Why can’t the Liberals win an election?
The Liberals haven’t won a state election in over a decade. Last year they lost control of the Federal Government and don’t look like winning it back any time soon. How did this happen? Bennett Mason doesn’t know but he’s trying to find out.
These are dark and depressing days for the Liberal Party of Australia. The Liberals are out of government in all six states, both territories and most recently, in the Commonwealth. The Liberal Party hasn’t won a state election since 1997 and last year they suffered a spectacular loss to Kevin Rudd. Do you know who the highest-ranking Liberal is in the nation now? You probably don’t. It’s Campbell Newman, the Lord Mayor of Brisbane’s City Council. And whilst each electoral defeat has its own unique circumstances, even the most enthusiastic Liberals supporter must be wondering if there’s something fundamentally wrong with their party.
In the early to mid 1990s, the Liberal Party held every single state government except Queensland. What has caused this once dominant political party to plummet to such depths? To help answer this question, I turned to Philip Senior… who is significantly more knowledgeable on such matters than myself. Senior co-wrote Howard’s End, a chronicle of the Liberal Party’s most recent electoral defeat. Senior says that elections are largely cyclical: “Eventually, a Government will run out of ideas and the voters will finally vote the other party into office.” It just so happens that the Liberal Party are on the losing side of that equation everywhere in the country.
Senior says that the changing nature of Australia’s political spectrum has placed the Liberal Party at a significant disadvantage. As the Labor Party’s moved ideologically to the right, it stole the centre away from the Liberals. “The Liberal Party isn’t that different to where it was 25 years ago but the Labor Party is vastly different,” says Senior, “Rudd, Hawke and Keating are all much further to the right than Whitlam.”
Take the NSW Government’s desires for electricity privatization as an example. Privatization is a mainstay of the Liberal Party and yet a Labor Premier and Treasurer are ardently in favour of it (albeit, much to the chagrin of their own party). The Liberal Party now finds itself in a difficult place on the Australian political spectrum. The Liberals obviously aren’t going to move towards the left but going any further right would place them well outside the mainstream and result in electoral suicide.
Conservatism Is Out Of Fashion (maybe)
The Liberals are the “conservative” party of Australia and that word is more unpopular today that it has ever been. Is conservatism simply unelectable in Australia today? Probably not. Kevin Rudd devoted vast amounts of time attempting to convince Australia that he was an “economic conservative” and conservative politicians have proven to be popular overseas. Nicolas Sarkozy won the French Presidential election last year as a conservative (by French standards) and the Conservative Party seems destined to defeat Labour in the next UK election under the leadership of David Cameron.
So if conservatism itself isn’t a barrier to being elected, then perhaps the Liberals’ recent failures can be blamed on their communication of conservatism. The Australian Candidate Study showed that most Australians perceived the Liberal Party to be out of touch on a number of key issues. The Liberals had allowed Labor to monopolise health, education and climate change.
Senior argues that the Liberals need to sell themselves as “compassionate conservatives”.
Compassionate conservatism proved to be enormously successful for the Republicans during the early 2000s. Although the Republicans ran for office on a traditional conservative platform, they adapted to help the working class. Says Senior, “Liberals have to work very hard to restore their compassion credentials… they need to show that they’re just as compassionate as the Labor Party – they just have a different way of seeing things.”
The Liberals also seem to be losing the media war. Howard often refused to appear on AM radios shows or make television appearances. In contrast, Kevin Rudd was perfectly content to make countless appearances on Sunrise with the delightful Kochie and Mel. It shocks me to say this but Rove McManus’ alleged comedy show might be the best example of the two parties’ different approach to the media and how that’s shaped public perception. Rudd appeared as a guest on the show and came across as a slightly amusing man-of-the-people. Howard’s refusal to appear on Rove’s set make the former PM look old and out of touch. (Howard is old and out of touch but that’s not really the point.)
Leadership Squabbles
The Liberal Party has a terrible habit of prematurely dumping their leaders. By the time the voters have even a vague familiarization with the Liberal leader, they’ve already been knifed in the back and hastily buried in a shallow grave.
Since their 1995 defeat, the NSW Liberals have been led by the fearsome fivesome of Peter Collins, Kerry Chikarovski, John Brogden, Peter Debnam and most recently, Big Bad Barry O’Farrell. And NSW is not alone: the West Australian Liberals have just endured their fifth leadership contest in four years. Even after the Liberals started perform well in polls in NSW and WA, there were still suggestions that Joe Hockey and Julie Bishop should return home to their respective states as leaders.
