The day after the Aston by-election The Guardian ran with this headline: Wipeout beckons for Liberals after Aston byelection and the problem is not just Peter Dutton and raised the possibility of leadership change along with the need for sensible emissions policy and a rejection of culture war issues.
Two days after the by-election this appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald on Page 9:
Peter Dutton says he's determined to rebuild the Liberal Party after its weekend defeat in Aston. That's necessary but insufficient. It needs a personality transplant too.
And it's not as simple as replacing Dutton. He is merely the current face of a party that has chosen to make itself inherently unattractive.
Kelly O'Dwyer, then-federal minister for women, explained to her Liberal colleagues in 2018 that the party was widely seen by the voters as being "homophobic, anti-women, climate-change deniers".
And that was when Malcolm Turnbull was leader. It wasn't about the leader - it was the collective personality of the party.
What's changed? Today you could probably add the perception that it's anti-transgender and anti-Indigenous as well. From being merely unattractive, the party is now on course to make itself irrelevant to contemporary Australia.
A byelection is a chance for the people to lodge a protest against a government. Instead, on Saturday the people of Aston lodged a protest against the opposition. That's what made it so extraordinary.
Extraordinary yet, if the Liberals read their own official review of last year's federal defeat, unsurprising: "The Coalition now holds its lowest proportion of seats as a share of the House of Representatives since the Liberal Party first ran in a federal election in 1946."
The review authors - former federal director Brian Loughnane and sitting Victorian Senator Jane Hume - said this was merely the latest in a continuing trend: "Many of the problems identified have been constants for a decade or more."
And now Aston. The byelection results make it impossible for the Liberals to console themselves with any of the shallow rationalisations they've been telling themselves since Scott Morrison led them to disaster in May.
First, it's clear that the problem wasn't just Morrison. He's gone, but the problem only gets worse.
Second, it wasn't simply the "it's time" problem afflicting a nine-year-old government. Because it's no longer in government and yet the electors continue to withdraw support.
Third, the Liberals can no longer tell themselves that their problem is strictly one of teal independents taking votes from them. The teals took six traditional wealthy Liberal seats at last year's federal election. Hardcore right-wingers in the party consider these to be votes lost to the "left".
But in losing Aston, the Liberals lost a middle-class, middle-income, mortgage belt seat. The Liberals are losing not only traditional, principled, wealthy Liberals. They are losing women, young people, the cities. In other words, they are losing Australia…..
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| IMAGE: The Guardian, 21 March 2023 |
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s (pictured left) national flagship since July 1964, The Australian, went a little further than this. It appears to indicate that he may be slowly resigning himself to seeing his tame conservative politicians spending years in the wilderness.
However neither the 92 year-old mogul nor the editor are going down without a fight. Bottom line: it’s all the fault of unseen global forces, the 'Left' and a blindly ignorant populace. Nothing to do with the mismanagement, misadventures and often downright corruption of conservative politicians whenever they are in office around the world.
Weekend Australian, 1 April 2023, p. 21, excerpts:
Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor, Conservatives fail dismally worldwide and in Australia
Centre-right parties no longer set the agenda across Western democracies
Whatever the result of the critical Aston by-election, conservative politics is in the midst of a crippling, perhaps mortal, crisis within Australia, and around the Western and democratic world.
In Australia, conservatives hold office neither nationally nor in any mainland state or territory. Worse, they seem intellectually and politically exhausted, and don’t look as if they’re on the brink of posing a serious electoral challenge in any jurisdiction. Peter Dutton is a substantial politician but he is miles behind Anthony Albanese. Most Coalition state leaders are anonymous and ineffective.
But they’re in good company internationally. For some version of the same crisis is evident in most democratic nations from North America to Europe. There are a few exceptions but the tide is mostly out for conservatives. Of course, politics mostly runs in cycles. And conservative wisdom will be needed again, eventually.
But today conservative ideas don’t set the agenda. The conservative crisis is part of a larger crisis throughout Western civilisation. In time, the centre-left parties that rule will face their own crisis because without exception they are leading the nations they govern to live way beyond their means. They are also indulging ideological dynamics that are intensely destructive in the long term.
The last great conservative era was the 1980s. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and even Malcolm Fraser all led self-confident conservative governments. The world’s most authoritative moral figure was Pope John Paul II, a theological and social conservative and communism’s worst nightmare……
The broad cultural crisis in the West is multifaceted. There is the loss of belief in God. There is the associated loss of belief in institutions and all traditional sources of social authority. There is the particular toxic hangover of Covid that taught Western electorates the worst, most dangerous and fraudulent lesson in public policy, that government money is effectively limitless, all demands can be met by more more government spending, endlessly increasing debt. As important as all that, we’ve also had several generations go through school and university education that imparts a message of near hatred, certainly contempt and condemnation, of their own society and history.
The climate change issue is linked to the idea that everything about Western society is rotten, if not downright evil. Some version of this is widespread in elite media. Hostile foreign nations do their bit by clandestinely spreading internal hostilities and divisions on social media. And the fiscal delusions fostered by Covid spending feed into the idea that nations can afford any cost that climate measures impose.
Australia’s conservative politicians have been strikingly unsuccessful. On the odd occasion they form government, they do more or less nothing. You cannot blame conservative politicians for the transformation of the ambient culture. The institutions and consensus on which they rested – family, church, patriotism, hard work, living within your means – are all under constant attack. But this environment means, more than ever, conservative politicians must fight for the things they believe in. They must advocate more energetically, more courageously, more passionately, with as much sophistication and good humour as they can muster. If they do that, they might be surprised at the influence they can still have on institutions. If, on the other hand, they surrender to the zeitgeist they will surely lose the arguments and the elections. As Australia’s greatest modern conservative says: “A lot of conservatives have lost the will to argue a case.”
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