It’s no secret Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party appears intent on cornering itself with a shrinking base of ever older, more male, more conservative and arguably more rural voters.
Most commentators — rightly perplexed at the party’s steadfast refusal to unspool itself from its daily outrage politics and repudiation of established norms — have accordingly read its Voice to Parliament stance as yet more evidence of a reckless or plucky but nonetheless indifferent slide into oblivion.
Writing in The Saturday Paper, Paul Bongiorno pondered whether Dutton’s position was part of a “cunning” albeit “truly bizarre” strategy to privilege rural and regional voters above those in metropolitan areas.
“He has ceded ground within the Coalition to the Nationals on policy and on personnel,” Bongiorno observed. “Dutton is not the Liberal leader in the accustomed understanding, but rather the leader of a new political movement to put the city slickers in their place.”
There’s no doubt that Dutton’s Voice stance and elevation into the shadow ministry of the National’s firebrand first-term Northern Territory Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price speaks to the party’s political recession within the Coalition partnership.
But the idea these twin developments are emblematic of a conscious decision to chart the abiding contours of a new Liberal political identity is inarguably one Dutton and his platoon of Voice gravediggers would reject.
The better view is that the philosophical tradition and values of the Liberal Party, as Dutton construes them, always stood in the way of his taking a benign stance on the Voice, much less supporting it as a matter of principle.
So much is borne out by Dutton’s speech at the Sir John Downer Oration in Adelaide last Tuesday, where he told the gathered party faithful: “I am determined to demonstrate to Australians that prosperity and progress come not from the radicalism Labor is peddling, but instead from the tried and tested liberalism which is our bones.”
“We are the Liberal Party,” he went on to say, “a centre-right party of the classical liberal and conservative traditions; a party which seeks to preserve what’s good about our society, but always looks to improve it.”
The obvious difficulty for Dutton, however, is that what’s passed for conservatism in Australia in recent decades is not of the disciplined Burkean variety he invokes, but instead a collection of resentful animosities grounded in white supremacy, partisan attachment to the repression of the vulnerable, corruption, and a rigid, sanctimonious moralism that equates social change with social decline.
Where once the Liberal Party considered its contribution to history as marked by slow, fitful progress, its position on a variety of issues, not least Indigenous reconciliation, has long been characterised by a resolve that would instead see it condemn the nation’s future to the dusty shackles of the past.
In the late 1980s, John Howard led the charge against the Hawke government’s push to establish the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) — a decentralised advisory First Nations body — accusing the Hawke government of seeking to create a “black parliament” or “black nation within the Australian nation” and, in so doing, “divide Australian against Australian”.
Similar arguments were brought to bear against the question of Native Title in the following years, with then-opposition leader John Hewson, for instance, describing it as a “recipe for uncertainty and division” and a “millstone around the country’s prosperity”.
Upon being elected in 1996, the Howard government surprised no one when it put an end to 26 years of bipartisan policy on Indigenous self-determination, rejecting the roadmap to reconciliation endorsed by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) and later abolishing ATSIC. As recently released cabinet papers attest, the language levelled against the CAR roadmap — described as “divisive” and ill-suited to the “critical issues facing Indigenous Australians” — echo the phrasing Howard weaponised against the Bringing Them Home report.
“Reconciliation will not work if it puts a higher value on symbolic gestures [such as an apology] rather than on the practical needs of [Indigenous] people,” Howard memorably told the Australian Reconciliation Convention in May 1997, in what some construed as an attempt to reduce reconciliation to assimilation. “Australians of this generation should not be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control,” he declared.
Compare Dutton’s sophistry on what he’s misleadingly called the “Canberra-based Voice”, which he claims holds out the promise of democracy’s demise, a dangerously altered way of government and entrenched racial divides. It’s also, so he claims, an impossibly elitist idea liable to give rise to a powerful group of city-based “academics” who are more likely to ignore “real” Indigenous disadvantage in remote and rural areas than they are to deliver practical outcomes to people “on the ground”.
Though most commentary is quick to point out the depths of disinformation at hand, commonly lost from discussion is the unconcealed sense of decay such lies and contortions over the Voice elicit, exhumed as they are from the graveyard of political ideas and culture wars of times’ past.
Indeed, the tenor of 30-odd years’ worth of Liberal Party objections to Indigenous reconciliation also finds reflection in the explanation Dutton offered for his infamous decision to boycott the historic apology in 2008, which he said owed to his belief it would not “deliver tangible outcomes to kids who are being raped and tortured”.
It’s true Dutton has since expressed regret for his absence. But it’s a position blunted by his not-so-subtle reliance on a political sleight of hand that deliberately conflates the question of a constitutional Voice with disputed claims of Indigenous child sexual abuse, which Dutton has described as “normal practice”.
Much like Howard’s children-overboard affair 20 years ago, the appeal to racist resentment here is as unrestrained as it is absolute, the sinister implication to voters being: “These people are not like you or me — they hurt children. How could you possibly trust them to have a say over policy?”
