The decline and fall of the NSW Liberal Party as the engine room of centre-right politics in Australia can be measured by the fact that as recently as three years ago there was a Sydney Liberal prime minister — the latest of three in a row, and the fifth of five Sydney federal leaders in a row. Now its most senior federal representatives are Angus Taylor and Paul Fletcher.
Taylor, at least, has managed to get through most of the parliamentary term without disgracing himself or drawing too much attention to the obvious splits between himself and his leader on issues like migration, tax and divestiture powers.
But Paul Fletcher… ah.
Fletcher, after 15 years in politics, remains shapeless, formless, a blank space without feature or characteristic. Marise Payne was the elegant political equivalent of those elementary particles that can travel right through the entire Earth without leaving any trace or interaction. But Fletcher is dark energy, a phenomenon that can’t be observed and can only be inferred from precise calculations of the rates of movements of other objects, as he slowly increases the amount of nothingness in the universe. Left alone long enough in any room, Fletcher will expand the dead space within it until any other living creatures will find themselves so separated by a vacuum that communication becomes impossible.
Fletcher’s portfolio (I’m paid to follow politics and I still had to look it up) is “Government Services and the Digital Economy”, an indication that Peter Dutton ran out of things to give out while compiling his shadow ministry and cobbled together the portfolio equivalent of painting rocks white and turning them over.
But Fletcher rarely troubles the scorers on issues relating to his shadow ministerial responsibilities. His media appearances — 90% of which are either talking to the Coalition’s friends at Sky or to his twin brother Greg Jennett, whose obvious sense of family charity extends to having him regularly on the ABC political insider cognoscenti’s Afternoon Briefing — are usually confined to bagging Labor, something that must set Albanese government strategists shuddering with fear every time the media alert goes out.
But tonight Fletcher will grace the halls of the Sydney Institute to talk not about Labor but the teals. Fletcher will easily be Gerard Henderson’s most boring guest since I spoke there a decade-plus ago, but his perspective on community independents may be amusing given he’s the next Liberal in line to be knocked off by one — viz. Nicolette Boele, who, in 2022, despite barely featuring in the media coverage of teal seats, ripped 15% out of Fletcher’s primary vote in his northern Sydney seat of Bradfield, clinching second spot and a two-party-preferred outcome of nearly 46%.
Bradfield’s a huge challenge for a teal: it includes wealthy enclaves like St Ives, Turramurra and Wahroonga where voters bleed Liberal blue. But after the Australian Electoral Commission redistribution earlier this year, big chunks of the now-abolished North Sydney like Chatswood, Willoughby and Artarmon are now in Bradfield, and they went hard for Kylea Tink in 2022. Fletcher’s margin is now just 2.5% as he faces Boele once again. And he’s panicking.
How do we know about Fletcher’s Sydney Institute speech? Because he carefully dropped it to the Fairfax papers, which ran it without any fact-checking or scrutiny — presumably a service they will, in the interests of balance, offer Boele.
According to the journalist’s account of the speech, Fletcher will claim community independents like Boele are front groups for “left-wing political operatives” aiming at “tricking voters about their bona fides”. Fletcher claims the Liberal links of some teal MPs illustrate that it’s all about fooling traditional Liberal voters (who evidently are easily fooled — “hmmm, Allegra Spender… Spender… Spender… wasn’t there an obscure ’80s Liberal MP called Spender? Must be a Liberal then!”), and installing minority governments instead of the high-quality majority governments that have served us so well over the years.
To be fair, Fletcher floating a grand conspiracy theory is the most interesting thing he’s ever said. But his claims illustrate, quite perfectly, exactly why community independents like Boele are such a threat to business-as-usual political hacks like him. Far from being a product of a shadowy cabal of “left-wing political operatives”, community independents are the organic, authentic expression of the will of voters in traditional Liberal seats. Of course they look like Liberals — these are affluent, educated people who look askance at Labor and the Greens, who want a genuine Liberal Party representing them, and find only a husk of a party run by right-wingers and climate deniers, facilitated by pointless “moderates” whose job is to endlessly roll over to the ultras from Queensland and the Nationals.
If Fletcher seriously thinks he’s up against a sinister elite plot by leftists, he’s in even more trouble than he knows. His electorate is turning against the idea of politics he embodies so perfectly. A management consultant, political staffer and Optus executive, Fletcher rose without a trace to replace Brendan Nelson as Bradfield MP in 2009, thinking it was a safe seat to convey his political ambitions.
Now he finds, alarmingly, his own voters want someone who represents them, not himself, and he’s outraged. Boele has a tough ask, but removing this symbol of everything that’s wrong with modern politics would be a positive change, regardless of what happens in the other 150 lower house seats.
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