“Liberal Party Death Spiral” — the headline was in Thursday’s Crikey, but it could have been anywhere in the media over the past few days. There’s been near unanimity that not only is Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership doomed, but the Liberal Party is facing the prospect of fragmentation and irrelevance.
My colleague Guy Rundle, who wrote the article so headlined, correctly traces the party’s problems to the amorphous nature with which it was founded, as a philosophically disparate coalition — “at its worst,” as he puts it, “simply a cloud of atoms pointed in roughly the same direction.”
But I think Rundle underestimates the extent to which the core of the party has always been illiberal, hostile to free thought and free trade (part of the reason is that he doesn’t see these so closely connected as I do). The task of making it an even moderately liberal party, and breaking the conservative hegemony that John Howard in particular had established, was always going to be incredibly messy and against the odds.
There were times when it seemed the Liberals, perhaps under Peter Costello, could settle down as a moderate-conservative force in opposition to a more liberal, market-friendly ALP, as it was under Paul Keating and later Mark Latham. But Kevin Rudd’s conservatism, coupled with the inability of the Liberal centre to throw up a leadership contender post-Costello, has put paid to that option.
The truth is that the Liberal Party’s whole history, and particularly its past 17 years (since the silencing of John Hewson), have meant it was always likely to reach a point at which all the available options were bad. That point has now been reached.
Even so, some are worse than others. For Joe Hockey to take the leadership now would base the party directly on betrayal — his personal betrayal of Turnbull and the party’s betrayal of the ETS deal — and commit him to a position on emissions trading that, whatever its intrinsic merits, can only be seen as a surrender to the denialists.
An Abbott leadership has more potential, in that the explicitness of the right’s victory might finally force a critical mass from the centre-left to leave the party and start afresh. But the precedents are discouraging in the extreme; the party’s left has repeatedly stayed put through outrages of every sort. As Hockey’s career shows, it has horizons that never stretch beyond the next election, and rarely beyond about lunchtime.
Turnbull evidently understands that an ideological attack has to be met in kind. Abbott and Minchin at least believe in something, and believers will always outlast non-believers. The task is to give the Liberal Party a philosophical centre that provides a coherent alternative to denialism and obscurantism.
Is Malcolm Turnbull the ideal person to be attempting this? Of course not — but is there ever an “ideal person”? Revolutions are not made by saints, and historical turning points turn on whatever the available talent is at the time. Someone had to try, and Turnbull at least is someone.
If not him, who? If not now, when?
If poor old Mal Brough had not lost his seat to workchoices he would have been a much more obvious choice.
Perhaps he is just an early indicator of the consequences of the seeds that the right of the party are now sowing….a bit like the proverbial canaries that miners used to rely on as indicators of rapidly approaching doom.
I don’t think we should run away with the idea that the Liberal Party is unique in being an amalgam of contrasting forces. Our electoral system tends to bring about two broad alliances of this type. Labor has to appeal to the socially conservative old-style ‘working class’ as well as to the socially progressive professionals such as myself, who have dominated the party since the Whitlam years and who have more in common with Malcom Turnbull than they do with ‘the workers’.
It is the art of the political leader in our system to unify your own broad alliance and drive wedges into the other lot. John Howard did this very successfully to Labor until the advent of Kevin Rudd who is now returning the favour.
Neither Howard nor Rudd achieved their success by dint of finding philosphical solutions to these conundrums. It is more about style, about making the right noises, ultimately about fudging the big philosophical questions.
The Liberals will eventually find another leader who can do this successfully, but it is unlikely to be any time soon, because they have taken too long to get their act together, and because parties rarely return to power after only one term in the wilderness.
Maybe it’s time to look at our whole electoral system: preferential voting versus proportional representation; executive government (cabinet) and/or representative govermnent; elected republic (refer to previous) or monarchy; compulsory voting or voluntary voting. At the moment, we have a “great” choice: we can have anything, as long as it’s black.
Michaelt is quite right – a 2-party system is always going to throw up parties that are broad alliances, & we shouldn’t expect too much from them by way of philosophical consistency. Our problem, as I see it, is that the alignment of our parties was set a hundred years ago on a basis (capital vs labor) that is no longer the most important thing on the landscape, & the fact that the system works so strongly against 3rd parties (particularly borad-based ones) makes that very difficult to change.