One direction

The Australian centre right needs to have a clear sense of purpose if it wants to succeed. By Zachary Gorman.

The lesson to be learned from the rise of the teals and other fracturing of the centre-right vote in Australia is that the Liberal Party needs to have a clearly defined purpose if it wants to succeed.

This disintegration is not entirely without precedent. By the time the United Australia Party officially dissolved in 1945 the party had long been rudderless, its raison d’etre of getting the nation through the Depression with thrift and sacrifice having exhausted itself.

It was Robert Menzies who famously resurrected the fortunes of the Australian centre-right, but he did not do it by establishing a “broad church”. While it was certainly meant to have a broad appeal ranging from “salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on”, Menzies explicitly founded what he called “a party with a philosophy”.

Recently in the Guardian Van Badham argued that history shows that the Australian centre-right succeeds most when it appeals to the centre. However, the formation of the Liberal party represented no leftward shift from its predecessor, which after all had been formed around an ex-Labor premier of Tasmania.

The Liberal party represented a revival of Australia’s strongest political tradition, namely liberalism, and with it came a clear sense of direction. Menzies was tapping into something with deep roots in Australian history, so much so that by the end of the nineteenth century virtually every Australian politician called themselves “liberal”.

In the Australian context liberalism has conservative elements, which can often lead to confusion in definitions. By the time of federation liberals had triumphed such that defending that which existed was to “conserve” a liberal order. Australian liberals have always believed that freedom flourishes under our existing institutions, including parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy.

Australian liberalism thus contains many of the tenets of the philosophy of Edmund Burke, whom Menzies admired. During the 1940s when Menzies was giving his series of radio broadcasts made famous by “the forgotten people”, he quoted from Burke that a political party is “a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed”.

The concept of the “broad church” when it comes to the Liberal party of Australia is a legacy of John Howard, who was trying to put to bed ideological infighting which had dogged the party throughout the 1980s. But the fact that the Liberal party was led out of the wilderness by Howard rather than a Peacock says a lot.

The Australian centre-right has tended to succeed when it has a clearly defined purpose, whether that be upholding patriotism during and after the first world war, maintaining fiscal conservatism in response to our gravest economic crisis, or defending the role of free enterprise threatened by Chifley’s bank nationalisation and the rise of international communism.

The Australian centre-right has failed when it becomes purposeless, like the end of the UAP or even during the 1980s, when Labor had taken up the crucial job of Reagan/Thatcher style economic reform.

Leaders who define themselves by their “moderation” have failed because they go out of their way to make the party pointless. Look at not just Peacock’s failure, but the unexpected near defeats of 1969 and 2016. It must be remembered that Malcolm Fraser, who was electorally successful, only drifted to the left after office.

Australia’s unusual system of compulsory voting and compulsory preferencing does drag politics towards the centre. Australia has a long tradition of sacred cows that cannot be touched because of this, namely the “Australian settlement” which endured for decades, and an industrial relations system that cost Stanley Melbourne Bruce and John Howard not just their prime ministerships but their seats. One could argue that border protection has become a new “settled issue” in this vein.

But just because our voting system nudges politics towards the centre does not mean that centre-right parties are rewarded for leaning into this and losing their sense of direction. People need to be motivated to campaign when they don’t have a union cajoling them to do so, and right-leaning preferences are far less reliable at coming back to their respective major party.

The recent wave of teal independents follows the fracturing of the UAP into multiple parties towards the end of its lifespan, but even before this it was the centre-right who introduced preferencing because of a tendency to have a multiplicity of candidates.

People who value individual freedom and personal conscience tend to herd about as well as cats. They need to be inspired and led.

Moderate Liberals are often fond of quoting Menzies as saying that Liberals “were determined to be a progressive party”, but what is too often forgotten is that as a visionary with a strong will Menzies would define what progress meant. He was not a weathervane pointing the direction of social and political trends beyond his control, and which actively eat away at a liberal ethos.

The centre-right will recover sooner or later, when it again finds its purpose. It is difficult to imagine that this will happen by simply chasing the teal vote.

Zachary Gorman is academic coordinator of the Robert Menzies Institute, a prime ministerial library and museum established to honour Australia’s longest-serving Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies. This op ed was first published in Guardian Australia and has been republished with the author’s permission.