Gun-shy Liberals ran scared of their own values

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Politics should ultimately be a battle of ideas. It should be more than just arguments about management.

After such a catastrophic election defeat the first thing the Liberals will need to do is elect a new leader.

Then that leader will have the opportunity to define the values and priorities of the party. Too much of its rhetoric has been about the mechanics of government.

The Liberal Party needs to be brave and bold enough to confront the progressive left head on across a range of different issues.

This is what Robert Menzies did when he first created the Liberal Party. He confronted the socialism of John Curtin and, more effectively, Ben Chifley with his own liberal democratic ideals.

In the end it wasn’t just his policies that won him subsequent elections. It was the public understanding of his core values.

The Liberal Party should first and foremost be fervently patriotic. By that I mean unequivocal in its determination to put the national interest first. Concepts such as love of country, pride in our history and the nation’s achievements and unbounded confidence in the capacity of the public to achieve great things in the future will always trump mere managerialism.

Politicians and aspiring politicians should read biographies of great people through history. They will find again and again one of their characteristics is the passion of their patriotism.

Anthony Albanese at his election-night function Sydney’s west. Picture: Jason Edwards

The greatness of Churchill, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Thatcher and even our own Robert Menzies lay not in the quantity of handouts they offered the public with borrowed money but the passion with which they argued the case for their nation’s survival and prosperity. They gave purpose to the nation and the endeavours of its people.

Second, great politicians become synonymous with their core values; all of their policies are presented in the context of their values, not just as tools of management. So the new Liberal leader needs to be defined by his or her values.

In Australia, in recent years, the political left has been successful in winning the argument for values. They have been braver and bolder in expressing them than the Liberals.

The idea that in Australia we are building a great nation that can achieve levels of economic prosperity for its citizens unequal to anywhere else in the world, and within which people enjoy freedoms of choice and a range of choices, is unimaginable in most countries. But this has been replaced.

The so-called progressive narrative that has come to dominate discussion spurns the achievements of our ancestors, denies choices for families and individuals by confiscatory taxes and regulatory interventions and puts the fantasy of changing the weather ahead of family prosperity.

This has become the dominant zeitgeist of the country. Above all they have used the issue of climate change to seize control of people’s lives. Any intervention under the rubric of climate change is acceptable. It’s hardly surprising that climate change initiatives are more passionately embraced by the left than the centre right.

Sir Robert Menzies.

Then there is the issue of equity. Egalitarianism should mean the equal value of all people regardless of their circumstances or, as we would say nowadays, their race, gender and sexual preferences.

But the dominant left paradigm today is redistribution: that is, taking away from the industrious and the creative rather than encouraging people to be ambitious and to achieve for either themselves or their families. In other words, we have replaced the concept of equality of opportunity with equality of outcomes.

It’s become fashionable to denigrate our history. We focus on the crimes that a few have committed, in particular against Indigenous Australians, rather than expressing our pride in how this continent has been transformed into one of the richest and most successful societies humanity has ever known. Surely that is something to celebrate.

Part of this paradigm of shame has been the embrace by many in Australia of the notion of identity politics. This neo-Marxist concept – which we have imported from America – has salami sliced society into racial and ethnic groups. Part and parcel of this is the abandonment of traditional Australian egalitarianism and replacing it with a range of discriminatory practices.

We’ve even imported from North America concepts such as acknowledgment of country. I went to an Episcopalian church in California at Easter and there it was on the back of the order of service: those familiar words acknowledging the traditional owners – in that case Native Americans – and their leaders past, present and emerging. Go to Canada and you will hear all the same language again in relation to the Inuit people.

During our election campaign, there were flashes of the values debate but they didn’t happen often. The Liberals looked too frightened to confront their opponents head on with their values. There was the controversy over welcome to country ceremonies being overdone but this discussion was quickly abandoned because the professional campaign staff judged the only thing the public cared about was relief from cost-of-living pressures.

The mood of the Australian public throughout the election campaign was one of relative indifference. Neither side of politics inspired them. There was a sense that the public didn’t really care what happened in the election. They noted with admirable cynicism the handouts that were being offered to relieve cost-of-living pressures.

Over and over again the mistake professional campaign staff make is to do the polling and then assume all the politicians need to do is address the concerns expressed to the pollsters and repeat them back to the public. I don’t think this is right.

Political leaders have to create their own narratives and their own issues that will interest and, in time, inspire the public not just repeat back to the public what the public are telling them. That is not leadership.

Opinion polls should be used by politicians not as a mirror but as a lamp. They should have their values and their ambitions for the country and use opinion polling to find ways they can excite the public with their ambitions. The reason the two major political parties sounded alike during the election campaign is that they were polling the same people and getting the same answers – unsurprisingly.

So out of the ashes of this disastrous electoral defeat can emerge a new, vibrant Liberal Party which inspires Australians to flock to its liberal democratic values, not just the mechanics of its policies.

Alexander Downer was foreign minister from 1996 to 2007 and high commissioner to the UK from 2014 to 2018. He is chairman of British think tank Policy Exchange.