Chris Bowen’s a gift but Liberals have to get house in order
Without doubt, Bowen is Labor’s weakest link in an area that’s steadily getting worse for them electorally as the renewables rollout stalls, emissions targets fail and business subsidies are thrown around like confetti.
With the cost-of-living crisis still voters’ main concern, the latest inflation data, showing a 37 per cent hike in energy prices, means this government cannot take political invincibility for granted. Especially with the Prime Minister showing clear signs of hubris, despite the economic stagnation, societal fragmentation and strategic peril that he has presided over and that his government has often made worse. The Coalition can claw back support, but only if the Liberal Party gets its house in order. If not, it will join the original Deakinite “fusion” Liberal Party, the Nationalist Party and the United Australia Party (its centre-right predecessors) in the dustbin of our federal history.
At one level, the (finally resolved) internal fight over energy and emissions was a dispute over what’s the best policy for our country. But at a deeper level it was a disagreement over the nature and purpose of public life in a democracy: is it the job of a political party to discern what voters want and then give it to them; or is it to work out what the country needs and then to persuade voters to agree with them?
Nothing unites a political party more than the sense that it’s now in a fight with the other side rather than within itself, which is why the mood inside the Coalition has so lifted since the decision to dump net zero and create a fight with Labor on something that matters.
Given the ubiquity of energy for every aspect of modern life, it’s hard to find an issue that matters more than this. And it’s hard to find a more prospective issue if the Coalition is smart enough to grasp it, particularly given that Bowen remains the political gift that keeps giving.
Beyond net zero, the next big argument inside the partyroom is going to be over the rate of mass immigration. The more moderate MPs (or “Labor-lite” Liberals, as I prefer to call them) will say overseas-born voters are in favour of high migration and, with 30 per cent of Australians born overseas, it’s not politically realistic to alienate such a large constituency.
But again, this misunderstands the real nature of political leadership: should policy be pitched to appease a significant voter bloc or should it serve the overall national interest? And it presupposes that people can’t be persuaded by a good argument. Even though, as was demonstrated in John Howard’s time, migrants can be among the biggest supporters of a government that cuts migration.
The harder fight will be taking on the powerful lobbies with a vested interest in high migration: the businesses that want more consumers and cheaper labour; the education providers that are selling student visas with work rights and residency pathways. Plus the Treasury boffins wedded to ever higher migration as a lazy substitute for the productivity reforms needed to keep economic growth per capita growing, as opposed to just overall economic growth.
Keeping net overseas migration at the record recent levels of 400,000 a year inevitably puts downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs and sustained pressure on social and physical infrastructure; as everyone here for 12 months or more needs a job, a home and a way to get around. Like Bowen on energy, this is where Labor is vulnerable, particularly given its inability to address the strains in social cohesion evident following the importation of Middle Eastern hatreds to this country.
Within the partyroom there’s also a disagreement over tactics based on different understandings of political dynamics. The Liberal Left thinks the overall Liberal vote is maximised by being Labor-lite because more conservative Liberals have “nowhere else to go”, they argue, so their votes will nearly always come back via preferences; at the same time, they argue, they can win over Labor voters on the basis that the Liberals can better implement leftist policies. But this ignores the Liberal Party’s entire history showing that the way to come back from opposition – witness the success of Robert Menzies in 1949, Malcolm Fraser in 1975, Howard in 1996, and Tony Abbott in 2013 – is to be a strong and clear alternative to a failing government.
Compare the Howard-era Liberal frontbench with its current successor. For all their occasional disagreements over policy and differences of outlook, the likes of Peter Costello, Abbott, Peter Reith, John Fahey, David Kemp, Nick Minchin, Philip Ruddock and even Amanda Vanstone, and of course Howard himself, were all very substantial public figures.
Even allowing for the nostalgia factor, it’s hard to see comparable talent today. Yet much the same could be said of Labor, whose own historically dismal primary vote is masked by reliable Greens’ preferences. Where are the latter-day Labor equivalents of Paul Keating, Gareth Evans, Peter Walsh, Lionel Bowen, John Button and Graham Richardson, let alone Bob Hawke?
While neither main political party is getting the same calibre of person into public life, that’s more of a problem for the Liberals because they’re currently out of office in almost every jurisdiction in the country and suffering near-terminal decline at a party organisational level due to the protection racket run to protect insiders rather than attract real talent.
In the 1960s, when Australia had half its current population, the NSW division of the Liberal Party had 50,000 members. When Howard won the Bennelong preselection in 1974, there were 22 other candidates; yet when Joe Hockey vacated the once-safe Liberal seat of North Sydney in 2015, there were just three candidates to be the next Liberal MP. Today, the NSW and Victorian divisions each claim about 10,000 members but less than half would be sufficiently active to turn up at events, let alone actively campaign. By contrast the Canadian Conservative Party has more than 400,000 members, meaning that on a proportionate basis the Australian Liberals should have 250,000 members – at least four times the claimed national membership.
In most states, the organisational party tends to be under the thumb of a state parliamentary leadership that’s usually more interested in a quiet life than attracting new members, encouraging policy ideas or vigorous campaigning. In NSW, especially, there are personality-based factions more interested in preserving their own fiefdoms than winning elections, as last year’s debacle over local government preselections shows
While creating a political contest based on strong alternative policies is the parliamentary leadership’s main job, revitalising the organisation and dramatically boosting the party’s membership can’t be neglected if the Coalition is to make a fight of the next election.
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