At Knox Gardens Primary School...and the Liberals' future

I spent Saturday afternoon and early evening at Knox Gardens Primary in Melbourne.  I was handing out How To Vote cards for the Liberal Party in the Aston by-election until the polling booth shut at 6pm and then followed two hours of as 'scrutineer' watching officials from the Australian Electoral Commission counting votes in the school gymnasium. 

Australia has changed a lot over the 35 years that I've been handing out How To Vote cards as a Liberal Party member.  What hasn't changed though is the sense of politeness that prevails at the polling booth.  Most voters take a How To Vote card from each of the parties - it's easier to say 'thank you' to someone thrusting something at you than it is to say 'no' - and that way no-one is offended.  (I once was at a booth in a 'Dead Red' Labor seat.  I guessed 70% of voters took the Liberal How To Vote card.  The Liberal first preference vote at that booth turned out to be 25%.)

The volunteers from the parties are usually nice to each other too.  Occasionally you'll get some unpleasantness but most of the there's an air of 'we're all in this together and we’re going to be standing next to each other for 2 or 3 or 4 hours so we may as well be civil to each other'.  Sometimes there's surprises.  At a Victorian state election there was just me and a Greens volunteer at the school gate.  We both decided it was safer to talk football and music - which we did for nearly an hour. 

No-one standing at a polling booth ever says aloud 'We're pretty lucky to live in a country where you can stand shoulder to shoulder with your political opponent without coming to blows' - but maybe they should.  It's the same when the Returning Officer cuts the plastic tags to open the cardboard ballot box and the votes are emptied out on to the trestle tables for everyone to see.  A pencil and a ballot paper is still the best way to exercise your right to vote. 

And so to the result of the Aston by-election.  The media's description of what happened isn't wrong. 

'Crushing' (the Australian Financial Review), 'Wipeout' (The Guardian), and 'Resounding' (in an unusually moderate tone from the ABC) are all accurate. On the Sunday morning after the by-election  in an interview with 2GB in Sydney I said the result was 'devastating' and 'disastrous'.  It made absolutely no difference to the outcome that a strong Liberal candidate with a breadth of real-world experience was up against someone who had spent almost her whole working life as a trade union organiser with the Financial Services Union, the Health and Community Services Union, the National Tertiary Education Union, and as 'Marketing Officer and Partnerships Manager' for the ACTU.  Such is the modern-day Labor Party.

The opposition losing a seat at a by-election to the government for the first time in a century was bad.  But worse is what the result says about the condition of the Liberal Party.  Aston is (or more precisely 'was') the real Liberal heartland.  A seat in Melbourne's outer eastern suburbs of families with mortgages, small business owners, and a growing number of migrants.  It was once one of the safest Liberal seats in the country.  The loss would have somehow been explicable if Aston was a Teal seat of high-income, tertiary-educated professionals voting to virtue signal their post-material concerns.  But it's not - and that's alarming for the Liberals.

The Liberal Party first preference vote in Aston on Saturday was 39%.  Such a figure doesn't signify a mainstream political party standing up for mainstream Australians.  The ALP first preference vote was 41%, for the Greens 10%, and for the Libertarian Independent 7%.  (At the 2022 federal election, supposedly the 'low water mark' for the Victorian Liberals the first preference vote for the Liberals was 43%, Labor 33%, the Greens 12%, and 11% for the 'right-aligned minor parties' - the United Australia Party, One Nation, and the Liberal Democrats.  At the 2019 federal election the numbers were Liberals 55%, ALP 30%, Greens 9% - approximately the same as in 2016).

History tends to be written quickly these days and in the first 48 hours after Saturday two broad interpretations emerged of the meaning of Aston. 

The first was the 'the pendulum will swing back/the tide will eventually come in again' argument.  An example was the former Liberal minister George Brandis quoting Shelley.  'The only certainty is that the next turn of the political cycle will see the red turn blue again.  Dejected Liberals can take comfort from the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley: 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind?'

Simon Benson in The Australian in the days before the by-election said of the Liberals - 'The party has been here before recovered, and recovered quickly when it went from rock bottom in 2008 to almost win the 2010 election.'  True.  But that was due entirely to Tony Abbott and now a decade later there's no Abbott on the Liberal horizon.

The other school of thought after Aston is that the result reveals the Liberals' problems are deep and existential.  To Troy Bramston, Labor historian and biographer of Hawke and Keating:

The Liberals are experiencing an existential crisis.  There is no other way to put it...  It is absurd  to think the Liberal Party is not in crisis.  At the federal election last year, the heartland seats of Kooyong, Goldstein, North Sydney, Mackellar, Wentworth and Curtin were lost to Teal independents.  The safe seats of Bennelong and Tangney were ceded to Labor.  Brisbane and Ryan were surrendered to the Greens.  How does the Liberal Party craft a coherent campaign against three distinct political ideologies?

The simple answer is - it can't. 

I belong to the 'existential crisis' school.  By 'existential' I mean the Liberal Party currently is unsure why it exists.  To take this further, among those Liberal MPs who contemplate such things there are such divergent views as to what the Liberal Party is and should be that it's almost as if the Liberals don't have a purpose at all.  The 'broad church' is now so broad it's hardly recognisable as Christian.

A google search for the definition of 'crisis' gives me exactly the description I'm looking for: 1) a time of intense difficulty or danger; 2) a time when a difficult or important decision must be made; 3) the turning point of a disease when an important changes takes place, indicating either recovery or death [my italics].

