Hastie knows Libs could die if they lose this fight
Andrew Hastie thinks it’s possible. He tells Niki Savva, in her absorbing new book, Earthquake, that without change “we should expect to become extinct at some point”. He admits the Liberal Party is very old, in its membership base and its voter base.
Hastie’s comments are paradoxically encouraging. Like a good military commander, he displays “situational awareness”; that is, he’s dealing with reality. His policy moves, repudiating net zero to concentrate on energy security and price, plus a tougher line on cutting the size of the immigration program, are designed not only as good policy but approaches that a smart, energised Coalition could sell to voters of all ages. And his own emphasis on social media is long overdue for his side of politics.
But if they don’t sell their new approach successfully, could the Liberals really disappear? Common wisdom says no. Compulsory voting, preferential voting and the substantial benefits accruing to existing parties with existing politicians, namely funding, staffers, offices etc, all make it very difficult to dislodge one of the main parties.
But it’s not impossible. The last great realignment in Australia was when Robert Menzies transformed the United Australia Party and founded the Liberal Party. The UAP was a strange beast, more an association of politicians who liked getting elected than a fully formed political party.
Menzies founded the Libs in 1944 and by 1949 won government, never to lose again while he was leader (he retired in 1966). He created it as a non-sectional party, not beholden to a single institution as Labor was to the unions.
There was even a tinge of anti-rich populism in his famous words: “I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of organised masses.”
I take that quote from Tony Abbott’s Australia: A History. Abbott emphasises that even with Menzies’ giant personality, and existing UAP MPs, it was a slow, tortuous business building the Liberal Party. It drew on a wide, rich life of civic organisations, among them the Australian Women’s National League.
There has been no fundamental realignment since then. Splits in parties sometimes provoke the possibility. In the 1950s the ALP suffered a devastating split, with the most dedicated anti-communists forming the Democratic Labor Party. It elected a lot of senators and had a huge influence, keeping Labor out of office federally for nearly 20 years, but it never supplanted the ALP.
In 1977, former Liberal cabinet minister Don Chipp broke away to amalgamate a couple of minor existing groups and form the Australian Democrats. They, too, won a lot of senators and lasted three decades but never looked like supplanting the Liberals.
Oddly, a more relevant example might come from 100 years ago in Britain, as the Labour Party pushed aside the Liberal Party as the alternative to the Conservatives. There was massive social change in 19th-century Britain. A true middle class developed as well as an authentic working class. The Conservatives represented the middle class, Labour the working class. The British Labour Party split in a big way in 1981. Its leading moderates founded the Social Democratic Party. It won nearly as many votes as British Labour but didn’t win many seats and faded fairly quickly.
Politics now is more fluid and unpredictable than ever. Centre-right politics around the Western world has been in flux. A new approach, focused on national sovereignty more than free-market dogma, has gained traction, especially around issues like immigration, the operation of markets and the failures of globalisation.
This can be wholesome or it can be toxic. In some nations the traditional centre-right party has reacted to these new social and political dynamics and become more populist to survive. The textbook example is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s populist-right party supplanted the old Christian Democrats and now governs the country. In France, Marine Le Pen’s outfit supplanted the Gaullists. It doesn’t govern but it is the main party of opposition. In Germany the Alternative for Germany challenges, but has not supplanted, the Christian Democrats. But the Christian Democrats are forced to govern in an incoherent and unsustainable coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats.
In Britain, a recent Ipsos poll discloses extraordinary results. Nigel Farage’s Reform registers 33 per cent, Labour 18, Conservatives 16, Greens 15 and Liberal Democrats 12. That is a fractured polity, something like ours and almost ubiquitous today, but an extraordinary level of support for Farage. At the next election, Farage could win government or displace the Conservatives as the main party of opposition.
It’s tempting to interpret the teal electoral success as a de facto split in the Liberal Party. It represents the social class of climate true believers in urban seats, and cleverly uses preferential and compulsory voting to get across the line. It’s also the case that the teal juggernaut represents one of the most brutal exercises in massive corporate power in Australian politics.
Defeated Liberals were often outspent by teals to the tune of $1m or more. There are enormous government subsidies and rents more generally coming out of the net-zero agenda and a new class of corporate money will readily support teal candidates.
The teals have been much less effective in state politics, where their funding options are more limited and the shallowness of their real community support evident. But Liberals must understand the ideological fight over net zero is existential. They have to discredit the concept of Labor’s net zero or they’re very unlikely to win back teal seats.
In many ways the internal fight for the Liberals over net zero was a decision about whether to fight with an uncertain chance of victory or to surrender in the hope of generous treatment by the victors.
Two final points. Four Liberal opposition leaders have become prime minister in Australian history – Menzies, Malcolm Fraser, John Howard and Abbott. Each came from the party’s right, the conservative end. Each was written off as too conservative and unelectable. Indeed Billy Snedden, who unsuccessfully led the Libs before Fraser, fatuously described himself as “on the wavelength of my generation”. Menzies, Fraser, Howard and Abbott all fought huge political battles to become prime minister – stop the boats, ditch the tax etc.
Finally, the next battle is immigration. Everyone agrees numbers are way too high. But in fighting this battle, the conservatives must not give the impression they are suspicious of or hostile to Australians of Indian, Chinese, Filipino etc backgrounds. All these folks are natural conservative voters if Liberals have the energy and capability of talking to them. Alienating them, in our compulsory voting system, would certainly be electoral suicide.
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