Why can't people admit the Liberal Party is falling apart?
Not just struggling, but collapsing
Just thinking about Dutton as a type. Former Queensland cop; long-term real estate developer and landlord; long-serving MP and Minister; and now leader of the Liberal Party. Stitched together from ideological parts developed over years in the Liberal Party's Frankenstein laboratory. Patriarchal. Monocultural. Jolted to life by the soggy lightning strike of there being no-one else left in the party to do the job.
Mr Menzie's bastard child.
The Liberal Party, in its initial iteration just after Federation, and then its rebirth when the IPA and various business interests tapped Robert Menzies to lead a new version to replace United Australia in 1944, has always had a kind of negative polarity. That is, it has always been a coalition of forces against organised labour and ideologies and policies on the socialism spectrum.
I’ve covered the basics of this in more detail elsewhere, so I won’t go over it again, only to say that there are historical and material reasons that the party is falling apart. The point is: the party is falling apart.
This reality is rarely acknowledged because our politics is built on the idea that the Liberal Party forms an eternal part of a two-party system,1 and that logic is so baked in for the political class that if the Liberal Party didn’t exist, they would have to invent it. Or reinvent it.
In fact, reinvent it is what they do daily.
The fact that Dutton has been competitive at all is partly because of the failures of Albanese’s leadership, but it is mainly the result of the inherent conservative bias in our political class, including the media, who simply continue to treat the party and its leader as viable.
Even after the first debate, which ordinary viewers—you know, voters—scored as a convincing win for Anthony Albanese, the professional class of self-described “experts” in the media almost overwhelming either scored it as a draw—the equivalent of gutless journalistic “balance”—or, with some exceptions, actually gave it to Dutton.
Shameless stuff.
We take this as normal, but when voters tell you that Albanese won, and then a bunch of journalists contradict them, that’s not expert commentary, it is deception. It is ensuring that this pillar of our two-party logic is kept intact and that the media retains the plausibility of a viable contest on which to generate the conflict their business model depends on.
Apart from being trounced in the first debate, Peter Dutton, the leftover Liberal leader, has also changed his position on key policy issues in the course of the campaign, while his party has been beset with farcical preselection problems in at least four key electorates.
You know that old adage about journalism?
“If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out the window and find out which is true.”
Well, guess what? It’s raining. The Liberal Party is falling apart and has been since John Howard lost his seat in 2007. But instead of reporting the rain, the media keep their backs to the window.
This bias is expressed in the very argot of journalism.
The media language of gaffes, backflips, slips, missteps, 180s, reverses, resets—and all the other terms they predictably resort too, especially during election campaigns—does us a huge disservice. It makes us think that the problems they seek to describe are momentary errors rather than evidence of what they are, deep-seated structural malaise that make a given party unfit to govern.
Guys, it’s raining. Look out the window. Humpty Dumpty has fallen.
Over the last week, the Liberal-National Party has shown evidence not of gaffes and slips and resets but of complete dysfunction. Apart from the party having almost no policies, unconvincing support for the policies they have deigned to release, a leader putting in a meh debate performance, the party is also fracturing at the candidate level.
They had to sack the unaptly named Benjamin Britton as their candidate in the seat of Whitlam because video/audio emerged of him telling some podcaster that he didn’t think women should be allowed in combat roles in our armed services. Britton should’ve been suspect long before that, having run unsuccessfully for one of Clive Palmer’s running gags of a political party, but somehow he was anointed by the local party to represent the Liberals in the federal parliament.2
Since his disendorsement, further evidence of the underlying dysfunction has emerged as Britton has, quite rightly, pointed out that Liberal golden boy, Andrew Hastie, had expressed exactly the same anti-women views as he had but apparently retains the confidence of the party. Britton has since insisted that the right faction of the Liberal Party is looking to unseat Peter Dutton as leader, and the rest of the party is now in damage control about that claim.
To add to the farce, the candidate chosen to replace Britton, turns out to be gas lobbyist.
