Peter Dutton will have to hold his nerve this week in the hope that the Liberals’ crippling defeat in NSW isn’t followed by a second and more catastrophic defeat, with Saturday’s Aston by-election now said to be closer than thought.
Following the routing of the NSW Liberal division, on the back of a federal election loss, defeat in Victoria and the slaughter in Western Australia, the party’s position overall is severely weakened.
And while the NSW loss has nothing to do with Dutton, a defeat in Aston would be dangerously destabilising for his leadership and would spell disaster for the party.
It would further confirm what the NSW result reveals and that which is patently obvious to most senior Liberal figures at a national level: Dutton, as the federal leader, cannot afford to remain indifferent to the organisational decay of the party at a divisional level.
That said, doomsday analysis for the Liberal Party can easily be overstated. And the Liberals are still likely to hold Aston.
The party has been here before, recovered, and recovered remarkably quickly when it went from rock bottom in 2008 to almost win the 2010 election.
The combined Liberal-Nationals primary vote in February 2008 dropped to 31 per cent. Today it is 35 per cent.
The only difference then to now is the rampant factionalism in the branches.
As for NSW, John Howard’s view is that one shouldn’t become alarmist about provincial defeats.
He says it was a conventional and orthodox change of government, where marginal Liberal seats fell to Labor. The teals failed to meet expectations and so did One Nation.
Howard’s view is an appeal to rational analysis.
While he acknowledged the organisational issues that are plaguing the divisions, he believes it isn’t why they lost.
That said, the troubles and how they are dealt with may end up being the difference between whether the party is competitive or not at the next federal election.
“It’s obvious that the party has to stand for stuff, and trust its members and follow its rules,” one senior Liberal said.
At an organisational level, there are fundamental challenges based on the unavoidable conclusion that to win an election, a party needs money, people power and decent candidates.
Dutton, as federal leader, now has to help the party deliver this.
So far none of the lessons of the Loughnane-Hume review appear to have been heeded. In fact not only did the NSW division ignore the urgent calls for reform and the excising of the factional cancer, it doubled down on preselection brawls.
The problems at a branch level have been clear for several years, becoming acute during last year’s federal election.
Nothing yet appears to have happened, in any of the state divisions, that would hint at an interest in doing anything about it.
While all sides will be out to spin the result, and apportion blame to one thing or another, a 6 per cent swing is way above the average and double the swing at the last federal election.
Something clearly is fundamentally wrong.
It is now an open question as to whether the party has again hit rock bottom. And only Aston may provide the answer.
As for Anthony Albanese and the formation of a coast-to-coast wall of red states and territories in lock-step with a federal Labor government, the significance of this too can be prone to overstatement.
While such events of history don’t come along often, they are usually fleeting. And while Tasmanian Liberal Premier Jeremy Rockliff will be the odd man out around the national cabinet table, conventional wisdom would suggest such an image would be a net political benefit for a federal Liberal opposition.
The Labor movement – including the trade and public sector unions that will only be more emboldened – will be at risk of hubristic overreach in believing that the new dynamic is a result of a unified and consistent national swing to progressive politics.
It may give Albanese a short-term triumph but over the life of this term it could turn into a longer-term challenge. There is a rich history of the states blaming everyone but themselves for their problems with little regard for any political allegiances with Canberra.
The health problems, education problems and the states’ lust for money won’t go away. And Labor will no longer have a Coalition government to blame for any of it.
This result, one would assume, also made Jim Chalmers’ job now more difficult.
In theory, Dutton should be able to take advantage of the opportunity that this might offer.
But for that to happen, he will need a party organisation that is in better shape than it is in now.
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