Saturday’s once-in-100-year by-election loss by the Liberal Party is the second time in less than a year that the voters have got it wrong, according to a shell-shocked Peter Dutton.
After promising to get the message last May, the Liberals turned up in Aston with nothing new on offer except a record of intransigent negativity.
Mr Dutton complained on the weekend that the Liberal Party “has allowed itself to be defined by our opponents and I think it’s time for us to take that back. Stand up for what we believe in whether it’s trendy or not, and some of that I believe, is what the Australian public is demanding particularly in outer metro seats, in regional areas, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
He actually said this after comprehensively losing an outer metropolitan seat that had been rock-solid Liberal for the past 30 years.
And after the spectacle of the state parliamentary party brawling over transgender rights and the advocacy of one of its MPs for bigoted intolerance, Mr Dutton believed the issue of women’s bathrooms has parents in many of these seats “worked up”.
Maybe, but on Saturday there weren’t enough of them to be so worked up they voted Liberal.
More excuses
Mr Dutton complains that Victoria’s Labor Premier Daniel Andrews is a “ruthless’’ campaigner at the state level.
He drew a stinging response from the Premier.
“The Liberal Party are a nasty, bigoted outfit and people have worked them out,” Mr Andrews said.
The reality is Mr Dutton has been defining himself and the Liberal Party much more effectively than his opponents as nothing more than trenchant, if not belligerent, naysayers on issues far more mainstream, and in no way contrary to traditional Liberal values.
Climate change action, boosts to manufacturing, housing affordability and availability were the current hot-button examples before Saturday’s poll.
The safeguard mechanism that forms a key plank in Labor’s climate change response is a beefed-up version of the Abbott Liberal government’s policy.
By refusing to support it or engage in its passage through the hung Parliament – there is no government majority in the Senate – the Liberals defined themselves as laggards on climate change, unreconstructed from the Morrison government’s half-hearted policies.
Climate fail
Mr Dutton’s claims the Coalition has a good record on climate simply doesn’t bear scrutiny.
The Opposition Leader was banking the results of the Gillard government’s carbon price and its investment in renewables that Mr Morrison had not taken forward but like Mr Abbott before him was trying to wind back.
As Mr Dutton and his colleagues were telling half-truths in Parliament about the Albanese government’s efforts on cost of living and promises on energy prices, Labor’s door-knocking teams in Aston were reminding voters the Coalition had voted against gas price caps and did not support the $1.5 billion energy price relief to apply after the May budget.
Mr Dutton has called a Liberal Party room meeting in Canberra for Wednesday. But rather than some thorough soul searching, the signs are it will lay the groundwork for an even bigger bout of naysaying than we have seen so far.
Voice agenda
Shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, Julian Leeser at the National Press Club said the meeting would consider its response to constitutional recognition of First Nations people through the Voice to Parliament.
One party room source believes the overwhelming majority of their colleagues is opposed to the referendum.
Mr Leeser, who together with Queensland Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson in 2014 suggested the inclusion of “executive government” in the wording, now says it is too dangerous to our system of governance.
It’s a proposition rejected by far more eminent lawyers than him, and appears to be based on transparent narrow partisan politics whose hallmark is saying no to anything the Labor government proposes.
Mr Leeser now says Mr Albanese should abandon the referendum because he says: “Why would you want to risk the social and racial harmony of the country with a reconciliation process by putting a referendum when it is not guaranteed?”
The threat to social harmony would be dramatically lessened if Mr Dutton, Mr Leeser and the federal Liberals followed their state colleagues in supporting what the Prime Minister calls a “generous offer from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people”.
‘If not now, when?’
Mr Albanese points out it was John Howard who first put constitutional recognition on the agenda in 2007. He asks: “If not now, when?”
The Morrison government similarly promised to progress recognition after the Liberals had set up inquiries into the process, only to do nothing further to advance it.
When will we ever bury the founding colonial proposition that “black fellas should scarcely be seen and never heard?”
The best we can hope for is that the Liberals, whose attitudes go from Mr Leeser’s contested legal quibbling to his colleague Keith Wolahan’s view that the Voice is racist.
Mr Wolahan, who has been nominated as deputy chair of the parliamentary committee, refuses to acknowledge the injustice at the heart of the referendum: There is one group of people in Australia that was here for millennia before 1770 and they were cruelly dispossessed without recognition or compensation.
This is one “no” that will have grave consequences for us as a nation, domestically and internationally.
It would confirm we are not a mature country capable of coming to terms with our past and advancing post-colonial reconciliation.
No wonder the call for delay – the opponents do not want to face an ugly truth.
It is another example of not facing up to political realities.
Paul Bongiorno AM is a veteran of the Canberra Press Gallery, with more than 40 years’ experience covering Australian politics
