The federal Liberal Party is to be commended for its commitment to transparency: in an unprecedented move, its post-election review seems to being held entirely in public.
Today the party newsletter carried detail of how the review will examine the extent to which alienation of Chinese-Australian voters affected the loss of key seats. Last week the Young Liberals unveiled their submission to the review, arguing that climate change and gender equality were key issues in the loss.
The public can presumably look forward to further blow-by-blow accounts of the post-mortem. The tradition is that such reviews are conducted by party elders in secrecy in the hope that real light will be shed on what worked and what didn’t. This review starts off somewhat crippled by the fact that it’s led both by party elder Brian Loughnane and Victorian Senator Jane Hume, who is no one’s idea of a party elder, has zero political nous and is from a branch that is fundamentally dysfunctional.
This review, more than most, is turning out to be the continuation of internal party conflicts — thus the leaking to the party journal. Peter Dutton is the target of this leak, with the suggestion his hyperbolic rhetoric about China alienated Chinese-Australian voters, who swung hard against the Coalition in May.
The primary perpetrator of the anti-Chinese-Australian rhetoric, however, is sadly no longer with us politically. Eric Abetz, who in 2020 demanded that Chinese-Australians condemn the Beijing regime, grew so objectionable that his own party branch dumped him down the Senate ticket to an unwinnable spot. He thus won’t be joining us for the rest of his already overlong career.
Abetz’s McCarthyist actions infuriated other Liberals and prompted NSW Senator Andrew Bragg to immediately call them “degrading and regrettable”.
Bragg cops plenty of grief from all sides, including his own, and usually with good reason, but he was well aware nearly two years ago the rhetoric coming from the then government about China and its apparent refusal to distinguish between Chinese-Australians and the apparently existential threat of Xi Jinping was alienating Chinese-Australians.
It wasn’t a one-off from Bragg, either. In March last year, he released a statement deploring attacks on Chinese-Australians.
By early this year the penny had dropped in more senior circles than Bragg’s that the government was in trouble with Chinese-Australian voters. In February, Scott Morrison told his MPs — under the cover of promoting national unity — to go and spend Chinese New Year with Chinese-Australian communities in their electorates. Only a few days later, SBS ran a story about how Chinese-Australian voters were “aghast” at the government’s rhetoric towards China.
Morrison’s suggestion that MPs join in new year festivities was too little, too late. In the last week of the election campaign, even Chinese-Australian Liberal members were lamenting Morrison’s rhetoric in seats like Bennelong, suggesting, correctly as it turned out, that it would lead to the loss of such seats. Morrison was asked on the campaign trail about it and insisted he had always distinguished between Chinese-Australians and the Xi regime.
Nowhere near enough, it seems.
This was a problem Bragg detected back in 2020, one the Morrison government was warned about, one it knew was a significant problem, and about which it did virtually nothing.
Which, funnily enough, describes most of the major reasons why the Liberals suffered a massive defeat. Liberal MPs and party members at all levels warned them how toxic Morrison was, they knew how toxic he was, even to the extent of confining his campaign to regional areas and outer-suburban electorates. But they did nothing about him. Ditto climate policy. Ditto the ructions in the NSW Liberal Party and its dire impact on preselections, caused by Morrison and has-been-who-never-was Alex Hawke. Ditto integrity. Ditto gender issues.
There are no great secrets for Loughnane to uncover, with or without the “help” of Hume. The causes of the defeat are all clear, because the Liberals were told over and over about them and ignored all the warnings.
Perhaps the review should really be about why nothing could convince a party heading for a train wreck to change course.
Can Peter Dutton stop beating those drums of war? Let us know what you think by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
