Why the Liberal Party struggles to regain ground

In the wake of the election defeat, and the subsequent Ross and Rachel from Friends ‘break or break up’ of the Coalition, there has been a flood of advice about how to improve the electoral fortunes of the Liberals in particular.

The Liberals need to learn some political lessons from the result, but a lot of the proffered advice has been nakedly self-serving. You could sum up much of it rather succinctly as ‘the Liberals can only win if they go harder on my pet issue / align more strongly with my ideology’.

It is true the Liberals need to do some serious policy work in a number of areas showing weakness. Rushing into committing to new policies or summarily jettisoning old ones would be premature. They are lacking the elements to reliably produce good policy.

For this and several other reasons, the Coalition is simply not ready to govern at the present time.

Of course, this is distinct from winning an election — as remote as that seems right now. Opinions can shift quickly, and with a couple of mistakes from the government, the Coalition could easily be competitive again by the next election.

Think about how quickly Tony Abbott capitalised on the chaos of the government, reversing the fortunes of the opposition in 2009.

However, Abbott’s immediate success masked deeper problems in the party and the broader movement that were never resolved. These problems are now pervasive on the centre-right and have only become more acute for not having been addressed for more than a decade.

Some have characterised this as loss of values; but reaffirming a set of values will not be enough without the ability and commitment to translate this into the real world. Unfortunately, the centre-right has a severe shortage of expertise in so many crucial areas of society and government.

As a result, we lack the ability to explain the problems confronting voters. We lack the confidence to promote our answers. We rarely question the basic assumption that government is everywhere and always the answer.

In short, we lack the ability and credibility to convince people we are right, rather than just right wing.

You can see further evidence of this within the Coalition in the ‘woman problem’ and the ‘youth problem’. Coalition leaders keep trying to fix their perceived issues with these voters by allocating money to buckets labelled ‘women’ or ‘youth’.

This almost never works. And it doesn’t work in part because of a lack of credibility and in part because the centre-right (in Australia and to an extent elsewhere) has nearly completely abandoned the task of educating voters on how a different approach might deliver better and more enduring solutions.

Previous politicians and thought leaders spent huge swathes of time discussing problems and issues in detail. They would take endless questions — often hostile ones — from subject matter experts, journalists and others. They would promote their ideas on mass-market media, in town halls, and in meetings across the country.

Go and listen to Peter Costello, or John Howard, giving interviews on the economy. It is clear they genuinely understand the complexity of the topic. Other examples abound. Think about the fight for free trade over the decades. Read not just what the ‘dries’ wrote but how they wrote.

This requires a familiarity with a topic that you can’t fake with a couple of weeks in the job. It requires genuine understanding and expertise. From this comes sincerity, and credibility — especially with constituencies outside the current base (like women and young people).

There are genuine centre-right small government solutions to the issues facing women and young people. The YIMBY movement, and its success, is evidence this can work. But you can’t just try and fake it at election time.

You need real experts in positions of power and they need to be visible and working hard on convincing voters all the time, not just in the lead-up to the election.

Yet such expertise is now in vanishingly short supply on the right. It has been almost completely supplanted by reactionaries and career party aspirants, who know little other than their own ambition.

This careerism has contributed to the problem of the Liberal Party not being able to articulate what it stands for, but this problem again goes beyond Australian politics. The ease with which Trump swept away the ideological certainty of the Republicans in America is another data point.

Trump represents the opposite side of this coin. Not the embrace of expertise but the cultivation of their hatred. The deep damage Trump has already caused to the institutions of the United States, and the damage he will cause across US society, makes clear which path a responsible party of government should take.

The longer-term strategy for the centre-right should then be obvious. It starts with identifying and developing thought-leaders. It means encouraging people with knowledge and understanding into politics.

For the Liberals, this means pre-selecting candidates who want a particular ministry because they know how to fix the health system, or the education system, or childcare, or Treasury. Find someone itching to blow up the NDIS and start again.

The next step is not just ‘reaching out and listening to voters’ but committing to teaching the electorate to desire a different way. Do that for years. Then they will be ready to govern.

Despite a decade of neglect there is surprisingly fertile ground. Anyone who has dealt with government knows how much mismanagement exists. It’s just that, for some reason, people who know firsthand that the government can’t operate a secure computer network somehow think that the welfare system works just fine.

The temptation for the party will be to take the easy approach of enforcing unity in the name of wining an election.

For the sake of the broader centre-right, we can only hope they don’t take it.

Simon Cowan is Research Director at the Centre for Independent Studies.