The systematic routing of the Liberal party from power across the country is “somewhere between a glitch and a death spiral”, historian Frank Bongiorno says.
Tasmania is the only state or territory where the party still reigns after the New South Wales election saw the Perrottet government dumped last weekend.
And this Saturday, the Aston byelection will be a default measure of the federal dynamics of Labor’s ascendancy in the polls and of the state of the Liberal party.
Liberal MP, Alan Tudge, who quit after battling various controversies, oversaw the Aston margin dwindle to 2.8% at the 2022 election.
History would dictate that the Labor government is unlikely to pluck this Melbourne jewel – meaning Liberal candidate Roshena Campbell should be safely installed – but prime minister Anthony Albanese’s strong polling means Liberals are not feeling “safe” at all.
Even a win, accompanied by a further erosion of that slender margin, would be swiftly interpreted as an indictment on the party and its leader, Peter Dutton.
The Liberals are facing turmoil on several levels. Their base has shifted, with women particularly turning away. There is dysfunction in the party organisation, with turf battles tainting preselection processes. There is the identity crisis as the “broad church” of the party gives way to skirmishes between ideologically opposed forces.
And there is the tarnished brand, thanks to successive leaders and the terrifically unpopular current leader.
None of these things are easy to fix.
Coalition’s gen Z, millennial and women’s vote share worsens
The 2022 federal election results were forensically picked apart in the Australian Electoral Study.
It found former prime minister, Scott Morrison, “became the least popular major party leader in the history of the AES, scoring 3.8 on a zero to 10 popularity scale”.
On top of a general trend of voters abandoning the major parties for the “teals” and Greens, it also showed that only 32% of women voted for the Coalition, compared to 38% of men.
And there were “major generational differences”, with the AES finding “the Coalition has very little support among millennials and generation Z”.
The AES’s prof Ian McAllister, from ANU’s school of politics and international relations, said the generational and gender gap were “nothing new” but that both were bigger than they had been before.
And while younger people were tending to the left, they were not swinging back to the centre-right in their 30s as they once did.
“People aged in their 30s, their 40s, they’re less satisfied with the economic performance and the role of the government,” McAllister says.
“They’re finding it more difficult to get into the housing market, their wages aren’t going up, there’s more economic insecurity … the Liberals are trying to defy gravity.”
“It is serious,” Bongiorno, professor of history at the Australian National University’s College of Arts and Social Sciences, says.
“[But] political parties historically have responded to demographic changes, so we can’t assume that just because numbers are changing in the community it condemns them to a death spiral … I would have thought it’s somewhere between a glitch and a death spiral.”
The Liberals’ federal election review, helmed by former federal director Brian Loughnane and senator Jane Hume, found Morrison “was not attuned to the concerns of women” and was perceived to have mishandled the pandemic response.
It also found that there were “too many examples of scandal, disunity and instability”, and that the party had “lost control of its brand”.
Meanwhile, Labor had the “hunger” to win and was helped by “an extensive left activist apparatus”.
A plague on all their houses: Liberals face issues in nearly every state
While that federal “vibe”, and underlying themes such as cost of living and climate change concerns, flow through to state elections, the state organisations have each had their own issues.
The NSW election loss was not just a question of “It’s time”, although this played its part in the loss.
Mistakes in a 12-year-old government add up: revelations of pork-barrelling in grants schemes; the protracted scandal over the appointment of former deputy premier John Barilaro to a plum New York posting; big infrastructure projects going over budget; and two corruption inquiries.
But the other big problem for the NSW Liberals is that the truce that has held the party together factionally has been slowly unravelling. If there was ever an adage that was true in politics, it is that “disunity is death.”
Unlike other states and federally, over the last 12 years the NSW Liberals found a way to manage their ideological differences. On contentious social issues, like abortion and assisted dying, it allowed a free vote. And on climate change, the party largely accepted it needed to encourage renewable energy, while also keeping the fossil fuel industry sweet by approving a new gas project at Narrabri.
The factional chiefs also forged a pact over the leadership, which meant the premier was not constantly looking over his shoulder.
But over a decade, a whole new generation of ambitious young men – and they are almost all men – have begun agitating inside the party in an attempt to take control of branches and the party executive.
In Victoria, Labor premier, Dan Andrews, retained power despite the “toxic Dan” narrative being perpetrated in the media.
The Victorian opposition, meanwhile, has spent the lead-up to the Aston byelection tearing itself apart over one of their own appearing at an anti-trans rally where the Nazi salute was performed by a group of far right gatecrashers.
An internal review after the 2021 Western Australian election loss found Liberal members and MPs were guilty of “unethical and underhand conduct”, and that powerbrokers used branch stacking to maintain control over the party.
