Dom is the dom! In NSW, Perrottet shows the Liberals how it’s done

Poor old Dominic Perrottet! Not only does he have to do something like whip himself across his naked back with a metal-studded cat-o’-nine-tails every evening as part of his religion (source: trailer of the movie of The Da Vinci Code), but the general cataclysm of the Liberal Party in the Aston conflagration has robbed him of his moment of glory.

On the Saturday night of the NSW election, Perrottet was assailed by the commentators for taking the Liberals to another of their catastrophic losses. Said commentators were also assailing each other about having run endless news stories about how close the election would be, despite the polls showing a 55-45 result. But it was Perrottet who got a real whipping. So the evening wasn’t all bad.

One week on and Perrottet is looking pretty, pretty good. He’s managed to hold Labor below a majority, and hold off challenges in numerous marginals. Forty-five Labor seats to 36 Coalition seats. After 11 years in power, numerous scandals and — a personal favourite of mine — building a tram system with two incompatible gauges, 36 seats is a triumph.

The Coalition needs only five direct wins from Labor in 2027, or earlier, to get the governor’s call. Labor has been forced into messy minority government, beholden to independents with a long list of demands. Sounds like torture, which Domin- OK, point made.

So far there’s been no acknowledgement by the commentariat that the commentariat got it wrong in  saying the commentariat got it wrong about the election by getting it right. There never is. There is now near-zero useful information in the mainstream press gallery, since the purpose of the Nine commentariat is now the same as that of News Corp’s: to enforce and reproduce the house ideology and, in Nine’s case, let food and Domain pay for it. To have to retrace their steps and point out that one state Liberal Party at least is not in such bad shape would complicate the picture overmuch. 

To assess the NSW result would require some sort of analysis of ideas and traditions, which would be too hard. But it gives the obvious and simple explanation for the NSW performance. Perrottet, from a conservative Catholic tradition, has been able to draw on the Catholic social tradition to create a centre-right alternative to Labor’s big state approach — used most successfully in Victoria — that does not forgo what people want from a “big state” approach, which is the conscious shaping of social relations by the state to increase personal life security and enhance opportunity across classes. 

Perrottet’s approach — limits on gambling, government-funded nest eggs, stronger on climate change, moderate progressive on cultural/identity issues — shows the way to go. It repositions liberalism as decisively post-Thatcherite. The fusion of free market economics and rigidly asserted cultural traditionalism is dead, and toxic to the right. They need to recompose in an era when the great progressive cultural moment has decisively happened, and in which people expect the state to be actively, and in an enabling fashion, involved in the everyday life of commerce, planning, urban design etc. 

Thus the Liberal Party, far from differentiating itself absolutely as the Sky lunatics suggest — honestly or otherwise — must become the “loyal opposition” to Labor’s version of modernity, which is now hegemonic, as Victorian and WA state election results have established.

By differentiating itself in detail — more individually targeted assistance, acknowledgement of the social primacy of the family, and then attacking the kludgey inefficiency and corruption of Labor management of the social whole through the old agencies (megacorps, unions) — it can then give itself space to audaciously combine right and left approaches on specific issues.

If tomorrow, just as one of my examples, the Liberal Party said it was going to use federal land around major cities to build not 15,000 dwellings a year but 100,000, using public-private funding of state-facilitated developments, offering truly affordable buy/buy-back options, a lot of people would suddenly get very interested in the Liberal Party as an option, and the commitment to encouraging ownership/social stakeholding would be preserved.

Once the social and cultural stuff was stabilised at a sensible middle, people would be free to reconsider the party on economic and personal interest questions. Labor would be portrayed as sluggish, backward, privileged and indifferent to the real problems facing those under 35, 40 or so. There would still be room on top of that for some harder-edge policies, such as a cut to immigration levels. But without a changed approach to overall state management, that would just look like the nasty party again. 

But this will be possible only if those forces within the party that want to go to war against the right. True, they’re now jammed up by the Voice mess — I don’t see how a Liberal Party could accept the current formulation of the “executive-focused” Voice; the Voice’s leaders have put pro-Voice Liberals in an unwinnable position — but the true problem is the lack of will to have the fight, as evidenced by its leader in the Senate Simon Birmingham’s blathersome article in Nine yesterday.

The moderates have to crack skulls and soak the carpet with blood to get the party back (I know, Perrottet is of the Christian right, but he’s adapted in a way that Scott Morrison and co haven’t). The culture war reaction stuff has to be neutralised to allow to come to the fore a personalised economic model with cross-generational appeal.

Of course the party may still, in the end, strike out for populist right territory, ditching the pseudo-populism of the News Corp right for a real appeal to some fairly rusted-on Labor working-class seats. But that would require a commitment to economic nationalism and higher wages. That may simply be impossible for the party. And populism based on culture wars alone will never win. 

Perrottet’s shown the way. The melancholy fact for the Liberals is that the state they are most likely to regain power in is NSW. Dom! He’s no whipping boy!