Maybe the Liberal Party needs to split, like Labor did in 1955.
Just (half) kidding. It took 17 years and seven elections for Labor to get back into power after the right-wing extremists (Catholic anti-communists) took off and formed the DLP. A week is a long time in politics; that was a generation.
The 17 years in the wilderness of opposition was largely due to the DLP giving its preferences to Bob Menzies’ Liberals, and you’d think that neither separate fragment of a split Liberal Party would preference Labor, would they?
Anyway, this time it’s different. Apart from anything else, it’s the modern version of the moderate HV ‘Doc’ Evatt who would have to lead his/her followers out to the promised land, leaving behind the right-wing true believers led by today’s BA Santamarias, who currently own the party.
Aside from an unlikely split, what’s the solution for the floundering Liberal Party?
It might seem like its problems could be solved by making Bridget Archer leader, but as fine an idea as that might be, the Liberal Party’s issues run far deeper than the leader.
Its 80,000 branch members and most of its MPs have become a fringe debating society trying to form majority government.
In the United States, there are 36 million registered Republicans, 10 per cent of the total American population. The Liberal Party’s membership is 0.3 per cent. In Victoria it’s half that, just 0.15 per cent. They wouldn’t fill Rod Laver Arena.
Moral outliers
It’s not just the lack of them. Those 80,000 Australians, to the extent they are not the result of branch stacking and actually believe something, believe things that other Australians increasingly don’t believe, which gets reflected in the people they pre-select. A few of them actually end up in Parliament, like Moira Deeming and the amazing Gerard Rennick.
Nor is it just the moral outliers. This week’s decision by the party to oppose the First Nations Voice is a good example.
Whatever the merits of Peter Dutton’s case on this matter, or the temptation to push a cream pie into Anthony Albanese’s face, campaigning against the referendum will do nothing to win back urban seats in Victoria and New South Wales, which Dutton knows to be his main job. Quite the opposite.
Your correspondent is not a political scientist but I know about numbers and it’s clear, looking at those numbers, that the problem starts not with a split but an amalgamation – of the Liberal and National parties in Queensland in 2008 to form a separate party called the Liberal National Party (LNP).
That decision has become a disaster for the Liberals.
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time – the Queensland Liberal Party was bankrupt and going nowhere, and at the 2007 election there were four Queensland Nationals and 34 Liberals from Victoria and NSW in a party room of 89, so the two southern states still dominated.
Now there are 24 Queensland LNP members against a total of 21 Liberals from Victoria and NSW. Liberal leader Peter Dutton is a member of the Queensland LNP. In the House of Reps, the LNP and the Nationals together easily outnumber Liberals.
Queensland’s sorry dominance
Queensland LNP MPs who are nominally Liberal go in the Liberal party room, and those who are nominally National go in the National party room.
But the distinctions between them are getting blurred because they are in a single party in Queensland, so the policy and ideological differences are naturally disappearing.
Queensland now dominates the parliamentary Liberal Party, both in numbers and thinking, and it is the least urban state in the country, with 52 per cent of the population living outside Brisbane and the Gold Coast. And the Gold Coast is populated by older retirees and not fully urban either.
The distortion caused by the Queensland amalgamation and the narrow band of pre-selectors in Victoria and NSW mean that the Liberal Party is quite unable to engage constructively on the two biggest issues concerning younger urban Australians – housing and climate change.
The most recent Census showed there are now more Millennials than Baby Boomers. Add Gen X, and those who were born in houses that Bob Menzies built or subsidised for their parents, and who now benefit from the high prices of those same houses they inherited and represent the Liberal Party’s base, are now in a shrinking minority.
Young people are not getting more conservative as they get older. They are angry about the cost of housing and the looming problem of climate change.
And then there’s the Liberals’ problem with women. Liberal strategist and pollster Tony Barry told a Liberal Party audience in Adelaide in March that “the class that we once pejoratively described as ‘doctor’s wives’ are actually professional women, including, ironically, doctors”. Incidentally, in 2020 in Australian universities, 52.8 per cent of all medical graduates were female.
He went on: “The proportion of Australians – especially women – who are tertiary educated is growing. The proportion of Australians who do not believe they can afford to buy a house is also growing. These demographic realities are now redefining the political conversation and the electoral math.”
That means political parties must also redefine themselves, and while the Labor Party is also losing primary votes, it’s getting the preferences of those who are stealing them.
David Cameron’s blueprint
The question for the Liberal Party is whether it is capable of the sort of transformation wrought by David Cameron on the British Conservative Party and Dominic Perrottet and Matt Kean on the NSW Liberal Party – that is, to remake it as a progressive conservative movement.
When he became leader of the Opposition in 2005, Cameron described himself as a “modern compassionate conservative” and identified climate change as a core issue. Tony Abbott took Australian conservatives in the opposite direction.
Perrottet and Kean also went hard on renewable energy and used that as the basis of their own progressive conservative government.
(The Tories were subsequently sidetracked by Brexit and Boris, thanks to Cameron’s disastrous decision to hold the 2016 referendum, which then obliterated most of his work in modernising the party. And Perrottet lost in March, but after 12 years nothing would have saved him.)
The federal Liberal Party has no choice but to become a Cameron-style progressive conservative party.
It is not a matter of moving to the left or right, as many characterise the decision facing the Liberals, but simply becoming a mainstream party that represents most Australians, including women and young people.
To be convincing and lasting there would be need to be a revolution, not simply a change of leadership. The party must build its membership in both numbers and breadth and have a group of MPs and a leader who actually reflect modern Australia.
Can that be done without amputating the Queensland LNP? That’s the question.
Alan Kohler is founder of Eureka Report and finance presenter on ABC news. He writes twice a week for The New Daily
