Broad church the Liberals’ best bet in age of identity politics

The need for the liberal and conservative strands of the Liberal Party to intertwine is great in this age of identity politics.

That great political philosopher Edmund Burke bequeathed to us many memorable phrases. One of them was society’s “little platoons”. It described the myriad of small clusters of individuals in our society who came together for a common purpose. That purpose was always to improve society.

As an individual, I belonged to many little platoons. There was the local soccer club, my daughter’s ballet group, the local church and the school parents associations.

Another numerically small, but in every other way not little, platoon was the federal parliamentary Liberal Party, which I had the honour to lead for more than 16 years. It was the most significant of all the little platoons in which I was involved.

The atypical turnover of prime ministers in recent years has attracted attention to the roles and responsibilities of a prime minister in the Australian version of the Westminster system. I use the expression “Australian version” quite deliberately. There are some special homegrown features, which we should recognise, but without question ours is a Westminster system.

The sole determinant in Australia of whether a person is commissioned as prime minister is the governor-general being satisfied that they command a majority on the floor of the House of Representatives. This is fundamental to the Westminster system. It also underscores the special character of the relationship between the leader and their parliamentary party.

It is leadership of that group, and that group alone, that delivers the prime ministership. That is why, in my opinion, election of a leader should always be the sole preserve of the parliamentary party.

In countries that embrace Westminster, the prime minister is but the first among equals. For the system to work, the members of the parliamentary party must accept the primacy of their leader as prime minister. In return the leader must recognise and respect their equality. Of all the relationships a serving prime minister has, none is more sensitive or important than the relationship between the prime minister and the men and women who comprise the parliamentary party.

In our system a prime minister is both a private counsellor and a public advocate. Members of parliament are overwhelmingly ambitious, opinionated and energetic. Most believe they are capable of doing the jobs of their more senior colleagues better than those who hold the positions. This includes the party leader. Much of the time of a party leader must be spent talking to colleagues, either in the formality of cabinet or partyroom meetings or in one-on-one meetings. Failure to do this can prove fatal.

Politics in its best sense is a contest of ideas and values. It is not a public relations tournament. Effective presentation is crucial to political success, but unless the source of the presentation is sound and compelling the presentation will ultimately fail. The most important quality a political leader can bring to their public presentation is a core set of beliefs, firmly and clearly held. To know and understand what an individual believes in is the most important measure of their success as a public figure.

As is well known, I have always seen the Liberal Party of Australia as the custodian of two great political traditions: the conservative and classical liberal traditions. Our party, which I frequently describe as a broad church, best succeeds when both elements operate together. It stumbles when one strand or the other stakes a greater claim to the party’s soul. I am confident that Scott Morrison holds strongly to this belief.

In a speech delivered on September 8, 2005, I cited the party’s commitment to labour market reform as an example of our commitment to the classical liberal tradition. I said: “Labour market reform is about transferring power from institutions to ­individuals … the essence of our drive for labour market reform is to create flexibility at the individual workplace level, to empower the individual, with appropriate protection, to make the bargain that he or she thinks is best for that person’s individual circumstances and … family.”

I frequently instanced my support for the constitutional monarchy as an example of the Liberal Party’s conservative tradition. Conservatism does not reject all change. Burke himself said “a state without the means of some change is without the means of conservation”. In 1999 Australia demonstrated that it had the means to remove the constitutional monarchy but decided to keep it. The people rightly concluded the case for change had not been made.

Preserving the broad church character of the Liberal Party is all the more important given the frayed political environment so evident in liberal democracies around the world.

The past decade has shaken the political orthodoxy of many countries. Donald Trump’s victory over his opponents within the Republican Party and, ultimately, his Democratic Party rival confounded most of the pundits. The vote of the British to leave the ­EU, something I welcomed, surprised most commentators. The list goes on. ­Emmanuel Macron, a virtual newcomer, overwhelmed the traditional parties of both the Right and the Left. Even Angela Merkel appears to have lost her magical touch, through mishandling the immigration issue.

