HAS THE LIBERAL PARTY LOST ITS TRADITIONAL BASE? TWO VIEWS – JASON FALINSKI

The rise of the Teal independents in unseating long held Liberal MPs in once known as “blue ribbon” seats in the federal election of 2022 has given rise to questions about the Liberal Party’s base. Elected on ALP and Greens preferences, Teal candidates appealed to well off voters who are concerned about climate change and other social issues. Can the Liberal Party win back those Teal seats or does it need to seek a new base in outer suburban and regional seats? To evaluate what might have happened to the Liberal Party’s base, Michael Sexton, author of “The Disestablishment of the Liberal Party” in Tragedy without Triumph: The Coalition in Office 2013-2022 and Jason Falinski, former President of the NSW division of the Liberal Party to address The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 28 August 2024

HAS THE LIBERAL PARTY LOST ITS TRADITIONAL BASE? TWO VIEWS

JASON FALINSKI

Thank you for coming to hear me tonight. Given that I could not convince my mother to attend, I will assume that you are all here to listen to Michael. Michael, thank you for agreeing to share a stage with me; you have provided a welcome amount of intellectual rigour and gravitas to this evening. Thank you also to Gerard and Anne for inviting me to speak this evening on a very important topic.

For while seemingly simple it hides an extraordinarily complex matrix on which much of the future of the Liberal political movement depends. For a political movement that is uncertain of who it represents, has no idea of what to fight for much less what to stand for, and is therefore doomed to failure. And, as the saying goes, he who stands for nothing falls for everything.

The reason that we, the Liberal Party, keep losing unloseable elections, and failing to win winnable ones, is because the Australian electorate has no clear sense of what or who we are standing up for. If 90 per cent of any cure is diagnosis, then whomever conceived of this question was endowed with considerable wisdom.

There are two schools of thought: the first is promoted by very influential and well-known personalities within the conservative movement. In their considered view, we need to move further to the right. The second school of thought is propounded by people like Matt Kean and Dominic Perrottet that we need to move left especially on issues like climate change, female emancipation and bureaucratic decision making on many matters often given the misnomer of integrity. With respect to both schools, I do not believe that either stands up to scrutiny.

The first school claims that there are a million votes in right wing fringe parties. This does not appear to be true. Starting in 2013, even being expansive about your definition of right-wing parties, about 700,000 people voted for these parties. This was despite the fact that, at the time, we had a leader in Tony Abbott who was considered to be more conservative than leaders who had come before him. In 2016, this number dropped to around 650,000 voters and continued to fall to around 520,000 voters in 2022. Even if all these voters were to vote for the Liberal Party it is not clear that it would add up to many more seats in the House of Representatives.

Which brings us to the next problem with this school of thought – most of the votes they identify are in the wrong places. They are highly concentrated in rural and regional areas in Queensland and to a lesser extent NSW and WA.  Rather than swinging marginal seats our way these voters would tend to make already safe seats even safer.

It is not clear that all these votes would come back to the Liberal Party in any case.  Many of these parties are used by traditional Labor voters as a bridge to the Liberal Party rather than a siphon away from it. The first person to notice this was Lynton Crosby in 1998 from which the famous Queensland strategy was born. It is not possible to say for certain, however, that if these parties ceased to exist that all the votes would naturally return to the Liberal Party because the majority did not start off in the Liberal Party.

Which brings us to a much bigger problem and one that in my view renders the second school’s strategy equally problematic. It is highly unlikely that adopting the policies of your opponent has ever resulted in gaining votes, indeed, history would seem to bear testament to the fact that it tends to drive votes away.

What exactly would we say to these voters that could lever their voters – on either side – from their current voting habits?  As many have pointed out success comes from standing out not fitting in. John Scully made the telling point before he launched the Pepsi taste test that if he renamed Pepsi Coca Cola it would not win over Coke drinkers but would lose Pepsi customers.

This does not mean that challenges highlighted by the second school should be ignored, quite the opposite. But they should be dealt with by analysing what the problem is and what a Liberal response should be, and then selling that original response.

It is my contention that our base is right where we left them. We do not need to go searching for a new constituency, rather we need to return from whence we came. I would like to illustrate this by using an Issues Value Map.

