Maybe the sharpest lesson to take from the history-making Aston byelection result is that the Liberal Party of Australia has no idea how much trouble it’s in.
Almost no one expected Labor to win. The party started to think it might have a chance in the last weeks of March but never dared to believe. No pundit was prepared to call it.
I said the Liberals would win, but my overconfident and plain-wrong prediction was based on historical precedent and a sense that Aston wouldn’t swing further from the Liberals after the disliked Alan Tudge had left the scene. How great was my error? It has a postcode.
The demise of the Liberals looks to have no solid bottom. You can chart this decline from the beginning of the end of John Howard’s time in office after he scored a win against Labor’s Mark Latham (the political equivalent of picking the Lotto numbers).
Howard crashed and burned, and Kevin Rudd ascended. He then crashed and all but took Julia Gillard down with some Rasputin-like treachery. Rudd’s subsequent comeback paved the way for the improbable Tony Abbott to get back some Liberal pixie dust to sprinkle around, but the electorate soon found out it was more like mycotoxins, certain to cause pain and suffering.
The Liberals returned to their search for meaning and purpose and came up with an impossible-to-square question that featured Peter Dutton and Malcolm Turnbull. Then a sneaky Scott Morrison squeezed through the middle and found himself winning against Bill Shorten, a Labor leader who gave rise to an excess of doubt in voters’ minds.
By the time Morrison went to the barriers again last year, the electorate had worked him out — and they didn’t like what they saw and heard. The Liberals were again far removed from middle Australian values and aspirations; they were also the last to realise this.
After May 21 2022, the Coalition could have taken a good look at itself, conducted a root-and-branch review of what went wrong and set about fixing the all-too-obvious problems.
But it didn’t. It had a desktop review that could have been written by a Microsoft chatbot. It reelected Dutton. It ignored the fact that the egregious Morrison just wouldn’t go away and it refused to condemn continuing revelations of his hollow-man political style and values-free core.
Too many people were complicit. They all sat around and indulged and agreed with Morrison or sat mute as he bulldozed on, regardless of the total absence of truth and meaning. Not one had the courage to stand up to him — and with the exception of Karen Andrews, none have spoken out against his behaviour.
What part of the message “we heard what the electorate said” was missing from all this? All of it.
Front and centre in this is Dutton, who is not the answer to the Liberal Party’s problems. In fact, there’s no question in Australian politics to which Dutton is the answer.
This is also true for Sussan Ley, Angus Taylor, Paul Fletcher and Dan Tehan. It’s certainly true for the Liberal cheer squad in and out of the media, which reckons the real villains in this failure to see the brilliant common sense at play are the voters. Really! What would they know?
Dutton says the Liberals have for too long allowed the Labor Party to define his party. Maybe so, but the only way your opponents get to define you is if you don’t know who you are or what you stand for.
So, we’re back at the Liberals’ core problem: they don’t know what the problem is. They don’t realise why they don’t realise what the problem is and how bad things are. They think there’s a Newspoll-bending unicorn at the bottom of their garden. They don’t know why voters are turning away from them and they haven’t got a clue about how to get the voters back.
Over the past decade, they’ve lost government in every state and territory on the mainland. They hold power in Tasmania but that looks increasingly messy, with internal power struggles breaking out. For a jurisdiction not much bigger than Brisbane, that’s an achievement. Brisbane City Council does stand out — when it steps up and asks for reelection next March, it will have been in power for 20 years — and it should be afforded another term.
However, the collapse of a real meaning for the Liberal Party nationally might cause a pigeon to take flight and look for a roost. After all, there’s a hint of arrogance emerging in Liberal Mayor Adrian Schrinner’s approach as seen by his high-handed move to consider Hong Kong-style megatowers in the city’s once-funky West End neighbourhood.
The next state election is also in Queensland, with Annastacia Palaszczuk going to the polls at the end of October in 2024. She looks to be in trouble — just as she did a year and a bit out from the 2020 election.
Palaszczuk can turn things around and should never be underestimated, but she has a lot of work to do — especially on public order and crime as well as housing. She may well be assisted by this seemingly bottomless decline of the Liberals nationally. After all, breaking a century-old run of political fortune for opposition parties is no small thing.
It might just be a very, very big thing. Something bigger than anyone realises. These are the times we live in.
So what is the Coalition’s course-correction strategy? Some small adjustments or a major shift in direction? Let us know your thoughts 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.
