Liberal Party needs a few ‘events’ to challenge Labor before the next election
What’s less well known is that the Whitlam era came to an end much earlier than expected. After the 23-year Coalition government lost the “It’s Time” election in 1972, it was widely believed that Labor would be in power for a very long time. Liberals had barely registered a pulse under their leader Billy Snedden and, according to the Canberra press gallery consensus, any comeback lay with small-L Liberals, not conservatives (as he then was) such as Malcolm Fraser. Labor’s radical policy agenda characterised the times.
Robert Menzies became so disillusioned that it’s unlikely he voted Liberal, preferring to vote for the anti-communist Democratic Labor Party instead.
“The idiots who now run the Liberal Party will drive me around the bend,” he privately lamented in 1974. “The so-called little-L liberals who run the Victorian Liberal Party believe in nothing but still believe in anything if they think it worth a few votes. The whole thing is quite tragic.” (Sound familiar?)
Yet, as Whitlam became overwhelmed by hubris and his government ran into severe economic difficulties, Fraser defeated Snedden in the partyroom before winning the largest majority in the House of Representatives in 1975. The great Whitlam dream lasted just three years.
Bear all this in mind as you reflect on the political situation 50 years later. Hardly a week goes by without Canberra’s herd of independent minds writing off conservatives and the party of Menzies. Up against a dominant Prime Minister and his progressive policy agenda, the pundits keep telling us, the Liberals face a very long time in the political wilderness. According to Niki Savva, ‘The Liberal Party is now dying, and (it is) completely at odds with mainstream Australians.”
The Liberals certainly face serious challenges. But one thing the party has in its favour is the same thing that helped revive its electoral fortunes 50 years ago: what British prime minister Harold Macmillan famously called “events”. That is, it’s the unplanned and unexpected that makes or, more often, breaks governments and political leaders.
All the more so when, as distinguished British journalist Andrew Neil puts it, “the ‘unlikely’ increasingly becomes the ‘likely’, with a rapidity similar to Hemingway’s description of going bankrupt in one of his novels – at first gradually, then suddenly … very suddenly”.
Although pundits and academics think politics is static, it’s very fickle. Stuff happens: often it is stuff no one saw coming, let alone stuff they had discussed at the previous election, such as the oil-price shock that helped destroy Whitlam. History shows that what appears to be certain can only come unstuck and what’s down can only go up. Ideas matter. Decisions have consequences.
For example, after Keir Starmer’s landslide victory in the British general election last year several respected commentators in Westminster said Labour would be in power for a decade or longer. One catastrophic year later, Labour has crashed in the opinion polls and were an election held tomorrow it would be lucky to come third. Poor decisions taken over the year have had their consequences and there is a vacuum of good ideas.
But one cannot predict where events will go next: a capable opposition can leave a limping government dead and buried, or that government can have a change of fortune and win back support.
At the beginning of the year, betting markets pointed to Peter Dutton becoming prime minister. Polls showed Labor could lose its majority, perhaps even power outright. But then the election was overtaken by events, most notably the Trump disruption in the form of US tariffs.
The point here is that parties and political leaders can rebound from the depths of despair.
You may say the Liberals are showing all the signs of a political party on life support: Newspoll this week shows the Liberals sinking to a new low. In politics, however, it is rare that a major party is finished forever. In Britain, for example, it last happened with the riven Liberal Party in 1918, and in Australia with the United Australia Party in 1945 when its members joined the new Liberal Party.
You also may say it’s very difficult now to predict a Liberal resurgence in the foreseeable future. But it was very difficult for the Liberals in 1974 to smash Labor a year later; or the Liberals in 1993 to defeat Labor convincingly in 1996; or the Coalition, deeply divided over (of all things) energy policy in 2009, to bounce back within a year before winning a landslide election in 2013. If you had told seasoned experts of Australian politics in 1993 that John Howard would win the next election in a landslide and stay in power for a dozen years, they’d want to know what you were smoking. Ah, the accidents of history.
When a government is under irresistible pressure from events, the fact it has a big parliamentary majority is largely irrelevant. And an opposition, however few in number, has an opportunity to exploit. The true test of any government or opposition is their ability to cope with the unexpected.
If, as another British prime minister, Harold Wilson, said, a week is a long time in politics, two to three years are an eternity. What the Liberals need before the next election are, above all else, a few “events” to challenge the Labor government. Whether it’s man-made or an act of god – blackouts, energy rationing, a financial shock, a natural disaster, a terror attack, a foreign crisis – the Prime Minister could find himself adrift and at the mercy of events (and treacherous colleagues).
No victory lasts forever, as Whitlam found out 50 years ago; and no downfall is permanent, as the Liberals have shown throughout their 80-year history.
Tom Switzer is author of Events, Dear Boy: Any Government Can Be Derailed (Centre for Independent Studies).
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We all know that November 11 marks 50 years since Gough Whitlam, the prime minister, was summarily and sensationally dismissed by governor-general Sir John Kerr amid a constitutional crisis. The episode constituted the biggest political upheaval in our nation’s history: indeed, if Whitlam were to be believed, there had been nothing like it since King George sacked Lord North in 1782. No wonder so many books, articles and documentaries mark next week’s golden jubilee.