'Recovery or death' for the Liberals sums it up nicely.  By 'recovery' I don't just mean winning office again, either federally or in any mainland state or territory.  I mean the Liberals winning office and then not wasting the opportunity by congratulating themselves on keeping out Labor.

The decision the national media is urging upon the Liberals to take is clear.  They must 'move to the centre'.  In the piece I've mentioned Troy Bramston argues:

If it [the Liberal Party] continues to follow the advice of cable television pundits and moves further to the right then it will never return to government.  It is politics 101 but warrants repeating: elections are won in the centre ground, not on the fringes.

Bramston is an astute observer of politics but another lesson of politics 101 is that what's 'the centre' and what's 'the fringe' can change.  Political parties and their leaders and their followers have it in their power to define 'the centre'.  What's 'fringe' today is 'centre' tomorrow - and vice versa.  One definition of a 'fringe' issue is just something that the left-wing media don't want talked about or debated.  Tony Abbott won an overwhelming majority in 2013 by campaigning for mainstream Australian values.  On Bramston's analysis Abbott could only have won because he was in the 'centre' - yet that's not what political commentators said about Abbot and his policies at the time.   

'Culture war' is a term that like 'the centre' suffers from the shifting sands of definition.  Earlier this week Liberal senator Andrew Bragg, and an enthusiastic supporter of the Voice to Parliament said of the Liberals '[There is a] tendency to Americanise some of the culture wars...I think that has been nasty at times.  We need to maintain our position as mainstream political movement...not drawn into the margin on crazy, culture war issues.'  However, some Australians might suggest the Voice is itself a manifestation of Australia's culture war. 

(On the subject of 'culture wars' back in 2016 Peter van Onselen wrote about the topic in an opinion piece in The Australian.  I've long remembered it and I printed it off and kept it.   According to van Onselen freedom of speech was a 'sideshow alley'.

The last successful conservative prime minister, John Howard, largely avoided the culture wars, focusing on reform outcomes while ensuring unnecessary skirmishes didn't reduce his chances of keeping Labor way from the treasury benches...Howard chose not to govern down sideshow alley.

Fast forward more than a year since Turnbull took over the top job, and four months since the election, and the culture wars are intensifying.  Nowhere more so than with respect to the Racial Discrimination Act section 18C.

Howard 'avoided the culture wars' because when he first came to power a quarter of a century ago Australia Day wasn't being cancelled, the national curriculum hadn't been written, and no-one was suggesting  the constitution be changed to overturn the fundamental liberal democratic principle of the legal and political equality of all citizens.)

In the days since the Aston by-election the media have struggled to identify any issue on which under Peter Dutton the Liberals have 'moved right'.  Not net zero.  Not the Voice.  There's no new Fightback!  or WorkChoices from the Liberals, let alone a promise to privatise the ABC.  In his budget reply speech in October last year Dutton mentioned how education should foster 'a love of our country and pride in our history and democracy' - but that's it.

Likewise no-one offering free advice to the Liberal Party on moving to 'the centre' has explained how that would make the Liberals any different from the ALP. 

Peter Hartcher in The Sydney Morning summed up the attitude of the Canberra press gallery: 

But in losing Aston, the Liberals lost a middle-class, middle-income, mortgage-belt seat.  The Liberals are losing not only traditional, principled, wealthy Liberals.  They are losing women, young people, the cities.  In other words, they are losing Australia...

The plain truth is that an increasingly reactionary, populist, right-wing impulse grips the party.  In between elections, its right-wing MPs and senators are excited to find encouragement on social media and a cheer squad in the Murdoch media.  They call this micro-gratification 'the base'.

Hartcher doesn't explain what makes a traditional, wealthy Liberal 'principled' as opposed to 'unprincipled'.

If he believes 'traditional, principled, wealthy Liberals' are now voting Teal he's wrong.  The ANU's  Australian Election Study of the 2022 federal election concluded this:

The Report found most Teal voters were not 'disaffected Liberals', but tactical Labor and Greens voters.  Less than one in five Teal voters previously voted for the Coalition.  And on average, Teal voters are ideologically close to Labor voters - placing themselves just left of centre.

Many people would curious about the manifestation of the 'reactionary, populist, right-wing impulse' that ails the Liberal Party so. 

The so-called 'base' that political commentators are so fond of denigrating happens to be people wh who did so much to help create the country we're so fortunate to live in today.  The 'base' is those who started businesses, employed Australians, raised families, and volunteered at church, at local sports clubs, at Rotary, and the Scouts and the Guides.

Let's assume 'the base' are Australian 65 years of age and older and let's ask them say, 'if Australia was in the same position as Ukraine is now, do you think that you would stay and fight or leave the country?' 

Which, interestingly enough, is exactly what the Institute of Public Affairs did in March last year in a poll of 1,000 Australians.  60% of 'the base' (ie Australians 65 and over) said they'd stay and fight, 16% said they'd leave, and 24% were unsure. 

Let's compare that to the views of Australians between 18 and 24.  32% said they'd stay and fight, 40% said they'd leave, and 27% were unsure.

The result of the Aston by-election, the NSW election, the Victorian election, the South Australian election, the West Australian election and the fact that 40% of young Australians would rather leave that fight for their country reveals the enormity of the task confronting the Liberal Party.