Simon says, “I give up.”
“Leading Liberal moderate” Simon Birmingham is leaving politics after 17 years in the Senate and five as head of his party’s dwindling moderate faction, in order to take up a “new, commercially oriented” career.
“Simon Birmingham has always engaged respectfully, he has always engaged with integrity,” said Senate leader Penny Wong, calling her Liberal counterpart a “thoroughly decent person”. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton also went with “thoroughly decent”, praising Birmingham’s “persuasive, principled and respectful” manner.
But what does Birmingham actually have to show for all his genteel, civil, decent politics, for having led the wets since Christopher Pyne’s retirement in 2019? What legacy does he leave?
I’ve spent my years covering federal politics waiting — perhaps naively — for the so-called leader of the so-called moderates to grow a backbone, like the one displayed by actual moderate Bridget Archer, or the handful of desperate Liberals willing to cross the floor in the dying days of the Morrison government.
But Birmingham, who used Thursday’s valedictory to remind us he was a small-l liberal “of the John Stuart Mill tradition”, remained the quintessential fence-sitter, offering little beyond respectful platitudes as the Trumpian right took over the party, doubling down on climate change denial, law and order, conservative social values, and racism.
While members of the Liberals’ right flank made extreme demands, Birmingham’s mods rarely used their shrinking influence to challenge the party, even as the faction was driven into obscurity. Private threats to “play hardball” on social issues were eagerly written up by the media, but never seemed to make much difference to the direction of the party.
It was this spinelessness, this failure to stand up for their supposed values, that drove many cosmopolitan voters towards the teals — the socially progressive, climate-conscious liberals the Coalition had long since ceased to represent — accelerating the death of his faction.
Even after 2022’s moderate wipeout, Birmingham’s fight never seemed to go beyond words of “concern”. He used a post-election interview and op-ed to call for a return to the centre, urging his party to heed the message of its former heartland. But he quickly dropped the public argument, falling in behind Dutton, insisting he was actually not so bad. He “pushed back” early on against the shadow cabinet’s climate backslide, making sure we knew it. That soon stopped as well, with the shadow Foreign Affairs minister more recently going along with his party’s nuclear charade.
As the ABC notes, Birmingham took “a back seat on the Coalition’s campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which he did not campaign against”. But nor did he campaign for it, despite a number of Liberals following their conscience to do so, preferring to keep his shadow portfolio. He failed to call out Dutton’s rhetoric, refusing to condemn claims the Voice would “re-racialise” Australia. He’s also taken a back seat during this year’s Trumpian migrant–blaming and Islamophobia, while saying little about the LNP’s profligate spending plans.
The “leading Liberal moderate” has been remarkably quiet as far-right forces have taken over his party, including his South Australian branch, which many suspect is the reason for his departure. Admittedly, he lost much of his power base in 2022, losing moderate MPs not just to teals but to Labor and the Greens. But instead of doing something to arrest this decline, he has left the public battle to Archer, who has told the media she stays to save the party from itself, frontbench be damned.
What else could Birmingham have done, sans numbers? What, after all, has Archer’s floor-crossing achieved? A serious leader would have threatened to use whatever numbers he had to demand the Coalition return to some kind of equilibrium before it was too late, even going so far as to move to the crossbench if necessary, to remind the party how much it needed them. Birmingham, however, was never willing to do anything that might jeopardise his position on the frontbench, even in opposition.
Birmingham made one last-ditch effort to call out “culture wars” in Thursday’s valedictory, obliquely warning against “the global rise of populism”. “I am confident that Australia is a country whose values sit towards the centre and that the parties of government forget that at their peril,” he added, in what was seen as a “parting shot” at conservative rivals. He then immediately turned to praising Dutton, saying he would make a “strong and effective” PM, even as he admitted they did not always agree. Dutton, after all, is “thoroughly decent” too.
Anyone hoping for a moderate Liberal Party should be “delighted to see the back of” Birmingham, who leaves a legacy of rolling over and letting the right win. He is not unlike the squeamish Republicans who stood by as Donald Trump took over their party in 2016, putting self-interest above their mild distaste for the bigotry he brought. “Birmo”, with his South Australian manners, has put a genteel face on the increasingly Trumpian party, often trotted out to persuade journalists and voters that it does care about climate, that it isn’t actually nasty and intolerant — that’s just how it appears.
It may, of course, be too late for the moderates to pull themselves together, to find a leader who will actually fight for the “broad church” — between Archer and Paul Fletcher (for now) in the House, and Jane Hume, Andrew Bragg, and Dave Sharma in the Senate, there’s few left to mount a serious defence for the soul of the party. They all bear some responsibility for letting things get to this point.
But Birmingham, as their so-called leader, bears the biggest burden for the death of the moderates, putting his commercial interests first until the very end.
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