James Campbell: Liberals don’t fit anymore and not just in Victoria

To understand why voters have turned on the Liberals, after last Saturday’s car crash, you have to talk about culture. Not just the culture inside the Liberal Party — as important as that is — but the culture in which these voters live their lives, writes James Campbell.

Surveying the wreckage from the Liberal Party’s car accident in Victoria last Saturday, John Howard emerged this week on the ABC to suggest that the defeat needed to be put in perspective.

“Victoria,” he explained, “has had a history for quite some years now, some decades in fact, of being slightly more to the centre-Left — the Massachusetts of Australia, some people call it — than the rest of the country.”

From this, I deduced the former prime minister seems to think that as far as federal politics goes, what happens in Victoria stays in Victoria.

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It is an interesting perspective and undeniably correct in that the Liberal Party — and their National Party brethren — have indeed only won three state elections here since 1979, and the two-party preferred vote only twice federally since 1983.

But even if you accept the truth of the Massachusetts analogy — which is debatable given that US state has had Republican governors for most for the past 30 years — this won’t give much comfort to the Liberal Party.

With its 6.9 million people, the Bay State has a bit more than 2 per cent of the US population, whereas almost one in four Australians lives in Victoria.

And according to all estimates over the next few years, the percentage of the nation that resides here is only going to grow.

There were 37 Victorian federal seats at the last election, there will be 38 seats next year. At the election after that, there will almost certainly be 39.

When Peter Dutton tells Melburnians they are scared to go out to restaurants, he looks like a visitor from another planet — and not a friendly one either. Picture: Getty Images

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So if this keeps going and the Liberal Party can’t do something to win more votes down here, there will come a time when it is going to find it very hard to form government in Canberra.

And as the past 40 years show us, where we go, the rest of the Australia tends to follow.

Victoria was the first state to introduce compulsory seat belts and random breath-testing, the first state effectively to permit abortion, the first state to reform its liquor licensing laws in the 1980s, the first state to privatise its government agencies en masse and to completely deregulate its electricity market.

All of which is a long way of saying that when the Liberal Party’s primary vote crashed to 30.61 per cent and the Nats’ to 5.32 per cent — as happened on Saturday — the shockwaves could be heard right around Australia.

Contemplating this, the truly scary thing for the Liberals around the country was not that the party’s vote crashed in outer suburbia — an outcome that could probably be explained away as a consequence of a first-term state government splashing money around — but that it was walloped in what we once upon a time used to call its heartland seats of Hawthorn, Malvern, Kew, Brighton and Sandringham, as well as the inner-city marginal of Prahran.

These are places where cost-of-living concerns are not exactly front of mind for most voters, and they’ve hardly been the beneficiaries of the Labor Party’s spendathon these past few years.

I bet most people in Hawthorn and Armadale thought Scott Morrison looked weird holding up a piece of coal in parliament. Picture: Kym Smith

To understand why voters have turned on the Liberals, you have to talk about culture.

Not the just the culture inside the Liberal Party — as important as that subject is — but the culture in which these voters live their lives.

In person, Peter Dutton can be charming and agreeable company. But when he tells Melburnians they are scared to go out to restaurants, he looks like a visitor from another planet — and not a friendly one either.

Holding up a piece of coal in parliament — as Scott Morrison did last year — must have seemed like a terrific wheeze at the time and maybe it wowed them in Queensland, I wouldn’t know.

But I bet you most people in Hawthorn and Armadale thought it just looked weird.

What has become clear since August is that as odd as these voters find the obsessions of the parliamentary Liberal Party in Canberra, they were prepared to overlook them as long as the party was led by Malcolm Turnbull, a man who looked as though he shared their worldview.

And the moment he went, they decided that there wasn’t really anything keeping them attached to the Liberal Party anymore.

Voting Liberal was something many of them did in the privacy of the ballot box out of habit — it has been years, if ever, since many of them were prepared to work at a polling booth or put a Liberal poster in their front yard.

The Liberals find themselves contemplating the same collapse in their heartland vote as the UK Conservatives did 20 years ago. Picture: AAP

The Liberal Party, with its hostility to arguments in favour of anthropomorphic climate and weird obsessions with trans-sexuality, just doesn’t fit them anymore.

And as their counterparts did in Wentworth earlier this year, these people have now decided they’re off.

In short, the Liberals find themselves contemplating the same collapse in their heartland vote as the UK Conservatives did 20 years ago — and for much the same reasons.

It took that party a decade before it accepted, as I wrote 10 years ago, “that Britain had changed and that the Tory party needed to change to better reflect it: It needed to be friendlier to Britain’s migrants, gays and women, to confront what former Tory adviser Daniel Finkelstein called the task of ‘making peace with the Sixties’”.

Whether it takes the Liberals in Australia as long to get this message is a matter for them.

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James Campbell is national politics editor

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