for The Adelaide Advertiser.

@mcguiremi

Originally published as Michael McGuire: Liberals have been hijacked by the hard Right