The Liberals are in a hostage situation

Despite the Liberals having wheeled out John Howard in several state and federal election campaigns without any great effect, his political legacy and views still loom large, both in terms of policy and analysis. 

The former prime minister was a big fan of describing Victoria as the Massachusetts of Australian politics — a progressive political island with different values than the rest of Australia, and atypical and therefore a place where uniform political lessons couldn’t be drawn from a loss.

But the facts of the Liberals’ byelection loss in the federal seat of Aston suggest it’s not Victoria that is the political aberration at odds with the Australian population — it is the party’s politics, more particularly the views of its conservative wing, noxious to almost all states bar Queensland.

Firstly, Aston is no Massachusetts. It’s not an inner-metro seat like Higgins — the domicile of Howard’s political hero Menzies now held by Labor and stalked by teals. No, Aston is zone three, the home of Kenworth trucks, the suburb where yoga studios end and karate dojos begin. 

Not only are the Liberals losing in heartland seats like Higgins by running down or running interference on climate change — or failing to discipline the nasty culture warriors in their party — but they are also losing in the outer ring where they imagine they align more closely on values.

The Liberals seem pathologically fixated on wedge issues and culture wars, taking their lead from vile media commentators and cretins from the toxic swamplands of social media. But as Aston has revealed, cost-of-living policies and important issues like climate change matter to ordinary people. They are not interested nor motivated by culture issues.

It’s one thing to get beaten up federally by voters in inner-metro seats — long since insulted as latte-sipping wankers by conservative media blowhards, despite the Liberals needing to win them over to form government. But to be eclipsed in the outer suburbs on cost-of-living issues and climate action is a serious concern and an utter repudiation of the toxic culture war politics — such as on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament or climate change denial — that many conservative commentators are asking the party to ramp up on. 

It’s the high-level political branding that matters here, not the state of the Victorian executive nor whether the wishes of local branch members are being adhered to. And that high-level branding is utterly polluted by people like Matt Canavan, Moira Deeming, Peta Credlin or Prue MacSween who want a Trumpian Party — Australian voters don’t.

The Liberal Party is in a hostage situation. It has nosedived federally in Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia, and as a result, the awful politics of Queensland conservatives that helped lead the LNP to federal defeat is now even more predominant. This claque of conservative Queenslanders now appears to dictate the party’s direction and is going to send them over a cliff. 

Conservative messaging is not landing with key demographics such as millennials and Gen Z, who political analyst Kos Samaras suggests will soon comprise 45% of the voting population — professional women, migrant groups, workers and middle-class voters concerned about the planet. In metropolitan seats, where continued population growth will be overwhelmingly concentrated, Labor won 36.35% of the federal vote, the Greens 14.03%, and the Liberals 33.02%. 

Dutton’s task as he sees it is to hold the party together. That’s not a strategy, and it’s a recipe for continued irrelevance and decline. Talking out of both sides of your mouth and trying to reconcile contradictory philosophies and policies means the Liberal Party is refusing to draw a line in the sand, neither disciplining its extreme elements, nor outlining its philosophical position as a small-l liberal, rather than conservative, party.

The federal party is in a pincer — outflanked in metro seats across Australia by teals and Labor and outpointed on economic issues by Labor in outer suburbs where cost of living, not culture wars, is king. The swamp of social media is no guide to the real concerns of most punters.

The clawback of votes in the recent NSW election to the Liberals is a good outcome after three terms of office. The party managed to hold off the teals in critical metro seats thanks to progressive policy in the areas of the environment, pokies, and other social issues. Their brand held up well in those circumstances and should be the model the federal party looks to for renewal.

Otherwise, they can expect to keep losing the votes of sensible people while it chases the dark culture war fantasies of conservative windbags.