Liberals’ path forward must be defined by core party values
The mainstream is where the Liberal Party should be firmly rooted, and that is centre-right.
But no, the so-called Liberal moderates believe that after last weekend’s defeat the Liberals should become even more like Labor. Presumably they have not stopped to ponder how such a trajectory would eventually make their party redundant.
People should be true to their beliefs and advocate the causes they support, but if you want to push green-left policies, there are plenty of options outside the Coalition parties. At some point your mooted reforms might be at odds with the values of the organisation you are seeking to change.
If you believe, for instance, that netball should dispense with its positional zones, include dribbling and add a backboard to the goal ring, then rather than trying to change netball, you might serve two sports better by defecting to basketball. Likewise, if you think the Liberal Party ought to embrace emotive, irrational stances on climate policy, support endless government interventions in energy, and enslave itself to political fashion, then perhaps you are in the wrong party.
It is extraordinary to hear the argument that because the Liberals lost to parties on their left, they must move left. If that strategy had been adopted by both major parties, they would have melted into a one-party state decades ago.
Ironically, convergence has been the trend and is a large part of the problem, as soulless politicking pulls the major parties closer. With diminished differentiation, the primary vote has shrunk for both majors, and the minors and independents have snared a third of all votes.
The Coalition parties won 3 per cent more primary votes than Labor nationally, and at least 10 per cent went to minor parties on their right. Winning them back would see the Coalition dominate.
There is no need to hypothesise about the outcomes from veering left because the Liberals have been running experiments. In last year’s West Australian election the Liberals decided not to oppose Labor’s policies but to agree with Mark McGowan’s direction – they lost 11 of their 13 seats.
South Australia’s moderate-controlled Liberal government was woke on climate and unaggressive towards Labor. At the March election it campaigned on its record, lost more than a third of its seats and was bundled out of office after just one term.
Federally, the Coalition opposed radical climate action in the previous four highly successful elections but last week took the net-zero emissions by 2050 pledge to the polls. They lost at least 16 seats, kissed goodbye to some of their best talent, including their deputy leader, and headed into opposition.
There is no guesswork required, the drift to the left has been implemented and it has failed. Yet the so-called moderates and their media enablers still want to tack left – by the time they finish tampering with netball it will be the game played by Michael Jordan.
Last Sunday Simon Birmingham said the Liberals’ fatal turning point was to abandon Malcolm Turnbull’s climate and energy policy in 2018. That policy was embraced by Labor and cost Turnbull his leadership, allowing Scott Morrison to take over, reverse the policy, oppose radical climate action at the election and win another term of government.
Yet Birmingham thinks that is where they lost their way? This was on his first day back in opposition, and the leading moderate senator was lamenting why the Liberals had not stuck with Turnbull and his climate action, which would have taken them into opposition three years earlier, imposed costs on the economy and not helped the environment because global emissions would have continued to rise anyway.
Another leading moderate, NSW Treasurer Matt Kean, intervened in the federal campaign only to call for the disendorsement of a conservative Liberal candidate and to echo the radical climate rhetoric of the Coalition’s opponents. His mentor, former prime minister Turnbull, praised the fake independent candidates and urged people to vote for them.
It is easy to see which elements are weakening the Liberal Party. In these pages in April 2016 I wrote that the moderates were not characterised by “compassion” and “liberalism” but largely by a default ability to concede their opponent’s arguments.
Two years later I argued that their power in the Turnbull period could drain the life force from their host organism. Previewing the election last November I said that by bowing to the climate zeitgeist in a bid to protect leafy seats Morrison might have surrendered his best chance for election policy differentiation.
We have just endured an election where there was precious little to fight over; the only policy contrasting party values was the first homeowner schemes where Labor offered government money and the Liberals allowed people to use their own savings. On climate policy, the divergence was limited to a few percentage points on the 2030 targets en route to an agreed net zero.
The political mainstream is where the Liberal Party should be firmly rooted and that means the centre-right. It needs to accentuate meaningful differences and prosecute necessary debates.
It is all there in the party’s seminal “We believe” statement that commits to “freedoms for all peoples” and “lean government that minimises interference in our daily lives”. It concludes that “we simply believe in individual freedom and free enterprise and if you share this belief, then ours is the party for you.” If so-called moderate Liberals want a bigger role for government in taxing and spending, dictating energy choices or social engineering, then rather than trying to change the nature of their party, they ought to find another. Or perhaps they could reacquaint themselves with the party values.
Public debate about conservatives and moderates, or conservatism versus liberalism, is a turn-off for voters. The introspection is hardly mainstream.
The Coalition parties need to speak plainly about real issues, and practical plans. If they must stick to net-zero ambitions, they should clear the way for domestic nuclear energy. Even the International Energy Agency admits current technology cannot deliver net zero by 2050, so why not embrace a reliable and affordable zero emissions technology?
Policy action like this is neither left nor right, not strictly conservative or liberal – just sensible and practical. Too often the Liberals shrink away from tough debates, seemingly expecting victory to be handed to them by focus groups or opinion polls.
This means the rampant climate alarmism fuelled by activists on the green left goes unchecked. It generates fear, creates unreasonable guilt about Australia’s culpability, and inflates expectations about our ability to change the climate. Who, aside from Matt Canavan, explains the energy crisis in Europe, details growing emissions in China, notes the ongoing demand for coal, and points out the environmental impotence of our actions? For his troubles, Canavan cops blame from the moderates for electoral failures.
This week I interviewed outgoing Liberal member for Wentworth Dave Sharma and spoke of my frustrations that Liberals failed to contest Labor, the Greens and the teals over their inability to meet high emissions reduction targets, or their assertions that natural disasters can be attributed to climate change or their inference that Australia’s policies can change the climate. I ventured that the Liberals seemed scared of being dubbed climate deniers, and Sharma’s answer was revealing and disturbing.
“From an analytical point of view you’re completely right,” he said, “but if you go out and utter these things as a politician you’re accused of heresy. It is difficult, people should be having these discussions and these arguments, but because this issue has become such a political hot-wire in Australia, so emotive, particularly if you are on the centre-right of politics, if you even raise questions about some of these things, people are very quick to brand you a denier.” Think of that. The Liberals are cowed from making the crucial arguments.
“It means we are not having the sort of open and honest debate about this issue that we should,” said Sharma. “It is very easy to throw around competing targets, but how are you actually going to get to these targets, what industries are going to be impacted, what is the impact on electricity prices, which towns and regions are going to suffer the most?
“They are all part of the figure you plucked out of the air, but at the moment we have these sorts of debates unanchored from those consequences, and it doesn’t serve our public debate well.”
What a sad indictment on the state of our national political debate. It makes it easy to plot the path forward for the Coalition – have these debates, speak plainly about the nation’s problems and possible solutions. The tone is set by the leader, and Peter Dutton is one Liberal who does not shy away from hard talk. The Liberals need to forget the spin and politicking, and just argue for what is right, in accordance with the party’s values.
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The idea that the Liberals, who were defeated after replicating key polices of the green left, should aim to reclaim government by footprinting more green-left policies is obviously self-defeating. Given the electoral success of the Liberal Party since its inception, its members should understand that the secret to future triumphs might spring from its own values.