How the ghost of John Howard haunted the Aston byelection

For all his limitations as a political leader and as a truly awful human being, Peter Dutton does have some skills, chief among them a singular ability to beat the drums of unreality as the Liberal Party marches towards electoral oblivion.

“There are obvious issues we need to address in the division of Victoria — that is a statement of the obvious,” he told Insiders on Sunday, as he recited his back-of-the-napkin talking points on the “Aston la vista” byelection. “I think [the problem is that] in recent years the Liberal Party has allowed itself to be defined by our opponents and it’s time for us to take that back.”

So far as explanations and finger-pointing for the party’s historic Aston defeat go, it was among the least plausible, venturing as it did into the realm of reduced responsibility and the art of political self-preservation.

Closer to the mark was Malcolm Turnbull’s take, which sheeted home blame for the humiliating spectacle to the Coalition’s hand-in-glove relationship with News Corp.

“The Liberal Party in Victoria and its federal leadership is increasingly out of touch with the people whose votes they need to win elections,” he told RN Breakfast on Monday. “You [have] this madness that the party is being told by its media backers to move further and further to the right and focus on value issues, whether it is transgender kids or whether it is denying climate change — all this craziness that has been infecting the party for years.

“Now those chickens are coming home to roost and it is electoral catastrophe.”

It’s true the Liberal Party has been captive to extreme interests within News Corp for some time, but it seems altogether unlikely the axis of history can be so easily pressed into the service of that narrative alone.

A better reading of the Aston carnage is to see it as the logical conclusion of an ideological experiment or rightward shift in politics with roots in the Howard era. It was, after all, John Howard who conceived the modern culture wars and politics of division that manifests in the Liberal Party of today, and which long gripped the heart of the nation.

And it was Howard — that immortal “lying rodent” (as one of his own side called him) — whose political mendacity and lack of ethics on all manner of issues ultimately elevated lying and institution-trashing into a Coalition pastime, poisoning the very soul of Australian democracy in the process.

No one of a certain vintage could easily forget Howard’s ability to swing an election through unconcealed appeals to racist resentment on asylum seekers, the scars of which linger. Nor could anyone truly forget the egregious falsehoods festooned over the Iraq War and the suite of anti-terrorism measures that followed. And, still less, Howard’s climate scepticism, the irrational loathing he fomented against Indigenous peoples and his conflation of welfare with “dependency culture”, which so happened to coincide with the shameless introduction of profligate tax breaks and perks for middle- and upper-Australia.

It was under Howard, in other words, that the country and its attitudes hardened, becoming less equal, less free, less generous, meaner and more divided and corrupt than ever. But rather than put an end to these toxic political undercurrents and refashion a return to small-l liberal politics, the subsequent Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments readily embraced them, spreading the ghost of Howard thin over a nation marked by fading futures, disappearing dreams, avarice and bloodstained prisons.

In Abbott, for instance, we had a leader who described Indigenous culture and disadvantage as a “lifestyle choice”, who championed cruelty to refugees and the “right to be a bigot”, who railed against marriage equality and climate science, and who stood in front of a placard describing Julia Gillard as a “bitch”, all the while insisting women are fundamentally ill-suited to politics.

In Turnbull, we shifted to a prime minister whose progressive stance on social issues, Indigenous affairs and climate change was, he says, overborne by the right faction of his party and the Murdoch press. Hence his early reticence on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the ugly divisions inspired by the marriage equality plebiscite (as opposed to a simple parliamentary vote), his fatally weak climate policies and his seeming lack of awareness regarding the robodebt scandal.

And in Morrison — he of the sly evasions, anti-woke crusade and “team Australia” facemasks — we bore witness to the utter degradation of the public service and the continuation of Howard’s history wars, and watched in horror as corruption was taken to new heights.

That’s not to say the legacy of that coal-carrying, Pentecostal architect of boat turnbacks and robodebt displayed no points of distinction. After all, few if any Australian politicians have claimed to govern through divine right, which may or may not shed some light on Morrison’s lack of fidelity to institutional norms. And no politician, moreover, has so readily and consciously superseded Howard’s bent for blending lies, identity politics and lack of responsibility and empathy as part of their political modus operandi.

Yet notwithstanding that, Morrison merely personified, albeit in extreme form, a certain malaise that has come to afflict the Liberal Party across Australia since the days of Howard. So much finds reflection in the rise of the Christian right within most state divisions of the Liberal Party, the wall-to-wall sea of red across the mainland, and, not least, the general conduct of those — including supposedly small-l liberal types — during the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments, which was not so wholly dissimilar to that of Morrison.

Against this, it’s distinctly possible, of course, that the lingering stench of both Morrison and Alan Tudge fed into Saturday’s byelection result. After all, it’s only in recent months that most voters have become acquainted with the full extent of Tudge’s complicity in the robodebt disgrace, the $650,000 taxpayer-funded payout to his former staffer and lover Rachelle Miller, and Morrison’s utterly bizarre secret ministries scandal.

But it’s equally possible voters were influenced by Dutton’s reaction to these same controversies, which tended to downplay their significance or seek political advantage in Labor’s response. Many would have discerned in Dutton’s refusal to join Parliament’s historic censure of Morrison an inexplicable vassalage to the whims of the disgraced former prime minister and a fundamentally weak leadership.

And, more broadly still, many conceivably looked on at Dutton’s wider political tactics — his policy of opposing virtually anything and everything (except more cruelty to vulnerable people) and his lack of policy ambition on the fundamental challenges of our time — satisfied with their conviction in his moral and philosophical failings as a leader and his unbroken allegiance to the politics of yesteryear.

At which point the obvious question arises: what lies ahead for the federal Liberal Party? After the general election, the historically low primary votes secured by both the Labor and Liberal parties gave way to theories of structural decline in the two-party system — the notion that there would soon exist no natural majorities.

But since then, Labor has arrested this decline, with its primary vote restored to a healthy position. The Liberals, by contrast, appear to be set on fragmenting to the point of no return. Contrary to Dutton’s statement on Insiders, most voters can recite the modern values of the Liberal Party with precision, centred as they are around cruelty to minorities, racist dog-whistling, fringe issues far removed from the experience of people’s ordinary daily lives, jobs for mates, indifference to bareface corruption and general incompetence.

One of the problems for Dutton is that many voters will have arrived at this conclusion independently of Labor rhetoric and notwithstanding the valiant efforts of News Corp commentators to the contrary. In other words, we’re now looking at the reality of Howard’s ambition to permanently remake Australian society in his mould and its failure.

To paraphrase the American poet Robert Frost, Howard — when confronted with a fork in the road — took the road less travelled and that has made all the difference, but in the worst possible way for his party. It was a journey that failed to foresee the declining influence of News Corp and, not least, the tectonic shift in politics presaged by the rise of younger voters who see no appeal in the politics of division.

As Victorian Premier Dan Andrews told reporters on Sunday: “The Liberal Party [is] a nasty, bigoted outfit and people have worked them out and that is why they keep losing.”

And so while Dutton may have unified the motley elements of his party for the time being, the question is at what price and to what end absent a wholesale return to the centre. The answer is the price of policies, the price of leadership, and, ultimately, the price of power.

None of this, of course, detracts from the historic significance of the Aston byelection result. It merely points out it was an historic result rendered less surprising though not less significant by the political conditions fashioned by the true architect of the modern Liberal Party’s enduring malaise: Howard.

Should John Howard shoulder the blame for the Liberal disaster at the Aston byelection? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.