The poverty of moderate politics.

Political parties fail when they try to be something they're not.

Sometimes you're reading something and you come across a sentence or a passage that’s unintentionally unrevealing and makes a point different from the one the author is trying to make.

On Friday, I came across just such a passage. It was an article in The Age newspaper in Melbourne by its state political editor, Annika Smethurst. It was about the Victorian state opposition and its Liberal leader, John Pesutto. While the Victorian Liberal Party is the focus of the article, Smethurst's comments have a nationwide relevance. They provide an insight into the condition of left-wing progressivism in Australia today.  

The article was titled - 'No, no, no: Pesutto was meant to be the great moderate. Where's the evidence?' This is the relevant part:

When John Persutto - a self-described small-l liberal from the well-to-do inner east- was elected, he was billed as the great moderate hope for the increasingly unpopular Victorian Liberal Party. As he told The Australian Financial Review during his campaign to win back Hawthorn [the state seat he lost at the 2018 state election and which he won in 2022], 'I don't think it's a secret that my view lean towards a more modern, progressive kind of Liberal.'

But a little over a quarter of the way into political term, it's hard to find a policy where Pesutto has been able to affirm his moderate credentials.

In the past 12 months the opposition leader has said no to pill testing, and he expressed 'major concerns' about raising the age of criminal responsibility from 10. 

He didn't back the Voice to parliament and scrapped the Coalition's support for a treaty, but agreed to support a push from now-expelled Liberal MP Moira Deeming to set up an inquiry into gender-affirming care.

At each turn, there have been excuses - including reasonable ones - but when you step back and look at his track record from the point of view of voter-land, it's hard to see what he has done that could bring back the more moderate voters who have turned their backs on the party in recent years.

I read that and thought to myself - 'Is that it? Is that what progressivism has been reduced to? Pill testing?' [If you don't know what pill testing is, don't worry I'll tell you in a moment.]

Smethurst isn't entirely wrong. She describes the sorts of things that pass for a 'moderate' political agenda in Victoria - and indeed across the country. Supposedly these are the concerns of 'moderate' voters - and if the advice of the state political editor of The Age is to be heeded, these are the concerns on which the Liberal Party should focus. Not the economy - not health or education, but pill testing. In an article about how the Liberals should attract the support of 'moderate' voters, there was not a single mention of the cost of living.

(For those of you who don't know, 'pill testing' is the testing of illegal drugs to determine their composition and purity. The claim is that if the government itself tested drugs or if a third party was allowed to, then according to the Greens 'when young people have access to pill testing services, they're much less likely to take drugs, or be at risk of overdose.' The Greens, the Animal Justice Party - which has one MP in the Victorian Parliament, and the Legalise Cannabis Party - which has two MPs, introduced legislation to legalise pill testing in Victoria. The Labor government is currently considering the idea.)

The other issues mentioned by Smethurst, the appropriate age of criminal responsibility, the Voice, and an inquiry into the medical care of transgender and nonbinary people, as important as they may be, are not front-of-mind issues for most Victorians.

As much as Smethurst might want a more 'moderate' Liberal Party, there's no evidence Age readers (or anyone else) would vote for such a creature. At the 2022 Victorian state election, the Victorian Liberals supported a treaty between non-indigenous and indigenous Victorians (a position since reversed following the Voice referendum), and they had a climate change policy far more 'moderate' (i.e. left-wing) than even the Labor Party led then by Daniel Andrews. The Liberals were still thrashed. When Smethurst gets into the specifics of what's required for the Liberal Party to be 'moderate', she demonstrates just how shallow and thin the 'moderate' political agenda is. In fact, it's not an agenda at all - it's a grab bag of unconnected talking points. After a few moments' reflection on what a 'moderate' political agenda would look like, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that such an agenda would be impossible to put into practice because it contains such few things of substance - it's just a collection of random topics. This perhaps explains why the Liberal Party at the state level across Australia has had such difficulty turning themselves into parties perceived by the public as 'moderate' (although it's certainly not for lack of trying). There's simply nothing for the Liberals to turn themselves into. There might be a few token gestures for the Liberals to adopt to prove their 'moderate' credentials', such as the Perrottet government replacing the New South Wales state flag with the Aboriginal flag on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but gestures are not a coherent political program. 

Smethurst warns the Liberal Party 'runs the risk of looking like it is unwilling to constructively engage on social issues that will be the key to winning over Gen Z and Millennials, who are on track to make up 45% of the state's voters by 2026. There is no path to government without them.' You hear this argument often - and it's wrong at many levels. 

It assumes the job of a political party is to follow where young people lead. If young Australians were asked their view on the Israel/Gaza war and with whom their sympathies lie, it's unlikely a majority would say Israel.

