Many Liberal and National MPs still don’t seem to grasp just how much sh*t they’re in

If the experience of the Liberal Party at the 2022 state election in Victoria showed, there’s nothing so damaging to a political party’s prospects than a belief among voters it doesn’t matter what they say, they just can’t win.

Talking to Liberal and Nationals MPs last week as part of an attempt to understand what had gone wrong between them and if it could be put right, it struck me with some surprise almost three weeks after they were smashed how many of them still don’t seem to grasp just how much sh*t they’re in.

And it’s not just the MPs either.

From what I can gather from talking to them, Liberal Party members and supporters have yet to grapple with the precariousness of the Coalition’s position.

It wasn’t just one side of the party that was peddling fantasy either, frankly both of them are away with the pixies.

Liberal Party members and supporters have yet to grapple with the precariousness of the Coalition’s position. Picture: Martin Ollman

Listening to some of the Mods talk about how being free of the Nats would allow them to reconnect with all the voters in the cities was like being buttonholed by a middle-aged mate whose missus has just thrown him out telling you how much he’s looking forward to getting back into the dating scene, blithely unaware of just how much the world has moved on and how unattractive a prospect he presents.

The conservatives aren’t much better, still talking about how they are going to build some grand electoral coalition of the regions and the outer suburbs, leaving teal land to its fate, even though the voters in these places have not three weeks ago handed Anthony Albanese a record majority.

Both parties are away with the pixies. Picture: Martin Ollman

In reality, of course, there is some merit to both positions.

The moderates are right to say the party cannot afford to forever ignore, what, until five minutes ago, was its electoral heartland, and ignoring “elite” opinion – as some conservatives advocate – is a recipe for oblivion.

But the conservatives are right too to say that too often moderate Liberals go so far out of their way to avoid having fights with the Left that they end up being ‘Labor-lite’.

The moderates would say that the Right just had a go with writing the party’s manifesto with its call for nuclear power and look where that got us.

To which the conservatives would respond there was nothing conservative about Dutton’s big spending promises and you can’t blame the loss on nuclear because he never really campaigned on it.

Not only is there no agreement between the two wings of the Liberal Party on what should happen next, there’s not even any agreement on what just happened.

Commentator Charles Richardson summed up the dilemma perfectly last week when he observed that the Liberal project of ignoring its former heartland while pursuing gains in outer working-class suburbs had been a failure and trying to win back the Teals would at least give them some sort of urban base on which to build.

“Any proposal to do that would split the party down the middle,” he said.

“Yet no coherent alternative strategy has presented itself.”

Time is short.

I don’t mean the non-Labor parties need to settle on a strategy and a plan in the next three or six months.

I mean that whatever strategy they come up with they’d better make sure it will make them up some ground at the next election.

Because if the experience of the Liberal Party at the last state election in Victoria in 2022 showed, there’s nothing so damaging to a political party’s prospects than a belief among voters it doesn’t matter what they say, they just can’t win.

That was the real danger to the conservatives from last week’s (hopefully abandoned) attempt at divorce.

Not that they would have gone to the next election with policies so wildly at variance that Labor would have been able to convincingly argue there was no way the two parties would have come together to form government afterwards – though that would have happened.

No, the real danger would have been the public would have looked at the pair of them squabbling and concluded that between them they had just no chance.

The world is full of political parties – PASOK in Greece, the Israel Labour Party – who were once utterly dominant but whose pomp of yesterday is now a distant memory.

The things that undid these parties were different, but their decline accelerated quickly when they reached a tipping point where voters decided they were permanent losers.

Some people will say of course that lumping the Liberal Party in with the above is a bit harsh considering they were in office only three years ago, but things can happen very quickly.

And with a primary vote of 32.82 per cent last month and no reliable source of preferences compared with the Greens-ALP total of 44 per cent, I’d say the Liberal and National parties’ situation is indeed precarious.

It’s still not clear that enough of them quite realise it.

Originally published as Many Liberal and National MPs still don’t seem to grasp just how much sh*t they’re in