The New South Wales treasurer Matt Kean’s warning that the loss of moderate MPs would leave the Liberal party at risk of a Trump-like lurch to the right was not exactly a compelling election pitch for the federal Coalition.
But Kean is right about what happens to conservative politics when true moderate voices are crowded out. He doesn’t need to look all the way to the US for a case study – just north of the border.
A decade ago, when she left the federal parliament, the progressive Queensland Liberal senator Sue Boyce spoke about her hopes for the future of the party.
“In the past few months I have been asked numerous times if, as a moderate and a feminist, I am concerned about our party’s perceived move to the right,” Boyce said.
“Yes, I am concerned, but … I am hopeful that debates about important issues such as same-sex marriage and responses to climate change will continue to be conducted robustly, but respectfully, within our party.
“I also expect that pragmatism will ultimately triumph.”
In 2022, pragmatism seems hard to detect as the Queensland Liberal National party puts the careers of the dwindling number of “small l” federal Queensland liberals at risk.
The state LNP – an organisation whose grassroots membership has become increasingly conservative, and influenced by a hardline Christian faction – on Wednesday voted in support of a motion from Robbie Katter opposing transgender women participating in women’s sport.
“This is not a debate about sport or women’s rights,” the Labor frontbencher Stirling Hinchliffe said. “It is an attempt to cause fear and division and is unnecessarily dragging an extreme right-wing trope into this parliament”.
The LNP leader, David Crisafulli, said: “There’s nothing in that motion that I think Queenslanders will be overly uncomfortable with.”
The past decade has seen the Queensland LNP pursue conservative causes – such as proposals to wind back abortion rights, or opposition to a ban on gay conversion therapy – that are unlikely to find much support in the centrist or progressive city seats the party needs to win.
I just found out that *every* member of the LNP in Qld Parliament voted *against* a proposed law to ban gay conversion ‘therapy’. How do gay MPs in the Liberals cope with being in that party? https://t.co/r1lEqRV9Bc
— Andrew Bartlett (@AndrewBartlett) August 14, 2020
At a state level, the LNP’s attempts to court the rightwing fringe have contributed to the party being all but banished from greater Brisbane.
Queensland shows how when a party’s broad church of views is thrown out of balance – in this case by the loss of moderates in city areas – other voices come to dominate. Without a pragmatic leader who seeks to bring the LNP back towards the centre (one who would have walked away from the anti-trans debate), that cycle will only intensify.
This week I spoke to a few moderate liberals in Queensland who were worried about the impact the women’s sport debate would have on two inner-city federal seats, Brisbane and Ryan, which could fall to Labor or the Greens.
It’s true that there are some parts of outer-suburban and regional Queensland – maybe much of Queensland – where pushing an anti-transgender line might help the Coalition. But pragmatic politics it is not. Especially when the two most likely LNP seats to be lost in Queensland are in inner-Brisbane.
“Honestly, I wish someone would tell Katherine Deves to go back into hiding,” an LNP member working on one of the inner-city campaigns said this week.
Trevor Evans, whose views on social issues are relatively progressive, is considered the most at risk of losing his seat of Brisbane. A few weeks ago while travelling around the electorate, I spoke to several voters who said they’d met Evans, they thought he was a good local member, but that they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the Coalition.
The electorate of Ryan, held by Julian Simmonds, sits to the west of the city – the historic stronghold of progressive and moderate Liberals in Queensland.
“Small l” liberals have a long and proud history in Queensland politics. People like Boyce, who who crossed the floor to support Labor’s carbon pollution reduction scheme and same-sex marriage; and Rosemary Kyburz, who stood up to intimidation to protect abortion rights in the 1980s.
More recently, the LNP threatened with disendorsement MPs who backed a conscience vote on abortion – one of those, Jann Stuckey, later resigned from the party and claimed it had been “slowly but steadily taken over by the Christian right”.
Compounding the rightward slide on social issues is the LNP’s backslide on its climate commitments. Comments from Nationals like Matt Canavan and Colin Boyce that undermine a net zero policy might prevent some right-leaning voters in regional areas from flirting with minor parties, but they don’t play well in inner Brisbane.
Nor does pork barrelling on questionable dams in regional Queensland, when kitchen table concerns like the cost of living are front and centre of urban voters’ minds.
Flooding in March left 3,600 homes – most in the Brisbane area – uninhabitable. More than 4,400 more were damaged. Action on climate change is also a kitchen table issue when your kitchen table is floating down the street.
The rain began again about the same time that pre-polling opened on Monday, and it has been pouring in the city for a week. People were queuing for sandbags on Friday. They’ll go to the ballot box next weekend thinking this is not normal.
