Deves endorsement shows PM is willing to risk progressive seats

It didn’t take long for Scott Morrison to get the question he was waiting for. His answer told us little that we didn’t already know about the Prime Minister but plenty about where the Liberal Party sees its political future.

“Why won’t you disendorse her?″⁣ the journalist asked.

Morrison had a choice. He had made it clear three days earlier that as offensive as Katherine Deves’s comments were about transgender people, he wasn’t going to dump her as the party’s candidate in Warringah. The PM didn’t need to say much more.

Full throated support: Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Perth this week.Credit: James Brickwood

Instead, Morrison raised the timbre of his voice and delivered a message carefully workshopped to reach beyond the press conference in Perth and into the SUVs of mums driving their daughters to swimming squads, hockey practice and netball training.

“She is a woman standing up for women and girls and their access to fair sport in this country,” he said. “I am not going to allow her to be silenced.”

The follow-up question was left hanging. “Are you prepared to lose votes in progressive seats as a result of this?”

Morrison knows his full-throated support of Deves, a photogenic mother of three who describes transgender children as surgically mutilated and surrogacy as reproductive prostitution, will do nothing to help his party hold inner-city seats under siege from independents running with the financial clout and organisational support of Simon Holmes a Court’s Climate 200 group.

The calculation made by Morrison and the strategists running the Liberal campaign is those seats, whether they are held or lost, are beyond the PM’s help. Deves, in the meantime, serves another purpose.

Morrison is convinced that in outer suburban and regional seats where he sees a “goat track to victory” there are enough women who, like Deves, don’t want greater transgender inclusion to come at the expense of their interests. These women don’t share Deves’ transphobia; they just believe that gender boundaries are being pushed into unreasonable places.

As one prominent moderate, Victorian Liberal woman observed: “There was never any thought that he would ditch her because it was calculated. He wanted her because it enables him to reinforce a message that has quite significant support in growth areas.”

Katherine Deves, the Liberal Party’s contentious candidate for Warringah.

The episode will do no favours for Liberal MPs like Trent Zimmerman in North Sydney, Dave Sharma in Wentworth and Katie Allen in Higgins. All three MPs crossed the floor of parliament in the interest of transgender children, in the religious freedom debate. The bigger issue is that Morrison did what he did knowing it would make political life more difficult for them.

The PM this week made clear what he is willing to give up for a bigger prize. The question this raises, one now being openly discussed inside the Liberal Party, is whether a Coalition government could be turfed out of its inner-city electorates in Sydney and Melbourne but take enough ground in the suburbs and regions to stay in power.

To some Liberals, this is electoral madness. “We want to represent the city,” NSW Senator Andrew Bragg says. “These people are an important part of our history and future. Electorally I don’t accept the premise that they are gone, or they are gone because there are not enough seats to replace them elsewhere. The electoral map is very clear; it’s a path we can’t go down.”

Senator Bragg is also concerned at what the potential loss of MPs like Josh Frydenberg, who is facing an intense battle to hold his seat of Kooyong against teal independent Monique Ryan, would mean for the Party and its politics. Kooyong was the seat of Robert Menzies and Frydenberg, the Treasurer and Liberal Deputy Leader, is considered the Liberal most capable of keeping everyone under what Bragg describes as the Party’s “great big tent”.

Frydenberg spent part of this week campaigning in Sydney with Sharma, who sees no evidence that Wentworth has been abandoned by his party. “I have got no doubt the division of the party are working really hard and providing me the resources that I need to make sure I retain the seat of Wentworth,” Sharma says.

Josh Frydenberg with Liberal candidate for Wentworth Dave Sharma at World of Whisky in Double Bay in early April.Credit: Steven Siewert

To other, more conservative Liberals, the future lies elsewhere. “To lose Kooyong would be a huge, emotional loss for the party, but it is just a seat,” said one. “It is certainly not the jewel in the crown anymore.”

The abandonment of the Liberal Party by its traditional base of tertiary educated voters is not a new phenomenon. Nor is the party’s appeal to less educated, disengaged voters on the edges of capital cities whose aspirations are anchored in cost-of-living concerns.

The long-standing tension between these disparate constituencies is being exploited by the independent movement which, if successful, would purge the party of MPs most closely aligned to the stated values of their candidates and supporters. This would in turn hasten the party’s shift away from urbane, secular liberalism to a more populist, moral conservatism.

About one third of Victorian Liberal Party members are registered to branches in Kooyong, Higgins and Goldstein. A Liberal Party without these Melbourne seats, Curtin in Perth and Wentworth and North Sydney would represent a radical redrawing of Australia’s political boundaries. But one well-connected Liberal points out, those boundaries are being redrawn anyway, by forces beyond the control of the party.

To see where centre-right politics in Australia is potentially heading, look to the red/blue divide of America, Boris Johnson’s previous success in dismantling of the “red wall” in England and this weekend’s extraordinary presidential run-off vote in France. None of these political systems are the same as ours but in all these countries a potent mash-up of right-wing populism has found a warm embrace in less educated voters who feel spurned by big-city elites and institutions.

