Politics
The lamentations of the Liberal Party
Before Christmas the Liberal Party produced its review of the 2022 federal election. They find plenty of people to blame. They start by identifying a coordinated activist network of Teals and Greens who came together “in an unprecedented manner to drive the defeat of the Government”. Then there are state premiers who took advantage of National Cabinet “to corrode the political standing of the Prime Minister and the federal Government”. And there was a prime minister who was “seen to be out of touch”, but who actually “placed the national interest first but at considerable political cost”.
Really?
Mostly the review is about administration. The party faithful are called on to gird their loins for the next election. They should build up branch membership, but there is no mention of religious fanatics who have been successfully stacking branches.
They should pre-select more women – as if women are more adept at lying and selling bad policies than men are. Change the sales force, but not the product. As The Shovel’s political analysts put it, the party has ignored women. They quote from one of the party’s insiders who told their journalist “we thought women made up five, maybe ten percent of the population. But turns out it’s actually much higher than that – maybe even as high as forty percent”.
Policy hardly gets a look in, except for the suggestion that the party “should conduct work to develop policy proposals, that are developed consistent with the Party's values”. Those values, however, are beyond question. There is no mention of the misery and lost opportunity imposed on our country by the party’s obsession with “lean government”. There is no acknowledgement of the offence to teachers, police, nurses and others who work for the public good in the party’s assertion that government contributes nothing to our wellbeing.
We might have expected a review to have mentioned climate change as a policy area where they have had one or two shortfalls. But climate change gets only one mention in passing, and that’s in the context of the Teals who exploited “perceptions” that the Coalition was weak on climate change. Similarly the party’s burden of having governed in coalition with the National Party gets no mention. Instead there is the statement:
In coalition with the National Party, the Liberals have been responsible for almost all of the major policy decisions which have made Australia a prosperous, safe, inclusive and growing society.
Really?
While the review has some data on the party’s loss of support among women, it fails to grasp the reality that young people, men and women, have deserted the party, as David Crowe, writing in The Age, reminds us – Young voters turn their backs on the coalition. Perhaps they hope that as these voters age and become card-carrying members of the comfortable middle classes, they will regard their flirtation with Labor, Greens and Teals as some youthful folly, and will return tom the One True Party. But The Guardian’s Matt Grundnoff points out that “millennials” (aged 27 to 43) aren’t coming back to the Coalition. In fact they seem to be shifting a little to the “left” as they age.
John Hewson, in his regular Saturday Paper column, puts it simply: the Morrison government was the worst government in our history, and that’s quite an assertion for someone old enough to remember the McMahon government. He stresses, for example, that “they must abandon the mythology that they have been better managers of the economy and national security”.
Writing in The Conversation, in a review of Tim Dunlop’s book Voices of us and drawing on his work, Mark Kenny says that the 2022 election saw the realization of trends that have been in the making for some years. People voted for a change, not within the old two-party choice, but for politicians who they believed could make a difference. (That’s a long way from the Liberal Party perception of an anti-government bloc of Teals and Greens.) Not only was the Liberal Party blindsided by this phenomenon, but so too were the media, who were still entrapped by their traditional two-party view of the political world: In Voices of Us, Tim Dunlop considers the outsiders re-energising politics – and takes aim at dumbed-down media and do-nothing politicians.
The Coalition may have been hoping that the Albanese government’s honeymoon is coming to an end. Not so, according to January polls. Resolve has Labor on 42 percent, the Coalition on 29 percent; Essential has Labor on 34 percent, the Coalition on 31 percent. In last year’s election, Labor won 33 percent of the vote, the Coalition 36 percent.
Young women are turned off the theatre of politics but still seek political engagement
The Liberal Party want its branches to be more representative of the community, but it has trouble attracting women and young people, meaning young women are turned off the party on both counts.
The Liberal Party is not the only party with such a problem. Duncan McDonnell and Sofia Ammassari of Griffith University have studied the composition of youth wings of political parties on the left and right in Australia, Spain and Italy, finding strong similarities in all three countries and in both left and right leaning parties. They report on their research in The Conversation.
Men are heavily over-represented in the youth wings of all parties, and women are less willing to stand for election than men. In this regard Young Liberal and Young Labor in Australia stand out from the other countries, in that young women are particularly reluctant to run for office. Possibly that’s because they perceive politics as a boys’ club.
That doesn’t mean young women are political apathetic, however. McDonnell and Ammassari find that young women are keen to be politically involved, as party officials and advisers, for example, but they are not attracted to the blokey struggles of pre-selections and elections.
Firearms policies – the fewer weapons the better
On December 13 three right-wing believers in “deep-state” conspiracy theories executed two young Queensland police officers and an innocent neighbor. This deliberate killing reminds the nation of the threat posed by right-wing extremism, and of gaps in our firearms laws, particularly the absence of a national register of firearm ownership.
Assault rifles not allowed here
Ever since the Howard government’s decisive action following the Port Arthur mass killing in 1996, Australians have been smug about our success in regulating firearms, particularly when we compare ourselves with the USA.
But in fact there are now more firearms in civilian hands than there were before the Howard government’s intervention. That intervention brought the number of firearms down from 3.2 million to 2.5 million, but it is now up to 3.8 million.
This is one of the key figures in an article Martyn Goddard (a Tasmanian) reveals on his Policy Post article Does gun control work?. One long-term development in Australia, starting well before 1996, has been a steady fall in the number of households with firearms. In Australia there are firearms in only 6 percent of households, compared with 42 percent in the US.
Goddard finds that there is a relationship between the number of households with firearms and gun deaths, but he also finds a stronger relationship between the number of firearms and gun deaths. He suggests that public policy should be more focused on reducing the number of firearms in civilian hands. (Having grown up on a farm I can confirm that it was hard at times to know the precise location of all the pieces of our rural arsenal. The introduction of a new weapon did not always see the de-commissioning of an old one.)
He looks into the claim made by firearm enthusiasts that reducing the availability of firearms results in more deaths by other means, particularly stabbings, but he finds no evidence to support that idea: homicide rates by both firearms and stabbings have been in long-term decline in Australia. Less use of firearms in suicide has been associated with more suicide by other means, but depressingly our suicide rate has been fairly constant over the last 40 years.