Despite plenty of warnings, the laziness and complacency of self-described Liberal “moderates” has created a political vacuum that is being exploited not by other parties but by a grassroots political movement that is more in touch with the pre-Howard Liberal Party than any current MP.
The threat to Liberals in what were once heartland seats has morphed from a couple of seats — Indi, where the inept Sophie Mirabella lost her seat to independent Cathy McGowan in the 2013 Abbott landslide, and Warringah, where, just six years after that landslide, Abbott lost his own seat — into a broader movement that aims at the soft underbelly of the federal Liberals.
That used to be its embrace of climate denialism, its subservience to fossil fuel industries and the dominant role of the Nationals on energy policy, and its ferocity toward refugees.
In the last three years, however, the refugee issue has mostly disappeared as a front-page concern. But it’s been replaced by something much more toxic for the government: its corruption and refusal to establish any kind of worthwhile integrity body.
Liberal “moderates” have allowed themselves to be dragged away from the political centre on integrity every bit as much as on climate. While right-wing extremists and climate denialists within the Coalition have openly attacked climate action, mocked the government and threatened to cross the floor in demanding coal-fired power stations and pushing for continued funding for fossil fuel interests, “moderates” have settled for occasionally calling favoured journalists like Nine’s David Crowe to politely express hope for stronger climate policies, and vaguely threatening to “reserve their positions”.
Similarly, Scott Morrison’s three-year refusal to implement his commitment to an integrity body — which was savaged by Barnaby Joyce as a threat to the Nationals’ traditional pork-barrelling — has been met with silence by “moderates” until Tasmanian Bridget Archer crossed the floor last week to support McGowan successor Helen Haines on debating an integrity body bill.
Archer was immediately subjected by Morrison to the same treatment meted out to Julia Banks before the last election, complete with unsubtle suggesting that Archer needed support, as if she had some sort of health issue that had made her cross the floor. Meanwhile LNP, Liberal and National right-wingers were merrily crossing the floor in the Senate without any hint they needed “support”.
Despite Liberal attempts to portray female Voices candidates as “puppets” of the left, there’s a strong argument that some are more authentic Liberals than many in the current party — only it’s the Liberal Party of Malcolm Fraser rather than that of more recent leaders: one with a commitment to the environment, a positive view of refugees, supportive of greater governmental accountability and progressive on social issues.
A figure like Zali Steggall, while ardently supporting greater climate action, also supports lower taxes on, and more support for, small business, and opposed many of Labor’s tax policies at the 2019 election. Kylea Tink, standing against invisible North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman, has been a CEO and managing director across several businesses and NGOs. Wentworth’s Allegra Spender — another CEO and company chair — hails from Liberal Party royalty.
These are in effect green Tories, indistinguishable from Liberal MPs on economic issues but more in line with the Liberal values of an older generation in relation to the environment, integrity and asylum seekers. That is, they offer the wealthy voters of Liberal-held seats the virtues of Liberal governments — lower taxes, generally — while committing to progress issues like climate and anti-corruption.
Ironically, they would be perfectly at home in the NSW Liberal Party, a genuine broad church where a highly conservative Premier — who professes himself relaxed about the state’s anti-corruption body — leads a moderate government in which the treasurer is an effective prosecutor of a serious climate action agenda. Instead, they will cost the NSW Liberals hundreds of thousand of dollars that could be directed to more marginal seats in the coming election.
They represent not merely an opportunity lost, but a style of politics anathema the major parties. The latter are hollowed-out institutions, reliant on donors to determine policy and public funding to maintain their status. The Voices candidates have emerged through community processes in which local groups search for the best candidates to represent them, and provide policy input into their platforms. Liberal “moderates”, who have allowed donors and extremists to dictate to them, have created an opportunity to see if that kind of politics can succeed.
Bernard Keane has donated to Kylea Tink’s campaign in North Sydney.
Would you consider supporting a Voices candidate at the next election? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Every ‘Moderate’ in the current LNP Coalition deserves to lose their seat. As a group of politicians, they have been so willing to sell their principles for essentially nothing. Truly, what is their purpose in the Parliament than to just enable the worse excess of Scotty, BJ and the rest of the far-right?
The Liberal Party did change dramatically under Howard. It is ironic how he idolises Menzies given that. What was once a battle between conservatives and small ‘l’ Liberals, dries v wets, is now between old-fashioned conservatives and libertarians who keep peeling off because libertarians struggle with collective action. The Liberal moderates are now a fringe and, like traditional Republicans in the US, looking lost in a party that is no longer the party they grew up in.
saw this on teh feed, thought you might like it:
Libertarians are like house cats. They are both convinced of their fierce independence, but in reality are utterly dependent on a system they neither appreciate nor understand.
Excellent, thank you!
Very apt. Try to tell that to the unlamented former senator David Lyonhjelm. It fits his stance to a tee but he wouldn’t accept it.
Agree and related, recently conservative commentator David Brooks attended a ‘National Conservatism Conference’ citing same think tanks etc, that influence the Libs and describes as follows, in The Atlantic:
‘The Terrifying Future of the American Right. What I saw at the National Conservatism Conference (By David Brooks 18 Nov. 2021.) … NatCon World, a hermetically sealed dystopian universe with its own confected thrills and chills, its own illiberal rides. I tried to console myself by noting that this NatCon theme park is the brainchild of a few isolated intellectuals with a screwy view of American politics and history. But the disconcerting reality is that America’s rarified NatCon World is just one piece of a larger illiberal populist revolt that is strong and rising.’
When Governments of any persuasion have been in power for more than 2 or 3 Election cycles they seem to lose their way.