Compulsory voting and proportional representation are suppressing the electoral impact of the shifting fault lines in Australia, but the great divide within the Liberal Party is no longer over economic policies, as it once was, or even climate change, but social issues and identity.

This is why Morrison sees value in the likely short-lived political career of Deves. It is also why moderate Liberals fear that a loss of urban seats will lead to a further coarsening of the political debate and alienation of educated voters.

Goldstein takes in some of Melbourne’s most affluent bayside suburbs and has been a safe Liberal seat since its creation. The emergence of Zoe Daniel, a former ABC journalist endorsed by Climate 200, has left sitting MP Tim Wilson facing a serious challenge to hold the seat.

Wilson is not a conservative and rejects the term moderate. As he puts it: “My liberalism doesn’t come in moderation, nor did I join the conservative party.” In his 2020 book The New Social Contract: Renewing the Liberal Vision for Australia, he writes that Australia has allowed the foundations of liberalism to erode. What would it mean if Goldstein were to go independent?

“Governments set the agenda, parliaments vote on it, so if a community deals itself out of a government party their representation is limited to responding to those that chose a government MP,” he tells The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

“The less urban communities support the party of government the more the voice of suburban and regional communities gain political weight. Aspiring candidates will always claim their community’s voice will be amplified with them, but it won’t be heard around the Cabinet table and will largely be the diluted echo around an empty House of Representatives chamber.”

Candidates for Goldstein: Independent candidate Zoe Daniel and Liberal MP Tim Wilson.Credit: Simon Schluter

How is the battle going on the ground? Former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, a Kooyong elector, says it feels as though every house in his neighbourhood suburb has been “obliterated” by signs for either Frydenberg or Ryan.

If you click onto the University of Queensland’s election ad dashboard you can follow the money on in the online campaign. Three days ago, Ryan was spending $4 for every $1 by Frydenberg on sponsored Facebook posts. By Friday, Frydenberg had matched her and then some. Their combined spend in Kooyong dwarfs all other seat campaigns.

Kooyong independent Monique Ryan at her campaign launch earlier this month. Credit: Aaron Francis

The Liberal Party has spent much of this week portraying the Holmes a Court-endorsed candidates as “fake” independents who are only in it to replace the Coalition government with a Labor one. “These are not centre right people,” Greg Hunt says. “They are GetUp! In teal rather than orange. It’s an undeclared party of the left.”

Allegra Spender, the independent seeking to win Wentworth, rejects this. She says she has always held traditional liberal values. It is the party, not her, which has shifted.

Spender’s father John was a Liberal MP for North Sydney who ironically, was unseated by an independent, and her grandfather Sir Percy Spender was a minister in Robert Menzies’ cabinet. She says the party they served was small-l, rational and business focused.

Liberal MP Dave Sharma and independent rival Allegra Spender shake hands at this week’s debate in the seat of Wentworth.Credit: Richard Dobson

“My values haven’t changed and Wentworth’s values haven’t changed,” she says. “We have always been pretty socially progressive, we are environmentally focused and people that I talk to don’t think there has to be a choice between the environment and the economy.″⁣

For Spender, the dumping of Malcolm Turnbull, the party’s self-styled champion of centrist rationalism, was the decision that estranged her from the Liberals. This was also the event that prompted Kerryn Phelps, a member of the Climate 200 advisory council, to stand as an independent candidate for Wentworth at the subsequent byelection.

The dumping of Turnbull was also acutely felt in Victoria’s Liberal heartland. At a state election held three months after Morrison became Prime Minister, the Liberals lost the state seat of Hawthorn, which falls within Kooyong, and were hammered in Brighton, in the centre of Goldstein.

Phelps describes herself as politically “dead centre” and says that when she decided to run as an independent in 2018 she was motivated by anger and frustration at the direction the Liberal Party had taken, rather than any expectation she would win. From a standing start, Phelps won the seat against Dave Sharma with swing of nearly 20 per cent.

Sharma reclaimed Wentworth at the 2019 election and Liberals point to this and the fate of other single-term independents as evidence that the teal candidates, even if successful, will be nothing more than a flash in the polls.

Labor figures see the Liberal identity crisis as a variant of the long-standing problem they face in trying to bridge the divide between inner-city progressives and what remains of Labor’s traditional, blue-collar base.

Kos Samaras, a former Victorian ALP campaign strategist and assistant state secretary, has been watching seats like Kooyong and Wentworth for the past two years. His political consultancy RedBridge is providing polling to the teal independents.

Samaras says Labor was slow to understand how the political ground had shifted when the Greens first presented a genuine threat to them in inner-city seats and wrongly assumed that the same, negative campaign tactics they employed against the Liberals would convince engaged, highly educated voters to stick with the ALP.

“It is a slow realisation that seats you used to fight over internally because they are safe are now ultra-marginal and could be lost,” he says. “Internally and culturally, you don’t shift to that paradigm until it is almost too late. I watched the Labor Party pretty much drive one car after another into a brick wall using the same tactics to stop the Greens momentum. It wasn’t until 2017 where a few people, particularly in Victoria, realised that the only solution was policy rather than political games.”

The Liberal Party is hurtling towards a brick wall in its heartland seats. Scott Morrison is gambling that his party can crash through.

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