This almost unvarying consistency, this imbrication between the politics of old and Dutton’s opposition to the Voice, reveals the extent to which the modern Liberal Party has long abandoned the Burkean conservatism it claims to venerate but in practice denigrates.
The difficulty for the Liberal Party is that this epistemic closure, centred around paranoid appeals to racist resentment and division, has been found wanting by the long march of time. No longer is the majority of voters so easily hoodwinked by a politics so fundamentally opposed to even the hint of progress.
But it’s as though the Liberal Party knows this, hence the rapid political rise of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a Walpiri-Celtic woman whose Indigenous mother before her, Bess — another controversial politician — was likewise roundly rejected by the Indigenous communities she claimed to represent.
Like her mother, Price shares Dutton’s conviction that domestic violence appears to be an innate problem in Indigenous communities, citing it in her maiden speech to Parliament as one of the overriding reasons for the disproportionate incarceration of First Nations peoples in modern Australia. Systemic racism in this context, she claimed, was a false narrative.
In the same speech, she railed against “welfare dependency”, spurned the Welcome to Country and likened the Voice to a racist proposition from another “paternalistic government” that she said would racially divide the country.
She’s also aired various other falsehoods, lies and incoherent claims about the Voice, including the notion it has excluded or silenced the voices of rural and remote Indigenous communities, will dismantle democracy and will prove incapable of delivering practical solutions.
As a person closely associated with right-wing outfits, such as the Centre for Independent Studies, Advance Australia and Sky News, and schooled in their tactics of outrage, misinformation and division, none of this is surprising.
It’s instead, as Indigenous lawyer and academic Noel Pearson recently told RN Breakfast, the upshot of a “campaign in the making over the last three years”.
“Their strategy was to find a black fella to punch down on other black fellas,” he said. “The bullets are fashioned by the CIS [Centre for Independent Studies] and the IPA [Institute of Public Affairs], but it’s a black hand pulling the trigger.”
This is a sentiment shared by Indigenous academic Professor Marcia Langton, who ahead of Price’s unsuccessful tilt for the federal seat of Lingiari in 2019 said: “Jacinta Price is useful to politicians. She legitimises racist views by speaking them against her own people.”
The aim of the right, in other words, was always to find a compelling Indigenous person who could lend a veneer of legitimacy to its No campaign, thereby shielding it from accusations of racism in all its truculent power and disguising the party’s hardened ideological disdain for Burkean conservatism.
None of the right’s arguments against the Voice, it bears emphasising, survive scrutiny. And indeed, the only common thread that runs throughout, apart from their shared apocalyptic visions, is their underlying appeals to racism.
It’s certainly questionable, of course, whether Dutton and the right’s quest to “prepare the grave” for the Voice will succeed, if recent polling and the manifest divisions within both the Nationals and the Liberals on the issue are anything to go by.
But if it does, Dutton will be remembered as the Liberal leader who not only signed the death warrant of Indigenous reconciliation, but whose misguided understanding of Liberal tradition resigned his party to the fate of a shrinking reactionary movement hardened against change.
Another part of the LNP nonsense about the Voice, for which I am hoping to see some serious push-back, is the apparent idea that all indigenous people live in remote areas of the NT and that the issues in those communities is the sum total of all indigenous concerns. Indigenous people are EVERYWHERE in this country. Its more of the anachronistic pandering to the past that marks the LNP as hopelessly out of touch.
I suppose the simple act of Labor governing the country would seem radical to Dutton. It’s not something his party were/are inclined to do. For him to call the Liberal party a centre right party is ridiculous. The party has been dragged further and further to the right under Howard, Abbott and Morrison to become a far-right party filled with religious zealots and ultra conservative bigots.
They were never going to vote “Yes” to the Voice.
“the radicalism Labor is peddling” – if only! – how I wish Labor still retained a shred of radicalism
They’re pretty radical for a so-called part of labour – unfortunately not in a good way.
It does, but as a form of Fabian socialism that seeks the necessary changes incrementally, rather than in bloodshed.
Radicalism was originally an offshoot of the conservatives and socially left-leaning people who became the liberals ( not the Liberals ) but the concept was no doubt in Menzies mind when he formed the Liberal party. This lot of droogies however, has transmogrified into the boogie-men.
You and me both. Having said that, a part of me understands their caution, right-wing media will tear them limb from limb if they do too much too soon. It’s very frustrating though.
The Liberal Party is being dragged to the Right to better reflect the nastiness of its few remaining members.
That’s okay though, it’ll reduce their overall vote and zap PHON and PUP (Or whatever clive runs with next time) in one stroke.
They truely are the “Nasty” party. They never govern for the betterment of us/country, it’s always for themselves and their donors/maaates.
They remind me of the observation on the Bourbons – they forget nothing and learn nothing.
In fact it is the Coalition in Australia that is The Lying Nasty Party.
The Nasty Party is the cognomen in the UK for the Conservative Party.