Some notes on this framework. The horizontal axis is the traditional left-right access and is mostly called the economic axis.  At one end you have libertarian economics, followed by free market, technocratic, bureaucratic, command and control and finally state ownership. I think that this axis should be renamed the value axis because economics is actually about underlying values rather than finance. The vertical axis is the cultural axis with post materialist and materialist voters, these have been supplanted by Maslow Hierarchy of Political Needs as it gives a more nuanced understanding of people’s cultural sets.

Absent population skewing, this graph is normally distributed, that is 95 per cent of the population is within half of the intersection of the axes; there are as many people to the left as to the right and below as above the axes.

Some obvious observations are:

• The Liberal Party is the only party organised around the economic axis
• There are a lot of political resources in the top left-hand corner which is why the Left can sustain so many parties. Because of compulsory preferential voting there is little cost to this arrangement and benefits in niche marketing and manufactured debate.
• So, when the voter’s consideration curve is tilted toward cultural issues non-Liberal parties benefit. When it is tilted toward economic issues the Liberal Party benefits disproportionately.
• There are no parties to the right of the cultural curve other than the Liberal Party.

Applying this framework to the last two federal elections we find the following. In 2019, the Liberal Party should not have won due to internal disunity, but the franking credits campaign developed by Tim Wilson tilted the consideration curve to the economic axis which opened the election up to other economic issues and allowed us to win an improbable victory. While this was seen as the result of a superior campaign by us, I would strongly contend that we actually got in our way a lot and actually set up substantive problems for 2022.

In 2022, due to Covid we had significant population skewing with most of the population shifting up the cultural curve. There are any number of statistics I can use to demonstrate this, but my favourite one is this: at the start of 2020 household savings were $77b; by the start of 2022 they were $355b. People were working less, earning more and had never been worth more. Thus,

• Needs based voters became aspirational voters.
• Aspirational voters became luxury voters.
• And luxury voters transcended this plain of existence.

Further, the consideration curve was now aligned with the cultural axis. That is, voters were giving little attention to economic matters. To put this in stark relief: over two election cycles the seat of Wentworth had a 25 per cent swing against the Liberal Party while the seat of Lindsay had a 7 per cent swing towards it.

Self-evidently, when the Liberal Party is framing issues in terms of economic or values-based decisions we win. When we are waging cultural wars they win. In the words of Tony Abbott: when climate change is a moral issue we lose, when it is an economic issue (I would add engineering) we win.

There are four frameworks I like to use when considering all this:

First. The Menzies’ forgotten people phenomenon in the 1940s was effectively about how the Liberal Party needed to represent those without a voice, the disempowered and the disorganised. While the membership of the disorganised has changed radically in the intervening years, if anything this group is larger now than it was then.

Second. The Abbott critique suggests there are three classes in post-modern societies: the working class, the welfare class (which are people who substantively derive their income from the tax transfer system, people like the partners of PWC), and the bossy class. The welfare class loves the bossy class because they are constantly working out reasons to take money from the working class to pay for the welfare class.

Three. The Neo Liberal alliance was more noticeable prior to the entrance of Kamala Harris into the US presidential election but seems to have on one side older voters combined with Gen X women. Trump was outperforming with everyone else: the young, men in particular, ethnic minorities, Gen X men. This is not just being seen in the United States; Javier Milei and Pierre Poillievre are both out-performing amongst these demographics too. Liberal values of personal aspiration and empowerment are resonating with a younger generation that belies the public perception. Ron DeSantis’s largest voting block in 2022 was men under 40.

Four. The Reagan coalition said it best. Reagan believed that most Americans are not interested in whether the Republican Party is going to the left or the right; they want a political party that has policies and proposals to make their lives easier, that gives them, their children and their communities more hope and opportunity.  The question for the Republican Party therefore is not whether to go left or right, but whether we want this great country to go up or down.

All of this can seem rather arcane and to a lesser extent ethereal, but it is incredibly important. The Canadian Conservative Party has trailed Justin Trudeau for more than a decade. But, by deciding who they were going to fight for, Poillievre clarified what sort of policies they were going to focus on and who they were going to fight for. From this base, he has built a more than 20-point lead over Trudeau. DeSantis did the same thing, as did Javier Milei.

It is not just electoral success. Florida is a much better place to live since DeSantis came to office and Argentina, for the first time, looks like it may pull itself out of a death spiral. It turns out that when you have a clarity about what you want for your community, it leads to better outcomes.

And, whether you support the Liberal Party or not, that is something that we should all want for our nation.