More and more, I am coming across other political orphans. Not quite akin to AA meetings, there is nonetheless a sense of group solidarity. We’re not trying to give up something that’s bad for us. Instead, we are sharing the loss of having to give up something good. It’s a case of: “Hi, my name is Janet and I’m a liberal.” Or: “My name’s Don and I’m homeless because I was a Labor Party true believer.”
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has said the worst number of political parties in a country is one and the second worst number is two. I disagree. Having two serious political parties was just fine when one of those two parties was a decent fit for voters on the left or right. More often than not, many of our core values — social, economic and cultural — coincided with the party we voted for. Now, with an election on the very near horizon, the politically homeless will suspend our senses and hold our nose.
I’m talking about many people across the left and right spectrum. One very smart woman, who describes herself as centre-left, told me she is feeling increasingly politically homeless over the issue of trans rights: “I can’t vote for a progressive party that would trample over women’s rights.” She implored me to start a political lobby group. “I’m not interested in ‘raising awareness’ but I am keen to ensure that the laws don’t eradicate the concept of women.”
Another political orphan, a former chief executive of one of Australia’s top companies, told me he couldn’t vote for Bill Shorten in 2019 because he knew him too well. Now he hangs his head in shame for voting for Scott Morrison. “Oh well,” he said, “liberals don’t have a political home any more. We have to choose between fascists on the right and the weird religious zeal of the woke left.”
I share their political pain. It’s not easy having liberal tendencies today. The Liberal Party went through a series of unfortunate gyrations after John Howard, moving from nice guy Brendan Nelson to avowed conservative Tony Abbott and then Malcolm Turnbull, who has confirmed, post-politics, why he wasn’t much chop as a Liberal prime minister.
The party then settled on someone more interested in the crude politics of winning elections. It has been hard to garner what Morrison believes in, apart from staying in power. The Prime Minister famously said he wasn’t interested in talking about free speech because it didn’t create a single job. That’s sad. It doesn’t cost anything to defend basic values that underpin a liberal democratic nation; you might even earn political capital by showing genuine conviction. But it sure costs us when a prime minister stops defending those values.
Across the country, during COVID, basic rights have been trampled on in the name of saving lives. That sounds fair enough until you realise how disproportionate some measures have been. An entire state was locked down by a Liberal premier in South Australia because of a few cases. More than 12 months on, no leader anywhere in Australia, not state, not federal, is trying to help Australians come to terms with the COVID cage they have chosen for themselves by believing in a false safety god of elimination.
For liberal-minded people, Morrison has been especially disappointing. There is nothing to crow about when you have helped condition most Australians, according to Newspoll this week, to live locked up as the rest of the world reopens, even after Australians have been vaccinated. That is a miserable legacy. But maintaining this hermit kingdom mentality makes it easier for Morrison to get re-elected, rather than having to deal with harder matters of how to open up the country, where leadership is forged.
There were times when a Saturday morning trip to the ballot box was exciting. OK, let’s not exaggerate, not like great sex or the rush from extreme sport. But making your mark next to a party that reflected even some of your more important beliefs about human empowerment, left or right, was satisfying. Doubly so after smiling smugly at some extremist trying to shove their how-to-vote card into your hand on the way into the school hall.
Next time we vote, it will be very different. When Liberal leaders trample on your basic rights in disproportionate ways, it takes the zing out of exercising that other basic right — voting for your choice of government.
On the economic front, the country has been let down too. There are small, tinkering steps, all sensible: minor tax cuts, facing down proxy advisers, better accountability from industry funds and trying to regulate litigation funders. But these aren’t big, brave reforms that will change the economic trajectory of this country. Voters didn’t beg Howard for a GST. Instead he led the country to major tax reform. Morrison seeks cover in the mob’s complacency about our economic fortunes.
Josh Frydenberg will likely be proud that his latest budget is, according to Newspoll, right up there with Peter Costello’s last one in 2007 when it comes to popular appeal. But remember Costello’s Debt-Free Day on April 21, 2006. Unlike Frydenberg, Costello baked spending into the balance sheet when the country had, under him, paid off debt and was awash with cash. There is no sign Frydenberg has an appetite for nation-changing economic reforms. If there was, surely he’d be tilling the soil of our complacency, as Howard did so diligently, sometimes cutting a lonely figure, for many years before reforming the country.
Apparently a liberal-minded voter must be grateful that Liberals aren’t spending quite as much as Labor. If that’s hard to swallow, consider what Labor voters are asked to accept: the ALP is telling them it is the more responsible party on debt and deficit, an encore performance of the same bad joke Kevin Rudd tried in 2007. Labor voters must be thinking: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
Perhaps we have to accept that politics is less principled today than it was in the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s. That core values, be they on the left or right, don’t matter any more. If so, the country will be poorer across all levels for rewarding mediocre leaders.
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