21 May

Governance is my profession. People know I love to talk about stuff here, including why the LNP in 2022 was not just a threat to Australia, but also to itself. The Liberals in particular may not even survive as a party. Here’s why, as I see it. For the past 30 years John Howard, Tony Abbott and now Scott Morrison have tried to remake the LNP as the Australian version of the US Republicans and UK Tories. The problem is, that’s fundamentally at odds with how Australia itself works. Australia is a pragmatic, communitarian society, unique on Earth. We work as a community to pragmatically solve problems, not strive individually to become prosperous, individually. A common-wealth. John Howard used the unprecedented propsperity we experienced during his time, due to an orgy of global debt driven by cheap money leading to a mining and housing boom (none of it of his making), to change the culture of the Liberal Party completely. Towards that US/UK libertarian attack politics model. People pay little attention to this sort of stuff, if times are good, and they were under Howard, because of those global debt-fuelled changes. Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison continued that shift. Many prominent Liberals resigned in disgust. Last night independents and the ALP stole all of the blue ribbon seats which are Liberal heartland. Everything those old Liberal seats stand for has been trashed for years by Howard, Abbott and Morrison. The ‘base’ of the Liberal Party they talk about is really just the fewer than 50,000 Australians who watch SKY News. Now they’ve lost that heartland, and the moderate Liberals who used to represent it. The man who will probably now lead them, Peter Dutton, will have the task of rebuilding that core Liberal vote. The problem there is he’s even more of a warrior for the ideas that have now gutted the Liberal heartland than the leaders he’s following. It’s hard to see how the Liberal Party survives.