Confessions of a Liberal wet

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Via The Guardian comes Craig Laundy, Liberal wet:

Laundy wants to push deeper than simply reflecting on one mad political fortnight, culminating in the destruction of another Australian prime ministership. There are three things on his mind: assessing how government works, or doesn’t optimally; the pernicious influence of Sky News at night on his colleagues; and the impact of the internal war between small “l” Liberals and conservatives that has defined so much of this period in government.

On the first point, how government works, Laundy believes the whole decision-making dynamic is back to front. He says people rise to ministerial level in politics through a combination of ability and “tenure”. The practical effect is people in safe seats dominate the power structures and the policy-making at the core of the government, and not the group defending the marginal seats, who are closer to their communities by necessity. He thinks this is the wrong way round. A better litmus test of whether a policy idea flies or not is the over the horizon radar of marginal seatholders, who find themselves at the bottom of the information pyramid.

Then there’s the “Canberra bubble” – often cited, not particularly well understood. “The part that gets missed for people outside Canberra … is when you are in Parliament House, our side of politics spends their whole time in their offices with Sky News playing in the background, and you are watching colleagues going head-to-head with Labor on policy, but once it gets to 6pm, it goes from panel-style shows to commentary shows.
“Look that’s [Sky’s] business model, it isn’t sour grapes, they are entitled to do this, they are trying to go the Fox News, US-style controversial rightwing shake-it-up … and a lot of my colleagues take what they say as gospel.”

Parliament House, for security reasons, is literally walled off from the outside world. It’s like a cloister, or a hot-house incubating exotic plants.

As a sense of crisis builds inside a government, the inhabitants of the building are isolated in their offices, and even intelligent people get swept up. “That’s the power of the Canberra bubble, the fact that [Sky] commentators, in the isolation of your office, can whip people up into a frenzy.” Laundy says those broadcasters have no impact on public consciousness in Australia at all, but “the impact they have is in the mind of the politician whilst in Canberra – and that’s something we need to break”.

Then there’s the impact of the rolling factional war. Laundy, a moderate, says conservatives cannot demand winner-takes-all and expect to retain government in a country like Australia. “The challenge we are facing right now as a party is to recognise that conservatives and ‘small l’ Liberals … are all our base. The base is not the conservative element of the Liberal party.

“If that were the case, then you are talking about 15% to 20% of Australia … and the sheer mathematics, and this is the beauty of politics, it comes down to simple maths. You need 50% plus one of the vote in each seat.

“You need to be pragmatic enough to understand that, and learn to live together. If you don’t, if you want to be ideological and not pragmatic, then the reality is because of the pure mathematics, you are going to spend a lot of time in opposition.”

A few points:

  • the Murdoch press has been unfairly treated on this occasion. The Coalition leadership spill was, if anything, led by 2GB shock jocks and they work for Domainfax. It’s inconvenient for the Fake Left conspiracy theorists, I know, but true nonetheless. That said, the criticism of Sky more generally holds;
  • the notion that the Coalition “base” needs to be a broad church is right but misreads what happened. While One Nation prospers in QLD, the Coalition will never win power again. This is straight electoral fact. Malcolm Turnbull never got this basic principle, indeed he was busy embedding the breakaway group into the polity. For the Coalition to restore its fortunes, the fractured ON base needs to be recaptured without losing the moderates. It is the lurching between the two polls that is killing the party and Laundy’s mob is just as guilty of that as the ratbags;
  • I see little reason for hope that the Coalition can pull this off. The obvious solution is to adopt a lower immigration platform from the centre. If not, the Coalition could be confronting its own Labor-style LDP-split which could render it ineffective for a very long time.
About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.