There are reasons for this. The decade since the global financial crisis has produced an irritable middle class, for the pure and simple reason that in many of the comparable societies with which most of us are familiar, such as Australia, Britain, the US and New Zealand, real wages have ­remained stagnant.

Unemployment has not risen as feared in 2009. In a number of countries it has fallen. For many years before 2009, political leaders and policymakers craved a trade-off, namely minimal real wage growth in ­exchange for lower unemployment. Frank Crean, Labor’s first treasurer after the election of the Whitlam government in 1972, often said “one man’s wage rise can be another man’s job” when appealing for wage ­restraint. It was a sentiment echoed by senior figures on both sides of politics in the decades that ­followed. But the apparent arrival of this trade-off has not produced a contented society.

Our communities have taken greater employment stability for granted. The old adage that one only worries about unemployment when it is thought that your job is at risk has been vali­dated. The middle class — which in Australia is most of us — is ­increasingly conscious of real wage stagnation and, understandably, is unhappy. In the US this ­unhappiness has been aggravated by the realisation that quantitative easing (or money printing) by the Federal Reserve, which puts more money into the system, has further enriched the very well off. Their ­already substantial assets have grown.

The really good news is that there has been a dramatic ­reduction in poverty in the developing world. The past 20 years has seen more people lifted from poverty than at any time since the ­Industrial Revolution. In the process real wages have increased markedly for many millions in the developing world. But the juxta­position of flatlining real wages in the developed world, with such wages surging in the developing world, has presented huge challenges for policymakers in mature capitalist societies.

A further characteristic of the changed political environment has been that the dividing line ­between the parties of the Left and the Right are less clear. In many ways the Cold War shaped the old political divide. In earlier years parties of the Left were strongly attracted to much greater government involve­ment in and ownership of the economy, whereas the parties of the Right pointed in the ­opposite direction, with greater stress on the individual’s ownership of property. Those differences remain, but they are less emphatic.

One consequence of this has been the rise of identity politics. Increasingly political parties, particularly of the Left, seek to build support by tailoring policies to suit defined groups in the community. This was a fatal flaw in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. For example, she targeted particular groups of women, black Americans and gays. But there was no philosophical coherence in her appeal. In the process she alien­ated others, even calling them ­“deplorables”.

Such an approach breaks a fundamental tenet of political persuasion. A party’s manifesto should be broad enough to appeal to individuals in all sections of the community irrespective of gender, race or other identity. Political parties should welcome the support of any defined group of citizens, but it is problematic to imply that the goal is to build majority support within a group irrespective of the impact on others. It will inevitably result in parties ­becoming beholden to special ­interest groups.

All of the post-2016 analysis of the Trump victory suggests the Clinton campaign alienated the very people who felt they had been left behind by the economic impact of the global financial crisis. Clinton’s emphasis on particular groups facilitated Trump’s appeal to those very Americans who were not numbered among her target groups.

Modern politics is much less tribal. More than 50 years ago, when I first became active in politics, it was broadly true to say that 40 per cent of the community ­normally voted Labor, with ­another 40 per cent supporting the ­Coalition. The rest moved around. Those rough figures no longer hold true. In recent times each of the two major parties has seen their primary voting intentions in opinion polls regularly below 40 per cent.

The decline in political party membership, which reflects a lesser disposition on the part of citizens in general to join organisations, means that active members of political parties now are probably less representative of the generality of those who might vote for those parties.

Thus the Liberal Party needs the broad church more than ever before. The party I hold dear must have a widely based appeal that ­rejects special interest groups and always projects a sense of balance. This, and an emphasis on the central role of the family, as well as the place of small business in the life of the nation, is most likely to deliver political success.

This is an edited version of the introduction to a new edition of Howard: The Art of Persuasion, Selected Speeches 1995-2016 ($34.95, PB, Jeparit Press).