Party of Menzies, Howard needs to rebuild its base

If the Australian Labor Party did not rejuvenate its membership base it ‘‘may wither’’, Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen wrote in these pages in mid-2013. In an extract from his book, Hearts & Minds: A Blueprint for Modern Labor, Mr Bowen was commenting on the review of the 2010 election result by party elders Bob Carr, Steve Bracks and John Faulkner. Mr Carr had taken the opportunity to demand that the party’s national executive take the lead on reform. “They can’t be a gathering of factional loyalists, otherwise they’ll end up being seen as they were by Gough Whitlam as 12 witless men.”

Not for the first or last time, Labor engaged in serious soul-searching. Many of its conclusions were right. A decade on, the national interest demands that the Liberal Party do the same if Australia’s robust democracy is to recover a competitive, effective two-party political system. Stasis is not an option given the collapse in the Coalition – mainly Liberal – vote, wall-to-wall mainland Labor governments and the one-in-103-year Aston by-election result.

The Liberal crisis is not isolated to any one state, with the federal opposition now holding only four of the 44 inner metropolitan seats across Australia’s major cities. The problems are organisational as well as about policy and selling a message, Brian Loughnane and senator Jane Hume concluded in their 2022 election post mortem. They run deep into major swaths of the electorate, across all states, as The Weekend Australian reports in the first of a series of articles.

Followers of politics will not be surprised that the Coalition polls strongest among voters over 65 and worst among those aged 18 to 34. But the size of the deficit among the young is startling, with more of them supporting the Greens than the Liberal-Nationals. It helps account for the loss of once blue-ribbon Queensland seats Ryan and Brisbane last year.

What should be more alarming for Peter Dutton and his team is that the nation’s mortgage belt, a group that identifies with the party’s bedrock values of aspiration and reward for hard work, has shifted its allegiance to Labor, despite the cost-of-living crunch after 10 interest rate rises. Among voters paying off their homes, 41 per cent say they would vote Labor ahead of 33 per cent for the Coalition. That breakdown, more than any other voter demographic, should worry the Liberal Party most. From this point in the electoral cycle, less than a year from last year’s election, voters’ attitudes could shift as economic times become harder, as the International Monetary Fund has forecast.

That said, John Howard is right when he says it is not enough for the party to hope and wait for the Albanese government to fall over. Mr Howard and former trade minister and federal director Andrew Robb tell Paul Kelly in Inquirer that the party needs a policy review. And Tony Abbott and opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan both invoke the spirit but not the content of John Hewson’s Fightback! agenda of the early 1990s. While not an electoral success – it helped the Liberals lose the 1993 election – Fightback! put policy grunt into the party. After winning office in 1996, the Howard government implemented some key principles, including the GST.

Any policy review, Mr Tehan says, should have five themes: lower taxes, higher productivity, smaller and more efficient government, an immigration plan in the national interest and home ownership. Those issues accord with the party’s principles and background, and are in the national interest.

Mr Howard is correct when he says the Coalition’s largest failure last year was that it did not present the electorate with a clear policy manifesto for the future. The Opposition Leader, rightly, is promising the Coalition will not be a small target at the next election and will have a bold policy agenda. While it is more than a year too early to think of rolling out policies, developing them will demand constant hard work and input from the brightest experts on the centre-right.

Mr Dutton also put his finger on some of the party’s main organisational problems when he cited corrosion in its state divisions, especially in NSW and Victoria, where it must do better to have any chance of making headway at the next federal election.

A revival in Western Australia will also be vital. Mr Dutton’s threat of federal intervention if the state divisions do not lift their game makes sense. The party needs to have candidates preselected early, campaigning and connecting with communities.

Gratuitous advice from factional warlords, as Mr Dutton said, was not helpful, too often leading to candidates being preselected too late to make inroads into their communities. The party also needs to be ready and capable of capitalising on its opponents’ failings – such as Victoria’s budget crisis that has seen Daniel Andrews get out the begging bowl. The Liberals need to use it as a springboard to build a narrative that will draw voters for the long term.