Goodbye Liberal Party

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Let’s lead off with the disastrous Newspoll:

An exclusive Newspoll conducted for The Australian shows the federal Coalition’s primary vote falling for the third poll in a row to a near-record low of 34 per cent, as senior ministers today ­defended claims that Victorian voters at the state poll had taken out their anger on Canberra.

The Coalition now trails Labor on a two-party-preferred split of 45-55 for the second consecutive poll as it heads into the final two weeks of parliament and potentially the last before the next federal election if an early poll is called for March.

That pretty much speaks for itself. The Coalition leadership change has destroyed the party in the cities and failed completely to repair the split in the conservative base caused by One Nation.

By assassinating Do-nothing Malcolm only to replace him with another Sydney cockroach, the party took the worst possible option. It killed its progressive vote while entrenching the breakaway QLD movement. So stupid.

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And now for Victoria where the pet shop gallahs are screaming a very simple truth, via the AFR:

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his deputy Josh Frydenberg will hold crisis talks with Victorian federal MPs on Monday, after the rout of the Liberal Party in Saturday’s state election raised fears that up to six federal Coalition seats in and around Melbourne could be lost.

With the state Labor government of Daniel Andrews forecast to win 55 of the state’s 88 lower house seats following Saturday’s landslide, moderates, shocked at the scale of the swing towards Labor in safe inner-Melbourne seats, blamed the dumping of Malcolm Turnbull for contributing to the result.

They demanded the Morrison government change tack and dial back its hard-right approach to issues such as climate change.

The entire MSM agrees, literally dozens of articles, and I see no reason to doubt it. It’s obvious.

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A couple of other results are of interest. The Greens are also on the nose, via The Guardian:

The Victorian Greens went backwards in Saturday’s state election, losing votes in both houses and on track to lose a majority of their seats.

After a campaign marred by fierce conflict between Labor and the Greens, and a number of scandals involving Greens candidates, the party suffered a swing of 1.7% in the legislative assembly and a similar swing in the legislative council. This looks likely to translate into a loss of up to two seats in the lower house and close to a wipe-out in the upper house.

The Greens currently hold three lower-house seats. They won Melbourne and Prahran in 2014, and won Northcote at a 2017 byelection. They look likely to win one or two of these seats, and potentially win a third seat off Labor.

This is as severe an indictment as the Libs. How can The Greens lose seats at such an election? How have they gone backwards during what is reaching revolutionary levels of disenchantment with the major parties? Or am I racist for asking?

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NSW Liberals are openly seceding from federal colleagues, also at The Guardian:

The New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, has suggested the prime minister, Scott Morrison, will be surplus to campaign requirements when the state goes to the polls in March next year, saying her government will stand “on its own two feet”.

After the Liberal party’s drubbing in Victoria on Saturday, Berejiklian was asked by reporters whether Morrison would be called on during the NSW election campaign.

The premier replied: “I have never relied on anybody outside NSW and I don’t intend to start now.” Her government would stand “on its own two feet”, she said.

The groping of Luke Foley is a heavenly intervention for Berejiklian who has one foot in the grave as well.

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Tim Colebatch makes a welcome return (clearly the new Domainfax stable of mediocre Seinfeldian snowflakes is not up to it) to note the rise of minor parties in the senate:

But the best-known crossbench MP will not be back. Fiona Patten, elected for the Sex Party with Mr Druery’s support in 2014, has fallen out with him since, and her decision to change the party’s name to the Reason Party saw its vote collapse on Saturday.

The new Transport Matters party, founded by hire car owner Rod Barton, would be the biggest winner. With just 0.6 per cent of the vote, it would win two seats in the council…

The Aussie Battler party would win the final seat in Eastern Victoria, where it won just 1.4 per cent of the vote. The lucky beneficiary would be serial upper house candidate Vern Hughes.

The Liberal Democrats stand to win a seat in Northern Victoria. Both seats would be taken from the Shooters party, which would be evicted from Parliament despite doubling its vote to 3.2 per cent.

In Western Victoria, the Animal Justice party stands to win the final seat, while in Southern Metropolitan – unless the Green vote picks up sharply – it would be the Sustainable Australia Party funded by anti-immigration campaigner Dick Smith.

Great to see SAP get up. It is not funded by Dick Smith. And no, it is not “anti-immigration”, nor is Dick Smith.

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My simple conclusion is that if the anger from the botched Turnbull coup has not been quenched by the two state election results then it is not going to be processed by the community until it slaughters the Liberals federally and there is nothing that can be done to prevent it.

Longer term the implications are even more dire. If the party swings progressive then it dies the One Nation death. If it swings conservative then it dies in the cities. There is no talent to bring the two together.

The Liberal Party of Australia, and the Coalition, may well be dead and buried.

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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.