Public ideas
Why should anyone care about the Liberal Party?
An academic study does a thorough analysis of the Liberal Party – its history, successes, and its failures, but in dismissing any concept of the public purpose it reveals the moral barrenness of the discipline known as “political science”.
Three political scientists – Matteo Bonotti and Zareh Ghazarian of Monash University and Marija Taflaga of ANU – have a Conversation contribution Change or die: how the Liberal Party’s long resistance to reform has left it fighting for life – summarizing their major two-volume work on the Liberal Party.
They outline the party’s history, going back to its formation in 1944, noting the way Menzies developed it as a decentralized federal structure. That structure gave it flexibility at the time, but that power of state branches has become a liability in more recent times, mainly because those branches control membership, organizational matters, and most importantly preselection. By contrast, over the same long period Labor’s reforms have allocated more power to the centre, a strategy that has helped it gain office.
Parties generally engage in reform after they have suffered a bad election loss, but even its recent losses have left the Liberal Party half-hearted about reform. (As if those losses were sone terrible mistake by the electorate.)
The authors describe how this structure and reluctance to reform have played out:
… a narrowing, older, more partisan, less centrist and less metropolitan membership base has slowly shifted the Liberals out of the middle ground. The devastating electoral results in 2022 and 2025, attributed to a failure to connect with middle and metropolitan Australia, are a direct result of this slow process of a failure to modernise.
Few detached observers would disagree with this assessment – although they may also identify the party’s policy concessions to the National Party as another liability.
The authors note the way the party has become preoccupied with culture wars and identity politics, rather than issues that relate to the concerns of the wider electorate.
Many would agree that this narrow focus is not a winning strategy. But rather than suggesting that the party should shift its concern to other issues, the authors state that the party’s problem is that it is concerned with any policy issues. Using the jargon of political scientists, they warn that it has become an “issue competitive party”.
This is when a party emphasises the issues it wants to dominate political debate, rather than focusing on the issues it thinks will help it win the election.
In practical terms, this means that the party has switched from office-seeking behaviour, aimed at capturing office, to policy-seeking behaviour, prioritising the elevation of specific issues over winning government.
This is the way political scientists see politics, in the same way as a sports commentator sees a football game. In football winning is the objective. But surely in politics winning office is the means to an end, the end being the achievement of some policy objectives.
Pointing this out is not a criticism of these particular academics. They are simply manifesting what has become a de-factoprofessional standard, avoiding any normative or moral assessment of political parties. Political scientists who analyze a government’s performance tend to do so in terms of whatever objective indicators they can find, typically the number of pieces of legislation passed, avoiding any judgement of the consequences of that legislation.
By such criteria some of the world’s most manipulative elected thugs would get top marks because they have been effective in implementing their agendas, but that’s all OK, because political scientists don’t enter moral debates,
But the use of such criteria is a moral choice, because it devalues the purpose of public service.
This is not to say politicians and political parties should not be concerned with winning. But when winning becomes an end in itself, the whole exercise becomes pointless, and the public are left wondering if politicians care about anything else other than the perks of office and opportunities for post-service employment.
That was a silly idea for men to give women the vote
Histories of female franchise and representation, and the persistence of male reactions.
Female franchise worked well for right-wing political parties in the twentieth century, but this century it all went wrong. Opinion polls and post-election surveys show that women’s votes are considerably less favourable to the right wing than men’s votes.
Nevertheless, two strong women running a grievance agenda – one first elected to Parliament 22 years ago, the other Australia’s richest oligarch – have enjoyed a surge in political support, but among voters the gender division remains.
That reminds us that the issues of female franchise and female representation are connected, but not closely.
On Late Night Live historian Paula Bartley, author of Trailblazers, the first women elected to government, describes the political paths of some of the earliest female parliamentarians in democracies.
She describes a number of feisty and determined women, but they are ideologically anything but homogenous. They are broadly described as “feminist” perhaps but not as “progressive” in today’s terms, and in cases they were elected as members of right-wing parties. She also reminds us that in the USA women achieved representation before they achieved the vote.
Australia’s (and the world’s) path to female franchise is described in a session of the ABC’s No One Saw it Coming by historian Clare Wright – The vote that shocked the world. She describes the quiet way, involving bluffs by chartist advocates of universal suffrage and misjudgements by conservative opponents, that led to both the franchise and provision for representation in South Australia in 1894.
She summarizes the arguments men put up against female franchise – arguments that are openly voiced in the US. They come across as ridiculous 132 years later, but Helen Lewis, staff writer at The Atlantic, describes how they still have currency. In her article – The men who don’t want women to vote – she describes a strong masculism, “a perpetual-motion machine of grievance, an inarticulate howl of anguish at the status quo.” The status quo to which she refers is America’s Nineteenth Constitutional Amendment, prohibiting American governments from denying US citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex, adopted in 1920.
There is no serious proposal to overturn the Nineteenth Amendment, but many in the MAGA movement are canvassing the idea of a “household vote”, based on the indisputable logic that a well-functioning “Christian” household has a male head. The struggle continues.