James Campbell: Ugly reality is sinking in for Liberal Party
BEFORE the Wentworth by-election few Liberal MPs comprehended the mess the party was in but reality is now hard to avoid, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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LAST week I asked a Liberal MP if “it” was dawning yet. Unsure as to what I was referring, he sought clarification: “What? That we will lose Wentworth? Or that rolling Malcolm was insane? Or that we are going to get smashed at the election? Or all the above?”
Well, all of the above, I suppose. His response was: “Nope”.
In his opinion, there were only three or four MPs who truly grasped the severity of the hiding the electorate is going to hand the Coalition at next year’s federal election.
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You would have to think that after the swing that poor Dave Sharma copped on Saturday — 19 per cent on the primary vote at the time of writing — there are a few more government MPs now awake to the predicament they are in.
The problem they have, or to put it more accurately one of the problems they have, is that there is no chance of them agreeing on what they ought to do to get themselves out of it.
On the right flank, there are those who think the government ought to bin any pretence that they are interested in climate change, try to pass laws that would protect the right of religious organisations to refuse to employ homosexuals, keep on belting the ABC and, well, just generally dial the culture wars stuff up to 11.
The old war horse, Eric Abetz, was fighting a good fight on that front at a Senate Estimates hearing on Tuesday, at which he was keen to probe acting ABC boss David Anderson about his knowledge of a radio interview the national broadcaster had broadcast with three “pederasts”.
How much political mileage there is to be had from this line of attack in 2018 is not entirely clear given the interview was aired in 1975, a year when, from the look of him, Anderson was still watching Play School and still had to beg his mum if could be allowed to stay up for Dr Who — but “points for trying”, I suppose.
On the other side of the Liberal Party, there are those who think that dialling up the culture wars stuff is nuts in a country that just voted overwhelmingly in favour of gay marriage and that instead of stepping away from Paris climate accords, the government needs a policy that at least makes a pretence of caring about climate change.
The trouble is that there is no right answer to which way the Liberal Party should resolve this division (the Nats don’t have the same dilemma). Going down either road risks alienating one segment of the electorate that has until now voted for the Coalition.
And as long as that remains the case, there is no chance of the argument ending this side of the election.
The depth of these divisions, perhaps, can be best gauged from the fact the Liberals are pulling themselves to pieces at the very moment that on the other side of parliament, there sits a Labor leader in Bill Shorten who is waiting to implement an agenda that in any other era would have had money and volunteers pouring into the Coalition.
If I were a neutral member of the Liberal Party trying to decide which side of this culture war I was going to support, I would have a close read of the three-monthly breakdown of Newspoll published by The Australian on Tuesday, in particular the percentage of voters aged 18-34 who are planning on voting for the government.
At the last election, the Coalition under the urbane Leftish leadership of Malcolm Turnbull managed to get 32.4 per cent of those votes. If an election were held now, they’d get 27 per cent.
If barely one-in-four 18-24-year-olds were voting that way, it would be, perhaps, a manageable problem. The kids have never been the biggest fans of the party of the status quo.
But to have that few voters in their mid-30s? That’s really not good.
And things aren’t better in the next age cohort.
The Coalition’s share of the vote among the 34-49-year-olds is only 31 per cent. Think about that — fewer than one-in-three people in the years when we traditionally start to grow up, get mortgages and start having children are interested in voting for the Coalition.
Why are so many people under 50 disillusioned with the Liberal and National parties? No doubt, the answers are many and varied — starting, I would argue, with the fact that the number of them who own real estate has been declining for years.
There is nothing to beat having a mortgage for changing the way you view the world, something British prime minister Margaret Thatcher understood when she sold the United Kingdom’s public housing stock to its tenants at knock-down prices.
Then there’s the fact that the young tend to be more inclined to believe in human-made climate change. Whether that is an informed view, I am not qualified to say.
They are also much more comfortable than their parents with homosexuality, so perhaps it wasn’t such a smart move electorally to bang on about the danger gay marriage represented to that institution as so many Coalition MPs did last year.
Either way, you have to ask if banging on about a radio interview from 1975 is the way to turn this around.
James Campbell is national politics editor
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