This was in truth acknowledged by Teresa May at the Conservative Party Conference in Bournemouth back in 2002
“There’s a lot we need to do in this party of ours. Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies. You know what some people call us — the Nasty Party.”
Dutty follows a long arrogant tradition of the LNP thinking they are a govt in exile. Who can forget silly Billy Sneddon, Peacock, Lord Nelson and the insurgent Abbott.
One wonders, is this just the hollowed out Liberal Party itself, but maybe a nativist right wing media outlet or cartel, with think tank influence, seems to do the running on issues, real or imagined, to be addressed by the Liberal Party?
As a former resident of Alice who was in semi regular contact with several CLP members I can confirm that Ms Price was indeed pretty much parachuted into Canberra via the No1 spot on the CLP Senate ticket because no one in the NT would vote for her personally. She was parachuted in on a mission as described, because she is willingly to punch down on other indigenous and do the bidding of her conservative masters. She is fickle though. If a better offer comes along they will lose her.
You mean like Warren Mundine?
There are many adjectives in addition to fickle to describe both Price and Mundine. But I do not want to be modded off Crikey for my remaining days.
Seems that other candidates in the CLP Senate ticket had to be mute on indigenous issues publicly, even if that contradicted their private views.
Dutton’s Trumpian playbook is not in fertile soil here. The popularity of the right in America is heavily assisted by not having compulsory voting (and being able to discourage voter turnout) and the structural gerrymandering that is the Electoral College system. Australians have rejected the Coalition’s culture wars and Dutton needs to project a positive vision. The thing is- he’s not the guy for that job.
The Americans are very big on freedom and democracy. Hypocrisy writ large.
I think the Yanks still retain the guiding ‘philosophies’ of the founding fathers – freedom and democracy for all – who are white and reactionary.
…and male.
If the Libs, US linked think tanks, media outlets and right wing influencers had their way, we would have non compulsory voting and imported US voter ID requirements (solution to a non existent problem) like UK has introduced; voter suppression to advantage the right over future generations.
From here in Australia it appears that In the US has a tyranny of the minority…mainly thanks to a Senate that was put in place by a minority, the Founding Fathers. This was to ensure that the real control of the country did not pass too easily to how polloi which was the serious concern of many of the attendees at the Constitutional Conventions.
And further ensured now by an Electoral College which was constituted to give citizens in less populated and economically unproductive rural states with as many as four times the votes as those as those in more populous and economically productive urban ones, thereby violating the fundamental democratic principle of “one person, one vote;” It can also be alleged that the college was originally instituted and continues to be maintained for explicitly racist and anti-democratic purposes.
The loser of the popular vote has won the electoral college only five times before 2000. The last time such happened was in the mid 1800’s, long before universal franchise. Now it’s happened twice in 16 years and has enabled, inarguably, the two worst presidents in modern American history, both Republican. Dubya, The Faux Texan and as the Scots have it The Radge Orange Bampot!
Ian Millhiser, writing in Vox, calculates that if you add up the population of states and assign half to each of their two senators, “the Democratic half of the Senate represents 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.”
41.5 million, more than 10 % of the population in fact c 12.5%, close to 1/8th!
You might think that in a country that claims to be some sort of a democracy, the party that held that much of an advantage might end up with a solid majority in the Senate, rather than have just barely eked out a 50-50 tie in a body that, taken together, represents the whole country.
Republicans have not won the majority of the votes cast in all Senate races in any election cycle for a long time. Nonetheless, Republicans held majority control of the Senate after the elections of 2014, 2016 and 2018 and still, after the 2020 races, held 50 of the 100 seats.
The problem in the USA is that though it says United, the States of America are not, so concerning much needed legislation, many people, mostly GOP oriented will clutch at their pearls and scream “State’s Rights!”
As well as in the HoR Right Wyoming’s single district has 560,000 people. California averages about 730,000 people per district. If CA had a number of representatives proportional to Wyoming, it would have 69 districts to Wyoming’s 1, instead of 53 to Wyoming’s 1.
There are two things needed to occur to bring the USA out of the 18thC into at least the 20thC.
The Electoral College needs be reformed or the US moves to The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
Also new legislation to replace the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, a combined census and apportionment bill passed by the United States Congress 18 June 1929, that established a permanent method for apportioning a constant 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives according to each census.
In 1929 the population of the USA was c. 122 million with 48 states it is now c.331 million now with 50 states to which must be added the Federal District of Columbia and the Territories of American Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianas, Puerto Rico and US Virgin Island.
Almost a century on the USA has over twice the the population but with still only 435 seats in the House of Representatives.
Hi Hayward, thank you for enumerating your understanding of the US’s electoral system.
IMHO, your post has little to do with the pending demise of the LNP in Australia.
So the racists installed by Howard continue to blight the nation. John Howard is fundamentally a racist who has sought to remove every trace of indigenous pride, not to mention the history of this nation. By seeking only what he thinks is good, he diminishes us all. That is one of the reasons I loathe him. The LIberals have really not been a centre right party for 3 decades.