In South Australia, Labor ousted the Liberals after just one term. A range of factors were at play, but, as with other states, there are factional wars and gender woes, along with claims of branch stacking by the conservatives.
The Country Liberal party lost its hold over the Northern Territory in 2016 after bouts of infighting, failed coups and stories about slush funds, ending up with less than a handful of seats.
After its 2020 loss in Queensland, the Liberal National Party had to ask itself what its “raison d’etre” was and faces ongoing battles between conservatives, moderates and the Christian right.
“They’ve obviously got a number of organisational problems,” Bongiorno says. “At the state level, you only have to read the report after the WA election, which was a report on a totally dysfunctional state branch … all the problems the NSW had in the lead up to the state election … the Victorian election …
“Reforming a political party that is so vulnerable to being captured by minorities at the branch level is very difficult.”
Turnbull: ‘If you abandon the centre ground, you can’t win’
“I don’t think it’s a death spiral,” former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull says. “But you can’t get away from the fact that the Liberal party is bleeding votes.
“Its primary vote keeps on falling, and unfortunately they’re being largely driven by a rightwing populist agenda out of the rightwing media.”
It is “increasingly out of touch”, Turnbull says. “The formula being proposed by the rightwing media [News Corp and Sky News ‘after dark’] and the right of the Liberal party is that climate change is rubbish, build more coal stations, stop this woke nonsense … what part of reality are they living in?”
Despite the jump to the left by voters, there is a rump of rightwingers who insist – against all available evidence – that a step to the right is what is needed.
NT Country Liberal senator, Jacinta Price, advised Dutton on the ABC’s Q&A show: “We have to stand for our conservative values. That’s what we have to stand for.”
Outgoing NSW treasurer, moderate Matt Kean, was particularly targeted for his progressive stance.
Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce said there was a “green inflection” to the NSW Liberal party and called Matt Kean “baggage”.
This is what happens when you fall between two stools.
— Anti-Socialist Matt Canavan (@mattjcan) March 25, 2023
About time we stop trying to be a fake green party and return to basics of family formation, small govenrment and national improvement.
Former prime minister, Tony Abbott, said on Tuesday that “Labor-lite Liberals lose” and that the Liberal party had not done enough to “create a contest” with Labor.
After the NSW election, federal Nationals senator, Matt Canavan, tweeted that it was “about time we stop trying to be a fake Green party and return to basics of family formation, small government and national improvement”.
(“It seems a rather unlikely conclusion to draw from the problems the Liberals have,” Bongiorno says.)
The moderates are not having a bar of it.
Senator Andrew Bragg told ABC radio that one of the “most important lessons” was that “we have to be a party that doesn’t go to the margins and that doesn’t seek to inject division into the mainstream”.
Former North Sydney MP, Trent Zimmerman, wrote that the NSW result would “provoke some deep soul-searching” in the ranks, as will the Aston byelection.
He pointed to the decline in support from women, younger voters and some multicultural communities, particularly Chinese Australians, and said that the federal Liberals had to respond to concerns on climate change and support working women.
Zimmerman also said that, despite conservative warnings, One Nation’s vote hardly moved.
As for Turnbull, he says the culture wars work for the rightwing media because they make people angry – he calls it “angertainment”.
But that will not build a constituency big enough to win elections. People care less about culture wars, he says, than the cost of living, the health system and climate change.
“If you abandon the centre ground, you can’t win,” Turnbull says. “Are you going to win outer suburban seats by carrying on about transgender sport? Do you think that’s what people are worried about?
“People are much more threatened by global warming than transgender men or women.”
Bongiorno says the party has to deal with its gender issues and with why women are much more likely to vote Labor or Greens.
Then there is that generational issue.
“They’ve kind of brought this on themselves. So much of their effort has been shoring up people with property … who own their own homes and have good super balances. They haven’t done anywhere near enough for young people.”
They have also been captured by minorities at the branch level, he says, leaving them vulnerable to penetration from religious groups.
“It damages the brand, gives the impression that it’s a party of cranks and extremists,” he says.
If the Liberal party needs to recapture the centre, and appeal to women and younger voters, it is far from clear that “hard man” Dutton is the best person to steer them. His popularity in the polls continues to languish.
The latest Essential poll found most think he is out of touch with ordinary people, does not understand women’s issues and is not a “visionary”.
A poor result in Aston – where Dutton has been conspicuously absent, as he was in the NSW election campaign – will inevitably put pressure on his leadership, or at least his leadership style.
McAllister says parties can change, but it often requires a dramatic shift.
“Parties can change and adapt,” he says.
“One of the things we know they respond to is an existential threat.”
Guardian Australia has contacted Liberal leader Peter Dutton for comment.