There have been ongoing problems with their chosen candidates in Bennelong and Bradfield as well, and in the seat of Bruce in Victoria, they have sacked a campaign manager after finding his social media history revealed serial misogyny:
The Liberal campaign manager in Bruce has been reportedly sacked by the party over a series of abusive social media posts.
Andrew McNabb, a long-time Liberal member from Officer, is running the federal-election campaign for candidate Zahid Safi in a key seat held by Labor on a 5 per cent margin.
The Age reported that posts from an X account under McNabb’s name attacked female anti-Liberal critics, as well as politicians including Bruce Labor MP Julian Hill.
The invective included “leftist b-”, “ugly cow”, “F off you old dinosaur”, “lowlife”, “Get stuffed you over weight GRUB” and “Clearly you need to stick your tampons in your mouth to stop the s… running out”.
The Age reports that the X account of 32 followers has been since switched to private.
My personal favourite, though, is the strife surrounding their choice in Kooyong in Victoria. She was potentially a good candidate. Until she wasn’t. Not only did Amelia Hamer fail to show up for a public event that every other candidate managed to attend—with party commitments trumping community engagement—her main claim to relatability turns out to be what the kids used to call complete bullshit. She had run hard on the fact that, like so many other young people in her electorate, she rented the flat she lived in and therefore could relate to “young voters” and their “cost of living” pressures.
Except it then emerged she owns property in Canberra and London and is, in fact, a landlord with investments worth, on some estimates, around three million dollars.
Whoops.
Of course, the local Murdoch media aren’t much interested.
This isn’t all just a matter of a failure to screen candidates properly, though it is that. It is evidence of party that has divested itself of its middle-class, aspirational credentials and that it can longer attract the sort of people who could properly represent those values. Instead, the party is, by and large, left to pick through the dregs of whatever crawls out of the right-wing swamp and hope that they can pass a non-entity like Dutton off as a “strong leader” and then rally enough people to the politics of division in a desperate attempt to stay viable.
Even potentially good candidates feel the need to misrepresent themselves, to cosplay relatability.
These are the hallmarks of the sort of minor right-wing parties that inevitably emerge on the fringes of democratic politics, not the modus operandi of a functioning, major party.
And yet, here we are.
Even at state and local level, the party is in turmoil. The former Liberal leader in Victoria is on the verge of bankruptcy after losing a defamation case against one his own MPs! You can’t make this stuff up. While “NSW Liberal Party members who were denied the chance to contest last year’s local council elections because of a catastrophic administrative bungle have launched a class action against the party in a move that could be hugely damaging for Peter Dutton’s federal election campaign.”
And then there is their ongoing hostility to women, even in their own ranks.
I mean, how hollowed out must a party be that it grasps at the Trump agenda to redefine itself in the way that Peter Dutton has? Talk about misunderstanding the country you are planning to lead.
This is all working to hand to Labor a victory almost no-one was predicting even a few months ago. So, even as Labor’s primary votes hovers around the 30% mark, they are starting to look a better chance than they even were in 2022. Of course, another risk emerges with this, that Anthony Albanese and Labor will learn all the wrong lessons from a narrow victory and we will be treated to another term of incrementalism when the world is resetting itself in a way that requires fundamental policy shifts.
But I’ll come to that problem in future posts.
For now, can we just admit the obvious, that the Liberal Party is in a state of collapse and shouldn’t be let anywhere near the Treasury benches.
I say system because it is a framework that can consist of more than two parties but still essentially operates as if it were two parties.
Did it help that his father is a major donor?
I might have mentioned this previously but the ‘Wets ’ of the Liberal Party have been slowly squeezed out of the Libs over the past 30 years. The broad church is now a rented hall for a community of Prosperity Gospel acolytes and neoliberal pundits who think the Australian Financial Review is a left wing rag. The only reason they are competitive is because of the support of the Murdoch Media (TV and print) Empire propping them up. And a voting population who are by nature conservative. Though that voting block of over 50s is slowly dying off.
Historically, political scientists called their various iterations the "anti-Labor" parties. But the Liberals have been around for 80 years, and the permanent coalition something like 40. The "National" name is a leftover from when Bjelke-Petersen thought he could seriously challenge the Libs - they would have been better to stick with Country IM)