An unfortunate truth underlying the speculation about Sussan Ley’s future as Liberal leader was that most Australians didn’t care much for her or her putative replacement Angus Taylor. Stay or go, call on a ballot, make the change or not – none of it is likely to make much difference to public attitudes to the Liberal Party. Incredibly, a series of recent opinion polls suggest support for the Liberals is disturbingly close to the level of backing for the Greens, which consistently hovers around 12 per cent. I’m in my fifth decade of writing about Australian politics, and I never expected to write those words.
The condition of the Liberals is now so poor that the personalities at or near the top don’t matter much. Taylor in place of Ley as leader might produce a bit of a poll bump for a while. A different face with a new personal story to tell, a declared conservative rather than Ley’s vague, supposedly moderate, ideological persona, he could please the bulk of rusted-on Liberal backers in the community, who skew rightward. But that would merely underline the Liberals’ problem: there are too few of them. Tony Abbott this week declared that the party would be lucky to have 30,000 members around the country. In the 1950s, with a much smaller population, it had nearly 200,000.
Things can be turned around but not by relying on outdated verities and investing in quick fixes such as leadership manoeuvrings. What’s needed is honesty and courage across the board, not new labels on old bottles of wine. Leadership contests – even the contests that won’t in themselves transform the political environment – briefly produce all the fun of the fair for the participants and the media, but the tough work should start now regardless of the party’s weak electoral prospects in the near-term. Just about every step the Liberals should take will be painful.
For a start, they need to be honest with themselves. Ten months on from its catastrophic election loss, the party’s yet to produce its official review. When it is eventually released, either in its original form or with redactions imposed in the interests of stopping Peter Dutton from bringing in the lawyers, it will have useful things to say. But events have moved on. The party has so comprehensively cocked itself up since the defeat, it might be better off ordering up a new review into how all of that has happened.
Surely the benefit of the election review will be to force many Liberal MPs and people throughout the party to face up to their reality: they lost big-time and they lost fair and square. When voters were given a chance to pass judgment on the Albanese government’s first term, a solid majority decided the government had earned three more years. The result was emphatic. The government is legitimate. This may seem obvious but there continues to be an air of unreality in the way today’s Liberals and their supporters speak of the government, variously describing it as bad, awful or terrible and Albanese as our worst prime minister. It’s hard to see the value in that approach. Most voters don’t see it that way and are turned off by the rhetoric.
The overheated approach is partly down to a historical bug inside the Coalition parties that often causes it to struggle with defeat and avoid internal reappraisals. We’ve seen versions of the movie before. The Whitlam government was viewed as an error and had to be destroyed post-haste no matter what. The sustained success of the Hawke government led the Coalition to split and basically throw an election away with the Joh-for-Canberra push in 1987.
And Labor’s win under Anthony Albanese in 2022 was also not taken seriously. It was merely a hiccup and normal operations would resume as long as the Liberals remained united under Dutton without really offering much. This turned out to be a misreading of how much Australia has changed – and is continuing to change – socially, ethically, racially and politically. And that is in a global environment that is being remade in frightening ways by both our biggest ally and our largest trading partner.
The old order that has continued to drive Liberal thinking was built on a binary choice between Labor and the Coalition, with the News Corp titles swaying public opinion by reliably backing the Coalition cause. Senior Liberals and their aspiring colleagues could make regular appearances on
News’ broadcast arm Sky News, building up their profiles, disseminating and bolstering the talking points and being legends in their own lunchtime. That binary model worked all the way up to and including Scott Morrison’s 2019 election victory.
But it’s over. Too much trust has been lost by too many Australians in conventional political behaviour and conventional politicians, as evidenced by One Nation’s apparent meteoric rise during Ley’s stewardship of the Liberals. This is not to say that Albanese is popular; he isn’t. But he has still enjoyed more residual trust than his direct opponent.
So in this new environment, what should the Liberal Party do?
Stop opposing for the sake of it. Liberal senator Jane Hume, who admittedly has had an axe to grind with Ley after being sent to the backbench, still made the accurate observation on Tuesday that since the election voters have learnt that the Liberals oppose the government’s energy, housing, tax and immigration policies without being presented with any counter policies.
The Liberals also need to take a hard look at the party’s own role during its past stints in office, in helping to create the economic inequalities that blight Australia. Instantly, they’ve attacked Labor for contemplating changes to the capital gains tax discount – a bad sign. To come up with new policies that attract the hordes of younger voters and women who refuse to countenance backing them, they are going to have to look at some radical reworking of old Liberal economic and tax positions. If they don’t, Pauline Hanson is going to scoop up ever greater numbers of disaffected Australians.
It’s been said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it but the Liberals’ position is more acute than that. They need to learn from the present.
Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.
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