As I wrote recently, one implication of the recent South Australian election is that the political covid party is over. Voters are no longer gratefully flocking to leaders who lock them down, muzzle them up and coerce them into getting dodgy vaccines.
But there’s another lesson from SA: one that a string of elections have been driving home. It’s also a lesson that applies every bit as much to National and leader Chris Luxon in NZ, as it does to Scott Morrison and the Liberal-National Coalition in Australia.
When will the Liberal Party learn you don’t win elections by being Labor-lite?
The Liberals should have learned this after the harsh judgement by voters on the Turnbull experiment of installing a soft-left leader at the head of a government dominated by sodden blue-greens.
Telling voters that you’re just like the other side, only more so, is hardly the path to electoral victory. Voters want a genuine contest of ideas, not a clamour to outdo each other in yammering the loudest agreement with a cacophony of media-driven talking points.
Part of the problem in SA was that this was a relatively left-wing Liberal government up against a relatively right-wing Labor opposition. It was a Liberal government that ticked all the socially progressive boxes: sponsoring late-term abortion laws, promoting even more renewables at the expense of baseload power and scrapping the V8 Supercars in favour of more cultural precincts.
When faced with a choice between a big-spending, politically correct Labor Party and an only slightly less politically correct and almost equally big-spending Liberal Party, long-term Liberal voters are scratching their heads and wondering where their party has gone?
As Ronald Reagan said, politicians have an obligation to dance with whoever brought them to the party. Instead, so-called conservatives are cynically hitching a ride with conservative voters, then spending the night feeling up the green-left behind the punchbowl. Conservative voters are left glumly sitting by the wall all night, wondering why they bothered showing up.
To win, the Liberals must have product differentiation from Labor. That’s what John Howard and Tony Abbott had but it’s what Malcolm Turnbull and now Steven Marshall in South Australia palpably lacked. And it looks like being a real problem for Scott Morrison going into the federal poll unless something big emerges very quickly, perhaps from the budget next week.
Are you listening, National? Luxon might have boosted National’s polling, but he can only coast for so long on not being Jacinda Ardern. In the end, voters are going to have to choose between the bullet-head and the horse-head, both braying the same woke guff. Which one is going to look better on a glossy magazine cover?
So far, the government’s key policies are net -zero carbon emissions by 2050 and nuclear-powered subs by 2040, and Labor has said “me too” to both. Last time, the Liberals had Labor’s new taxes on retirees and investors plus job-destroying emissions reduction targets to fight against. This time the Prime Minister won’t have these so he has to create a contest on something else. But with fights over civil nuclear power and leftist brainwashing in schools apparently ruled out, it’s hard to see what options the government has left. But whatever Morrison chooses, it must be an issue where Anthony Albanese’s leftist instincts will be at odds with those of middle Australia.
The big problem, as Tony Abbott found, will be fighting the screeching classes. Abbott won a thumping election victory, but lost government by being spooked by what turned out to be a sneak preview of Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s easy for a foghorn media to bully politicians, but, as a recent survey of flood-ravaged NSW found, voters aren’t necessarily going to be convinced by media hate-campaigns.
One of the paradoxes of modern Australian politics is while Labor has won a majority only once in the past nine federal elections, the whole political spectrum has moved to the left. The elites, hectoring corporations and so-called modern Liberals all fail to appreciate that the vast bulk of the electorate is centre-right in its views. If it were otherwise, Labor wouldn’t have lost so often.
Too often, muddle-headed Liberal moderates fall for the trap of thinking they need to move to the left to win, but in practice marginal-seat voters care much less about being politically correct than about the day-to-day issues that affect them and their families directly. By shifting to the left, Liberal moderates invariably lose more votes on the right than they pick up on the left.
The Australian
Labor (and Labour) get off far more easily. Left-wing voters are far more tribal, so they’ll stick with a left party that moves right, and what far-left votes they lose to the Greens they’ll just get back anyway by going into government with them. Left voters will never vote for a right party that moves left. Luxon could prance through a Pride parade wearing nothing but a sequined g-string and a hijab and hugging a giant portrait of Greta Thunberg (if he hasn’t already), and he wouldn’t win a single left vote. But he’ll shed even more conservatives.
Conservative parties need to start living up to their names, or they’ll just keep on losing elections.
