THE LIBERAL PARTY AND THE 2022 ELECTION

With the Liberal/National Coalition losing government after nine years at the 2022 federal election, The Sydney Institute asked two of Sydney’s best known Liberal voices to offer their take on what went wrong. On Tuesday 21 June, Senator Hollie Hughes and former Member for Wentworth Dave Sharma offered their views on what happened at the 2022 federal election and what might need to be part of the Liberal Party rethink of party strategy and policy in the coming years.

THE LIBERAL PARTY AND THE 2022 ELECTION

Dave Sharma

Thank you, Gerard, for the introduction. It’s a little sobering to be introduced as former this and former that, and I hope there’s a future somewhere in my biography that emerges at some point. Senator Hughes, it is lovely to be here with you tonight – my former colleague and someone I have a high respect for and worked very closely with as well.

It’s important to focus, tonight, partly on the rebuilding task ahead. In order to do that properly, and to do it justice, we need to understand the extent of our loss as a government and a Coalition – and of how we lost as well. John Howard, famously, said that the voters always get it right. It’s important that we listen to what they are telling us from this election, and that we don’t discount or dismiss it.

This has been the most extensive election loss for the Coalition in the post war era, and it’s the worst election loss for the Liberal Party since 1983, by my own reckoning. After earlier losses, in 1972, 1983 and 2007, the Coalition still held at least 40 per cent of seats in the House of Representatives. Today we hold just 38 per cent.

This is the worst election loss we’ve been through as a government, or Coalition, in the post war era. How did we lose? Bluntly speaking, and in my view, we lost it in NSW and Victoria. NSW and Victoria still account for well over half the seats in the federal parliament. This was true in 1996, with 87 out of 148 seats or 59 per cent, and it remains true today, with 86 out of 151 seats, or 57 per cent. Despite their vaunted place in our political coverage, Queensland and Western Australia account for a little less than a third of all seats. This was true in 1996, with 40 out of 148 seats or 27 per cent, and it remains true today, with 45 out of 151 seats or 30 per cent.

You cannot win federal elections in Queensland and Western Australia alone. Since 1996, every election we have won has involved us winning roughly half or more of all the seats on offer in NSW and Victoria. In 1996, in 1998, 2001 and 2004, we won at least 52 per cent of the NSW and Victorian seats. In 2007, when we lost to Labor, we won only 42 per cent of those seats. In 2013, when we regained government, we were back to 54 per cent of NSW and Victorian seats. The glaring exception here is 2019, when we won only 37 of the 85 NSW and VIC seats, or 43 per cent. And I think it was at least partly this result, and the natural tendency to fight the last war, that lead us down the path to 2022.

To me, this is the obvious pathway. In 2022, in this parliament, as a Coalition we hold only 27 of NSW and Victoria’s 86 seats, or 31 per cent. So, we’ve got a pretty big task to rebuild in those two states. In my view, there is simply no way we can win back government without winning back a big chunk of these seats. We need to claw back something in the order of 16 seats in these two states, alone, to have a pathway back.

We cannot allow NSW and Victoria to become red states, where we’ve written off this territory and we’re resigned to them being Labor strongholds into the future. There is no pathway back to government for us as a Coalition if that’s the case. Linked to this is the observation – and it is only an observation, not a judgement – that the Nationals did not lose a single seat. As well, the Nationals aligned LNP members, in Queensland, did not lose a single seat. Of the 19 seats that we lost, all of them were Liberal seats, with 10 of them in NSW and Victoria. So, the task for rebuilding here is primarily one for us as a Liberal Party, and the primary focus of this rebuilding has to be in NSW and Victoria.

We can’t hope to regain government without substantially rebuilding our stocks there. And we can’t hope to win government again without winning back some of these Teal Independent seats. On my count, we have at least 11 seats which were traditionally Liberal, that are now being held by Independents or Greens – Mayo, Indi, Warringah, Wentworth, North Sydney, Mackellar, Goldstein, Kooyong, Curtin, Brisbane, and Ryan. That’s a big chunk of real estate. Unless we win back a substantial number of these, there is also no pathway back to government.

That’s the scale and extent of our loss. I think it’s important that we’re frank about that since this wasn’t just a one-off election loss, it was an historic election loss. Unless we come to terms with the magnitude of that, we’re not going to be good at coming up with the right prescriptions. There are some obvious pitfalls ahead, as we go about this exercise, and these are pitfalls political parties often succumb to after losses of this sort.

The first pitfall is to fail to head the message that the voters have sent and instead offer them a reheated and repackaged version of more of the same. This is the trap that the conservatives fell into after their historic loss to Tony Blair’s Labor in Britain in 1997. It took them four opposition leaders and eight years before they digested the message of the voters and began to modernise their party and their offering. We’ve got a rebuild to do, and opposition is the time to do it. Not only to refresh our policies, but also to refresh our party structures, our membership, our candidate recruitment processes and our campaigning. The second pitfall would be to write off large swathes of Australia and to pursue a niche electoral strategy. Whether you like it or not, we are not going to win government again without doing a lot better in NSW and Victoria. This isn’t the United States. Our demography, our political traditions and our compulsory voting system mean that you cannot win elections simply by appealing to and energising your base.

Learning those lessons has been made harder by the fact, for us as a party, that the territory and the seats that we need to win back, now are so lacking in a voice in our party room. The third pitfall would be to fail to differentiate ourselves properly from the National Party as a Liberal Party. Yes, we’re a governing Coalition, but we are separate parties, with separate histories, ideologies, values, and constituents. We should be able to reflect this, especially when in opposition.

I do believe that there is a way ahead for us as a Liberal Party, and a pathway back to government that is true to our values, principles and our founding ethos. I see three elements to this. Firstly, re-energising our reformist credentials. To my mind, at the last election, we gave voters many reasons not to vote for Labor, but we didn’t give them any reasons to vote for us. That was a failing. We need serious reform offerings in tax, energy, productivity, the digital economy, workforce participation, immigration, superannuation and education. Yes, these things are hard and, yes, there are always many vested interests who fight to the death to protect the status quo. But we need to find a way to have these debates and make these offerings to the public; we need to find a way to animate the public with some fresh ideas and approaches: true to our values and traditions, but which address modern-day problems.

Secondly, protecting and preserving our environment is a naturally conservative value, and it should be in Australia. It was Richard Nixon who created the great national parks in the United States. It was Margaret Thatcher who first called out the risks of global warming and climate change. We shouldn’t be afraid to champion these causes here either as a centre right party. But we should also not be afraid to offer a more market friendly and technology-oriented way of doing so. We cannot vacate this space.

Lastly, we need to be offering policies which reflect, to my mind, some of the modern pressures and reality of family life today. We need to be finding ways to make it easier for women to return to work. For making the education system serve students and parents, not teachers. For busting up some of the cosy oligopolies that take advantage of Australian citizens and Australian households. By making it easier to start a business. By making it easier to earn money. By helping to get red tape and endless administrative clutter out of the lives of everyday Australians.

These are Liberal values, but we need to make sure that they are aligned to the modern era and the modern everyday experience of Australians. Political parties always need to regenerate, and election losses are often, unfortunately, their call for doing so. But in order to do this properly, it’s important that we do the necessary reflection and regeneration, that we understand and do not understate the magnitude of our loss here, and that we be quite clinical and ruthless in our analysis and prescriptions.

That’s the only way back to government for us.