The assumption that young people are all left-wing isn't supported by evidence. During the Voice referendum, Voice supporters, the Labor Party, and not a few Liberals assumed the 'youth vote' would swing decisively towards 'Yes' - but that's not what happened. According to the exit poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs and Advance, 41% of Australians between the ages of 18 and 24 voted 'No' at the referendum, as did 48% of those between the ages of 25 and 34. That's not the picture of young people in Australia that left-wing journalists like to present, but that's the reality. 55% of males in both age groups voted 'No', while 74% of females 18 to 24, and 59% 25 to 34 voted 'Yes'. That is a far more nuanced picture than one that simply takes for granted all young people lean left. Certainly, the number of young people voting Liberal might be declining, but that doesn't mean they're all left-wing.  

Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, who, if the polls are correct, will replace Justin Trudeau as prime minister after the next election due next year, shows what happens when centre-right political leaders are willing to challenge the received wisdom about young people. This is from a news story at the end of last year:

Canadian millennials [those born between 1981 and 1996] are nearly twice as likely to vote for Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives than the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's governing Liberals.

The Tories are polling at 40 per cent among Canadian millennials, ahead of NDP at 24 per cent and the Liberals at 21 per cent. Among the young Gen Z cohort [those born between 1997 and 2012], the Conservatives also hold a strong lead at 32 per cent, six percentage points up over the NDP and eight percentage points ahead of the Liberals.

This is one explanation for Poilievre's appeal to young people.

Poilievre's growing popularity among young voters is likely due to how he's seized upon an opening by providing coherent messaging that addresses the general state of dissatisfaction and the economic anxieties that are weighing on young Canadians. 

That includes continuing frustrations about the inaccessibility of home ownership, income instability and inflation.

The continuing detrimental economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have also affected this demographic the most, contributing to perceptions of a growing divide between older, economically established generations and young adults.

…Poilievre offers a coherent, semi-populist [whatever that means - you can tell this was written by a university academic] appeal that prioritises these problems, provides a common cause or enemy and proposes solutions within Conservative policies.

Poilievre has identified a set of 'gatekeepers' that include all-powerful interests and established voices in Canadian public life as the source of these problems, including progressive urbanites, government bureaucrats and financial elites. In working to maintain their privilege, says Poilievre, these gatekeepers have compromised the opportunities available to ordinary Canadians.

Recalibrating these existing institutions to align with a renewed desire for 'freedom' is presented as the solution, allowing Poilievre to repackage and legitimise conventional conservative emphases on free markets, deregulation and small government.

(As it happens, Poilievre does have a drugs policy - and it's the opposite of 'moderate'. He's said he would stop the decriminalisation of drugs and end the policies of some provincial governments that provide a supply of drugs to some users. He said, 'I don't believe in flooding our communities with more and more taxpayer-funded drugs.')

Finally, my column in Friday's Australian Financial Review was about Anthony Albanese and his broken promise on the stage 3 tax cuts. 

I said that the problem is that voters are so cynical about politicians and their promises that Albanese, at least in the short term, might gain an electoral reward for what he’s done. 'I'm breaking my promise to give millions of Australians a bigger tax cut' is an effective line - and as yet, the Liberals don't have an answer. Saying 'it's a broken promise, it's a broken promise, it's a broken promise' is all true - but the Liberals have broken plenty of promises in their time too.

At the 2013 federal election the Liberals promised to make no changes to superannuation. Within months of Tony Abbott being removed as leader, Malcolm Turnbull and his treasurer Scott Morrison did exactly what the Liberals had promised not to do, increasing superannuation taxes. The problem for Peter Dutton is that defending the stage 3 tax cuts for the wealthy requires the Liberals to fight for the interests of a group that votes Teal, voted 'Yes' at the Voice referendum, and demands more climate change 'action'. That is not the Liberals' constituency. 

The consequences of Albanese's broken promise will take some time to play out. Whether the electorate will ever trust him again is an open question, but on the other hand it's likely he was never trusted in the first place.

After all, Albanese won the 2022 election with a record-low vote lower than that received by Labor under Bill Shorten in 2019.

Recommended Watching

This is a video Pierre Poilievre released when he was running for the leadership of the Canadian Conservatives. The party leadership was decided by a ballot of the party's members after a seven-month campaign, and in September 2022, Poilievre won the contest with nearly 70% of the vote. It's four and a half minutes long. The first time I saw it in July 2022 I thought it was bit bizarre. A columnist in the Toronto Star called it 'unhinged'. 

I'd never heard of Poilievre, and while I loved that someone running for their party's leadership would make a video talking about wood, and 'freedom', and the Magna Carta, and the evils of 'statist big government' promising a 'Utopia' that never existed, I couldn’t see how it would translate into politics - but the polls show it well and truly has.

And if you want more Poilievre, there's this now famous video from October last year. Poilievre eats an apple while being interviewed by a journalist.