These Machiavellian leadership machinations create humongous problems for the party. They draw negative attention from the press and public when it’s the Government who should be the subject of scrutiny. Currently, the Federal Liberals appear to be too busy focusing on the Nelson/Turnbull/Costello squabbles to properly attack the Labor Government.
Of course, these leadership kerfuffles aren’t unique to the Liberal Party. Before Kevin Rudd, Labor was forced to settle for Kim Beazley, Simon Crean, Mark Latham and Kim Beazley again. Leadership squabbles seem to be an inevitable result of being in Opposition. But Senior says that the Liberals are more susceptible to internal quarrels as they place more importance on the role of the leader. “So much of Labor’s strength and structure comes from their institutional base – the unions and the state and federal conferences. That makes them much less likely to fall into disarray when in opposition.”
Mergers and Acquisitions
The Queensland Liberal and National Parties merged this July after decades of negotiations. After four consecutive electoral defeats, the two parties’ members finally decided that a merger would give them the best possible chance to defeat Anna Bligh’s Labor Government. But a similar course of action is unlikely to take place federally or in any other state.
Like XXXX beer, cane toads and the absence of an Upper House in parliament, a Liberal-National merger is unique to Queensland. The Liberal Party has never been a factor in Queensland – there hasn’t been a Liberal Premier for forty years. Queensland is the only state where the Nationals are the dominant member of the Coalition.
There’s no guarantee that a joint Liberal/National Party would appeal to traditional National voters across Australia. If the Nationals merged federally, they would have to alter many of the stances and risk alienating their base. “They would be ripe for independent candidates to move into that gap,” says Senior. We’re already seeing that in the recently vacant seat of Lyne, where independent Mark Oaksehott (a former National who shares many but not all of the party’s views) is about to snatch the seat from the Nationals.
Money, Money, Money
The Liberal Party also seems to be suffering from problems within its structure. Labor now has a huge superiority in organizational machinery and fundraising. Says Senior, “The Liberals definitely need to professionalize. The Labor Party has become more of a machine in the last ten years. It’s been masked by the success of the Howard Government but now we’ll find out if there’s really a gap.”
Incumbency has given Labor a considerable fund raising advantage. Donors obviously have far more to gain by throwing their support behind a Government rather than an Opposition. The Howard Government was able to very successfully reap in enormous bundles of cash but the state Labor Governments were able to offset that.
Labor’s shift in ideology has also led to more financial support from the business community. In the past, big business only backed the Liberal Party and Labor was forced to rely on the trade unions. But as Labor became more conservative economically, business began to see Labor as less of a threat. In fact, business is now eager to donate money to both parties, causing the Liberals to lose a gigantic advantage.
Kids These Days…
Consistently winning elections has given Labor a huge advantage in the acquisition and retention of young talent as Governments are allowed to employ much larger staffs than their Opposition. Obviously, there’s a benefit to having a bigger staff but there’s more to it than that. Young Labor staffers can be groomed to stand for office later in their political careers. But there are remarkably fewer of these jobs available for Liberal staffers. They’re forced to drift outside of the party and possibly, politics altogether. A friend of mine works for a Liberal minister; when the Liberals lost the 2007 election, scores of their colleagues lost their job. Some of them found jobs within the political periphery (lobbying groups, PR companies) but most ended up outside politics altogether and are unlikely to find their way back.
Hope For The Future?
Is there any chance of wall-to-wall Liberal Governments in the near future? Probably not. Says Senior, “The parties are so close together now that it’s very unlikely the same party will manage to win all elections at the same time – they’re fighting over such a small place on the ideological spectrum.” The Liberals will almost certainly win Government in NSW, they have an outside chance of victory in WA this year, and just last weekend the Libs made surprising inroads in the Northern Territory. But the rest of the country seems lost to the Liberal Party for the foreseeable future.
I spoke to a number of people within the Liberal Party who believed the success of the Howard Government federally, made voters less likely to vote for the state parties. It’s true that Labor suffered a similar problem in the 1990s. For most of the Keating Government (1991-96), the Liberals held power in every state but Queensland.
By voting Liberal federally and Labor in the states, voters seemingly created a system of political checks and balances. Or do they? Recent evidence seems to show otherwise The Liberal Party tried to convince us of the dangers of wall-to-wall Labor during the last federal election but clearly the election’s result proves that voters didn’t particularly care.
Philip Senior’s book, Howard’s End (Melbourne University Press) is available at bookshops everywhere.