A thread on whether the Australian Liberal Party can even survive. This election result is the endgame of…

A thread on whether the Australian Liberal Party can even survive. This election result is the endgame of something that’s been coming for 30 years. Wise Liberals and others predicted it right at the start of that 30 year period. /1 #auspol https://t.co/yvJvjPG0aC

The election of John Howard to lead the Liberal Party to the 1996 election was an event only those who lived the Howard and Peacock wars of the 1980s and 90s can really appreciate for its significance. A divisive figure within the party for most of his career to that point,…/2

…he’d been written off as unelectable by his colleagues multiple times. His not infrequent playing of the race card was just one indication to the Liberal Party of the time of his unsuitability to lead a mainstream party in modern Australia. But persistent infighting left…/3

…him as a last-man-standing candidate for that election. A Steven Bradbury moment. It marked the end of 13 years of continuous ALP rule, an ‘it’s time’ moment’ in politics. Howard just had to be there pretty much to win, Australians were in the mood for change. /4

His victory would potentially end the Liberal Party itself, nearly 3 decades later (today). If you focus on the daily thrust of political issues, you can miss the longer-term patterns. But senior Liberals at the time knew the danger. During his term they even campaigned…/5

…directly against him. The ‘Not Happy, John’ movement, spearheaded by John Valder, President of the Liberal Party. And then luminaries like Malcolm Fraser, a prominent Liberal ex-PM, resigned from the party in disgust as well. And in our current election campaign others such…/6 https://t.co/N86oq4lAIL

…as Ian McPhee, another senior Liberal of the 1980s, have said the party has been damaged perhaps beyond repair. Howard’s success as our second-longest serving Prime Minister highlights a truth not often told about politics. That most political success happens to pollies,…/7

…not because of them. Howard presided over an unprecedented explosion in government revenue, due to a mining boom, itself driven by an unprecedented orgy of global debt-financed speculative investment. ‘Times were booming’ in ways nobody had experienced before. /8 https://t.co/lma9hOL91q

Domestically many Australians were becoming wealthy on the capital gains from their homes, which skyrocketed in value, fuelled by the same cheap global money. This is the sort of thing that makes people feel like whoever is in charge must be doing a great job, as Google…/9

…(the company) sometimes says, ‘revenue fixes all problems’. It seemed like Australia had reached the promised land, of unending prosperity. Howard and Costello delivered one big spending budget after another, making hay while the sun shone. /10 https://t.co/ZLxG2eLFvG

You don’t lose elections showering pretty much everybody with everything they want. And thus the actual change to the Liberal Party culture Howard was introducing underneath all of this orgy of revenue and spending met little opposition. And those changes were profound. /11

Howard introduced Republican US culture-war politics to Australia. Small-government libertarian fantasy, completely at odds with the essentially communitarian history of Australian politics. He once quipped that the Australia he dreamed of was one where a person would see a…/12

…Rolls Royce drive past, and say ‘I want that to be me’. Aspirational American-dream politics, where the poor would be recast as the not-yet-rich, who just need to aspire and work a bit harder. Again the public pays little attention to the ideologies of politicians,…/13

…if times are good they let them indulge any ideas they like, nobody is really listening. But these ideas were not just completely at odds with how Australia works, but also with the history of the Liberal Party itself. A ‘moderate’, mainstream party that did embrace…/14

…aspiration, but without the anti-institutional angry passion of American libertarianism, and definitely without the use of the attack-politics of race and other scapegoating. All Howard specialities. The moderates in the Liberals have been fuming for nearly 30 years. /15

Now the heartland of the historical Liberal vote, the expensive suburbs of modern Australian cities, have fallen to independents. Independents who have targeted those old Liberal values that Howard, Abbott and Morrison trashed during those 30 years. /16

What was always a marginal rump of the LNP, the hard-Right faction, has hollowed out everything else. Nothing much else is left. Here’s a way to really feel the genuine existential threat to the Liberal Party even surviving. The man most likely to lead them now, to rebuild…/17

…that lost mainstream Liberal voter support? Peter Dutton. One of the leaders of that same rump hard-Right faction, a zealous warrior for everything that has now cost the Liberals their core vote. One of those who spent the past decade confusing…/18… https://t.co/MZlRq3Wu0q

…the fewer than 50,000 regular viewers of SKY News Australia with the Liberal Party’s base. That may in fact now be true, the only real base it has left. /end