They become complacent and stop listening to their constituents.
The Coalition especially are masters at this sort of funk.
It’s why, up until Xi, the CCP had a policy of rotating leaders every 7 years. Still do it for provincial governors. Xi is so influentiAl, he had had the chinese communist manifesto changed so he can rule for life.
Actually, the Chinese Presidency is on 5 year terms and it required a change to the Chinese Constitution by the National People’s Congress (NPC) to remove the 2 term limit. The presidency is officially regarded as an institution of the state rather than an administrative post. Under the constitution, the president serves at the pleasure of the National People’s Congress, the highest organ of state power and the legislature, and is not legally vested to take executive action on his own prerogative (unlike the US).
He will only be there as long as they determine that he is doing a good job.
Except that this Government lacked any real vision and direction from the start. Abbott proved to be an opposition specialist, his only talent being undoing policies, not actually formulating them. They’ve bounced around like a pinball ever since, shunted to and fro by wider events with their latest leader madly spinning narrative to frame this chaos as both good and intentional. While they may have managed to Murdoch themselves a narrow victory in the last election, the reality is they have been spinning in an ever tightening death spiral ever since.
For most of the last century, the standard and most stable political model adopted by Western democracies was similar across nations. Two dominant centrist parties with largely overlapping policies that served and answered to the needs of the majority of the population, with just enough variation left or right to give the punters the impression that they had a voice through their votes, supported by a range of independent or special interest parties to satisfy the more ‘fringe’ elements of the electorate that couldn’t, for one reason or another, stomach the big two. Under that arrangement, everyone felt they had someone representing their viewpoint, even if that viewpoint never actually made it into parliament, and even though – in preferential voting systems like Australia – those fringe votes eventually made their way back to the big two anyway.
Since the global collapse of communism and socialism as a possible viable political alternative to capitalism and neoliberalism, that situation has slowly eroded. Not that I’m arguing the merits of either communism or socialism, but the absence of an alternative has resulted in a gradual shift to the right. Accompanying that drift to the right has been the rise of a professional political class that believes all human activity, including politics, should be modelled on a commercial relationship. Consequently, politics is no longer about principal and good governance. It’s simply an exercise in marketing. Focus groups rule. Integrity commissions have no place.
Nowhere is this trend more obvious than in Australia, where our prime minister is actually a professional marketer.
A standard technique of marketing is to try and achieve customer (or voter) ‘lock in’, where the customer is so wedded to buying from the supplier that it is impossible for them to take their business elsewhere. In the political context, this is achieved by creating a perception of ever greater distance between the two main parties and, because of the dominance of the political right over the last three or four decades, this has meant a shift to the more extreme right. This attempt at lock in can be seen, for example, in the broadcasts of Sky News (yes, the media has played its part too) or in the hyperbole of the US Republicans, who cannot refer to Joe Biden as anything other than ‘extreme, far-left, Antifa, communist socialist anti-US they’ll all take our guns away Sleepy Joe’. The impression created is that the opposing party is so far away from being an acceptable, viable political alternative that no decent-minded person would contemplate voting for them for even a second.
Of course, the suggestion that only one party is worthy of receiving votes is profoundly undemocratic rubbish. Democracy – and we as members of a democratic society – needs choice and alternatives. A democracy of only one party is totalitarianism. The relatively recent trend of ‘othering’ the political opposition to the point where their very humanity is questioned only serves the interests of click baiters, not the country nor the people.
And it doesn’t work over the long term, anyway. Politics, like Nature, abhors a vacuum. We are seeing that vacuum being filled now.
Yes, Malcolm Fraser did become more progressive once he left office, but to characterise his rule as being socially progressive is somewhat risible.
While you are more than half right, you have to admit he was more decent and progressive than those who followed him. Things may have been better under Hewson, but we’ll never know. Turnbull was far more human and humane, but the illiberals sacked him in favour of a religious zealot looking for his own theocracy.
Fraser did seem to drift to the left after leaving office, even if he was far more helpful to the Vietnamese refugees as PM than Howard or Abbott would have been.
Whilst most cynically assume that Fraser’s left-shift post-office was to airbrush his legacy as PM, it is conceivable that he was pulled to the right by cabinet colleagues who were less small ‘L’ liberal than he was.
It was a different time. Then progressive was Gough.
Progressive then?
Today’s ‘Labor’ would/do regard him as a dangerous radical and strive to distance themselves from any taint of his decency, integrity and principle.
His government introduced the The NT Land Rights Act in 1976. In some ways Fraser was progressive.
When Fraser was in power the refugees from Vietnam turned up on the beaches in their thousands. He went to Gough and said that he wasn’t going to make any anti-refugee statements as it wasn’t the correct thing to do. Funnily enough there was no anti-refugee talk that I remember. There was just one person in his government that caused some problems though. He was a junior minister by the name of John Howard. A born racist who has amplified all the nasty anti-refugee sentiment that is currently everywhere in Australia.
One of those Vietnamese refugee families live next door to us, you can not imagine a more hardworking family, they have become great citizens and are fantastic neighbours. Vietnams loss our gain.
One of those Vietnamese refugee families produced my amazing daughter-in-law and thence my 3 beautiful grandchildren. There is much to blame you for, Malcolm Fraser, but for this, I thank you.
Ain’t that the truth. His policies on Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, his stance against Apartheid – a stance he never publicly declared as a Minister in the Gorton and McMahon governments – conflicted markedly with his stance on East Timor/Timor Leste. He shut down Radio Free Fretilin in 1976. He attempted to shut down radio 2JJ.