Political death: Liberal Party uncertain about what it should stand for in the current era
A leader losing his footing on a platform at election time is a minor embarrassment. An entire party falling backwards off the stage is a catastrophe with no obvious path to recovery.
If there is a crumb of comfort in this story, it’s well hidden. The Coalition’s support in regional and rural Australia largely held up, but much of that was thanks to the Nationals. The fundamentals haven’t changed. Anthony Albanese presided over an inglorious first term and promised nothing of substance for his second. A dozen mortgage rate rises, inflation and skyrocketing energy bills gave the Liberals a golden opportunity to win back the hearts of the forgotten people, and they squibbed it.
If the baseball bats were going to come out for the Prime Minister anywhere on Saturday, it would’ve happened in Mickleham in the seat of Calwell, on the northern outskirts of Melbourne, where the household recession is intense.
Mickleham is a patchwork of recent subdivisions occupied by families with large mortgages. Labor suffered a 14 per cent swing against it in the Mickleham booth on Saturday, finishing at 34 per cent. The Liberals also went backwards, coming in a distant second at 15 per cent. The remaining 51 per cent was scattered around like grapeshot: Greens, independent, One Nation, Family First, Legalise Cannabis, you name it. The informal vote was 6 per cent.
There is no single-cause explanation for the party’s worst result. If it were simply a bad campaign or an unconvincing leader, the problem could be fixed. If the solution was moving to the notional left or right, to embrace or ignore the so-called culture wars, the argument could be settled in the partyroom. The bottom line is that Robert Menzies’s party has lost touch with the concerns of aspirational, middle-class voters to the point where it can no longer speak their language.
Albanese’s landslide is insubstantial and undeserved. Like Labour’s Keir Starmer in Britain, his parliamentary majority is flattering given his meagre primary vote. Kevin Rudd won 83 seats in 2007 with 43.4 per cent of the popular vote, while Labor’s primary vote hovers around 34 per cent.
Labor’s support was clearly soft, which begs the question: Why couldn’t Dutton pull voters his way? Labor’s brand was seen as toxic in Victoria and parts of Western Sydney, prompting many Labor candidates to shrink the party’s logo on corflutes or drop it altogether. Dan Andrews’s poisoned legacy gave Victorians a compelling reason to leave Labor, but they held their noses and stayed.
The Coalition’s blue wall in Queensland has collapsed. Diligent local MPs in mortgage-belt seats, such as Luke Howarth in Petrie and Bert van Manen in Forde, were helpless as the ground disappeared under them.
In Sydney, three decades of Liberal advances into Labor’s suburban heartland were reversed. Labor made a successful smash-and-grab raid on Hughes, which had been in Liberal hands since John Howard’s 1996 landslide.
The Liberals lost Banks, a seat first won when Tony Abbott swept the board in 2013. Labor’s first-preference vote rose by less than 1 per cent, but increased support for the Greens, messy preference flows and an informal vote of almost 10 per cent exhausted David Coleman’s chances.
Adelaide will replace Canberra as the nation’s all-red capital if Labor loses Bean to the teals. The Liberals have been banished from Tasmania, and the mortgage belt in WA didn’t budge. The vulnerability the Coalition sensed in teal seats proved largely illusory, and the Coalition looks like it may lose Bradfield into the bargain.
Dutton had the right credentials to lead a party that draws its strength from enterprising, working Australians in the suburbs. His background in policing and small business ticked the boxes.
His views might have been seen as conservative in the media echo chamber but, to the majority of Australians, they are simply common sense. His greatest legacy in the thankless job of opposition leader is defeating the voice to parliament referendum. His courage in backing Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was not inconsiderate. He proved a better judge of the popular mood than some within his party who warned it would be a career-ender.
So how did a leader who was in tune with 60 per cent of Australians in October 2023 capture the votes of only half of them 19 months later? If it was simply because he failed to sell his message well, that could be fixed. If the party’s strategists were misled by poor internal polling or the wrong message from focus groups, there is no shortage of marketing and communications professionals who could do with the work.
The brutal truth, however, is that the party is uncertain about what it should stand for in the current era. Equivocation is political death. Focus group-driven policy will inevitably be insipid.
“Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides,” Margaret Thatcher once said.
Dutton would have fared better if he had leant into the remarks rather than stepped away from them. By pulling his punches, he got the worst of both worlds. The story became even bigger in the woke media, while Dutton looked timid to the majority of Australians, for whom unabashed patriotic sentiment would have gone down rather well.
Dutton’s defeat at the hands of an unpopular left-wing government that was all but written off at the start of the year parallels the defeat of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in Canada five days earlier. Yet Poilievre’s tone was different. He was overflowing with national pride, projecting an image of citizens chasing the Canadian promise protected by brave troops under a proud flag. He closed his concession speech with, “Canada first, Canada always … Thank you very much, Canada”.
Prime Minister Mark Carney matched his nationalist rhetoric. Both leaders recognised that, at a time of global uncertainty, it was the language Canadians wanted to hear. Carney’s Liberals increased their share of the vote by 11.1 per cent, while the Conservative vote increased by 7.5 per cent. The minor parties’ share fell from 33.6 per cent to 15 per cent.
The flight of voters to third parties is not inevitable, even in bilingual Canada, provided you speak their language.
Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.
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