The Liberal Party is expected to reject the government model for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament at a snap party room meeting on Wednesday, as leader Peter Dutton appeared to hold firm against calls to bring the party towards lost seats in metropolitan Australia.
Senators Andrew Bragg and Jason Wood, though from different sides of the party, were united in their calls for a conscience vote on the issue, which the former said had become standard practice in recent decades.
But teal independent MPs, who routed the party from key seats in capital cities less than a year ago, said a likely compromise plan for the Liberals to reject constitutional change but pass legislation was proof the party wasn’t listening.
“When will the penny drop?” asked Zoe Daniel, the MP who won the seat of Goldstein in bayside Melbourne.
“Park the petty politics. Either move forward with good faith and optimism or get out of the way.”
Regional focus
Mr Dutton seemingly took no heed of these warnings, nor did he show any signs of moderating his criticism of the historic constitutional amendment as he pitched for votes from rural Australia.
“We will, and very much [take] a regional focus,” he said in Albury on a trip before the first party room meeting since the once-in-a-century by-election loss in the outer Melbourne seat of Aston.
“Too much of the government’s effort is really concentrated on capital cities and we are the party of regional and rural Australia.
“People living in regional Australia [are] … an incredibly important part of our country, and we should show them respect by visiting regularly and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing.”
When he won the Liberal leadership uncontested last May, Mr Dutton said there would be no need to choose – as commentators said predecessor Scott Morrison had – between the outer suburbs and inner city and that the party would provide for both.
It’s not clear if the move closer towards National Party territory is an official change of tack from the Opposition Leader as Liberals worry they are structurally unfit for reform.
Senator Bragg said the party should continue a recent trend of allowing elected representatives to vote according to their conscience but also backed concerns about the structure of the body to be created.
“Communities need to have a say over their own issues,” he said.
It is less clear how many might cross the floor in the face of likely strong support from their colleagues to turn down the government’s plan for constitutionally entrenched recognition.
The party’s centre of gravity has grown closer to Queensland since the May election loss. Yet, even there, Mr Dutton is one of the last Liberals close to the city after a Greens rout last May.
“If we had all of the answers, we would have won the election on the weekend,” he said, of the Aston result.
“The fact is that the Labor Party ran a very brutal campaign. The Labor Party had nothing positive to say.”
Double negative
Mr Dutton has been criticised for being reflexively negative in the role of Opposition Leader including by the architect of Tony Abbott’s effective but divisive strategy from that position, Peta Credlin.
“The vacuum on the alternative is what’s killing these guys,” she said. “They can be ‘no no no’ but what’s your alternative?”
Ms Credlin said on election night that Mr Abbott had presented a change to the status quo when coming to office with a plan to stop the boats; not reduce education or health funding; cut waste and not defund public broadcasters – most of which was speedily jettisoned in government.
On the eve of the party room meeting she was encouraging a strong rejection of the referendum, something she said “could be the making of Peter Dutton as a strong and effective leader”.
On Monday, the shadow attorney-general Julian Leeser denied that he or his party had been oppositional by calling for more detail on the referendum, which he noted he had supported consistently throughout his time in politics.
He said the current model for change was not encouraging of local community input and called for caution about a provision that would allow the body to provide advice to the executive branch of government.
“We’ve been genuine from day one,” Mr Leeser said.
That drew a rebuke from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who said that the previous government had twice taken a proposal for the Voice to cabinet but never achieved it.
