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Liberals must realise ‘real Australians’ live in cities, too

Peter Dutton addressing the Liberal Party campaign launch held at the Liverpool Catholic Club at Prestons. Picture: Richard Dobson
Peter Dutton addressing the Liberal Party campaign launch held at the Liverpool Catholic Club at Prestons. Picture: Richard Dobson

Of all the errors that led to the Coalition’s shattering defeat on Saturday, few were more ruinous than the belief that the future of conservative politics lay not in the traditional heartland seats of the cities but in the socially conservative outer suburbs.

This theory, pioneered during the Morrison era and refined under Peter Dutton, has now guided the Coalition to two election defeats. The first, in 2022, was merely devastating. The second, Saturday’s wipeout, has seen virtually every Liberal MP driven from the centre of Australia’s capital cities and the party plunged into the worst crisis of its history.

Aside from delivering precisely zero new seats – the objective test of any electoral strategy – this approach has profoundly altered the ideological balance inside the Liberal Party.

The Liberal Party’s much vaunted broad church has collapsed in on itself, with Liberal moderates buried beneath the rubble.

With a gap of 45 to 50 seats separating Labor from the Coalition, the next election is basically unwinnable. The one after it is probably lost too. In all likelihood the Coalition is facing the better part of a decade in opposition.

How did this happen?

It would be an exaggeration to say the party gave up on the lower house seats lost to the teals in 2022 – but only a small one.

Neither Scott Morrison nor Peter Dutton campaigned much in those electorates, correctly surmising their presence would do local candidates more harm than good. Nor did they offer any policies designed to turn the heads of people living in those areas.

Party strategists succumbed to the thinking – never officially articulated but an article of faith nonetheless – that the party’s new heartland lay in the outer suburbs of Australia’s capital cities.

To some extent this was understandable. The loss of the teal seats and the rise in support from non-tertiary-educated voters for conservative parties across the world suggested a wider political recalibration was under way.

But the view that there was an unbridgeable divide between voters in the culturally progressive suburbs of Sydney’s east and North Shore and the voters in hard-scrabble outer boroughs such as Casula and Prestons has proved a dry gully. It gave rise to vague assumptions and dubious caricatures about the attitudes of “real Australians’’, a class of voter presumed not to exist in Rose Bay or Northbridge.

Former attorney-general George Brandis. Picture: Ben Stevens/i-Images
Former attorney-general George Brandis. Picture: Ben Stevens/i-Images

Of course there is a difference between affluent communities in the inner suburbs and those in the rest of the country. The interests of a mortgage broker in Manly and a cafe owner in Campbelltown are not the same. But the idea that it’s impossible to find common ground among them is demonstrably wrong.

At time of writing, the Liberals are a near-lock to flip one teal-held seat, Goldstein, and an outside chance of winning another, Kooyong. In Sydney, Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian looks likely to beat teal candidate Nicolette Boele in the seat of Bradfield.

None of these seats are from the outer-suburban mortgage belt the party hoped would yield a swag of Labor-held electorates. All are from suburban electorates in Sydney and Melbourne.

“We actually did better in those metropolitan seats than we did in the outer suburbs,” Liberal Party moderate and former attorney-general George Brandis said. “We’ve done better against the teals than the Labor Party.’’

As conservative attitudes within the Liberal Party have hardened, there has been a creeping tendency to see city-dwelling and middle-class suburbanites as post-material elites, rather than moderate Australians caught between two parties.

The rise of the teals is both a cause and a consequence of this.

The teals have given hundreds of thousands of Australians – who could never bring themselves to vote Labor but who feel alienated from the Coalition – an out.

The Liberal Party is now in the diabolical position of having to win back seats its opponent doesn’t need to defend.

Liberal MP for Goldstein Tim Wilson. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui
Liberal MP for Goldstein Tim Wilson. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui

Given the teals’ success relies heavily on a personal connection with the electorate, as opposed to the ebb and flow of the major parties’ popularity, this will be a difficult task.

Making it even harder is the fact that any reforms aimed at re-centring the party will need to clear a Coalition partyroom increasingly conservative in its attitudes, in part due to the routing of moderates and in part due to the influence of the Nationals, who in relative terms are now more powerful.

None of this is to suggest the Coalition should mimic Labor. Nor is it to say that teal seats mirror the wider Australian community. They don’t. But like the proverbial canary in the coalmine, they carry a warning: that is, many of the attitudes and values found in abundance in places such as Warringah and Kooyong also exist in other parts of the country, albeit in milder forms.

Take climate. The Coalition’s nuclear policy was soundly rejected by voters. It will surely be dumped by whoever follows Dutton.

The Coalition is fast running out of places it can go on energy. It should read the room, accept that most voters want some kind of action on climate, and position itself as the party best placed to competently manage the transition from the carbon economy without bankrupting households and without slavishly pursuing arbitrary reduction targets.

Former prime ministers Scott Morrison and John Howard. Picture: Dave Hunt/AAP Image via NCA Newswire
Former prime ministers Scott Morrison and John Howard. Picture: Dave Hunt/AAP Image via NCA Newswire

With conservative MPs now largely relegated to the regions, the danger is the Coalition will lose its connection to the Australian public. Given that around two-thirds of Australians dwell in the greater metropolitan regions of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, this would be disastrous.

Policy missteps such as Dutton’s work-from-home edict, which mandated that public servants return to the office and which alienated women, will occur again and again if the next Liberal leader lacks the cross-section of perspectives needed to sense-check new ideas.

That, of course, leads to another glaring shortfall: the Coalition’s chronic lack of female MPs. Of the 40-odd MPs projected to survive Saturday’s bloodbath between four and 10 are women. No party that claims to represent the wider Australian community can credibly get away with this.

Australian elections are won and lost in the centre. The Liberal Party must chart a way back there. Until it does it will remain buried beneath the rubble.

Paul Maley is a journalist and director at Hemisphere East, a strategic advisory firm. He is a former senior adviser to the Morrison government.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/liberals-must-realise-real-australians-live-in-cities-too/news-story/4e774faa97f0a4a77eb193ff3893a340