THE LIBERAL PARTY: WHAT IS TO BE DONE? THE COURAGE TO TAKE BACK CONTROL

In the wake of the Coalition loss at the federal election in 2021 and with Liberal state governments across mainland Australia, the Liberal Party faces a reassessment, both organisationally and in terms of policy. To hear something of fresh thinking in Liberal ranks, The Sydney Institute invited three younger and Liberal Party activists to give their take on what is happening. On Monday 22 May 2023, Charlotte Mortlock, political media and policy advisor and convenor of Hilma’s List, Alex Dore, member of the State Executive of the Liberal Party NSW and Freya Leach, Liberal candidate for Balmain 2023 and Law/Commerce student at Sydney University addressed The Sydney Institute before a crowded audience eager to hear their views.

THE LIBERAL PARTY: WHAT IS TO BE DONE? THE COURAGE TO TAKE BACK CONTROL

ALEX DORE 

Three years ago, during those mad pandemic years, my parents’ neighbours received a call that all parents dread. “Your son’s had a heart attack in Brisbane. He’s on life support and he’s not going to make it.” And in that moment, their world crashed around them. And they did what any of us would do; tried – with a growing sense of desperation – to get the travel exemption they needed to see their son; to hold his hand and say goodbye.

Well, try as we all might, the exemption wasn’t granted. And so, their son died, alone in a hospital room, surrounded by machines and strangers. And they’ll live with that forever. That era of madness and fear and selfishness and greed and inhumanity, that swept Australia and robbed those parents – and each of us – of so much.

But it wasn’t the laws of physics that robbed those parents of their final goodbye, or young people of their best years in lockdown despite representing a demographic least at risk, or the millions of other Australians of memories and moments and opportunities.  It was the arbitrary regulations of politicians and unelected bureaucrats, supported by both major parties. Heavy-handed regulations designed to disempower individuals, and which changed hour to hour with little accountability.

In Victoria, you could visit a brothel, but not your family. In NSW, you could protest for Black Lives Matter but not against the biggest restrictions on freedom since World War II. You couldn’t congregate on ANZAC Day.

There are some who look at the current predicament of the Liberal Party, ignoring all of this context, and say that the solution to our woes is to surrender to “woke” identity politics – to reduce our candidate selection process to a question of gender, or race, or sexuality through collectivist quotas. They say that to win the next election, we need to appease GetUp and other noisy activists, by out-flanking them on climate change and on social policy; that to win, we need to merely preselect women, and that those women should be as similar to the teals as possible; that to win, we need to not really be Liberals at all.

Respectfully, I say they’re wrong. That if our goal is the pursuit of power without principle, then we rob voters of a meaningful choice.

All of this is to bring me to a very simple point. The central point, actually, of my address tonight: that policy matters. Decisions have weight. And ideas trump identity. I believe that by restoring faith in our principles and putting people in Canberra and Macquarie Street with the courage of conviction to fight for them, we’ll offer voters a real choice.

As former Liberal prime minister John Howard says, politics is the contest of ideas — not of personality, not of gender, not of symbolism — it is the contest of policy, of values, and it is meaningful. Who we choose for parliament matters. And not in some superficial way, but because their decisions directly impact lives.

And, as Robert Menzies said, we should choose candidates on the basis – not of gender – but of “the quality of their minds, the soundness of their character, the humanity of their experiences, the sanity of their policies and the strength of their wills.” We shouldn’t shy away from the fact that we, as Liberals, actually have something worth fighting for. As the Liberal Party, we are the proud custodians of three intertwined philosophical traditions: liberalism, meritocracy and conservatism. In the history of human civilisation, these are still new ideals. And they are not without their challengers.

It used to be that your lot in life was determined by your relationship to the aristocracy, caste or means of production. Meritocracy upended those straitjackets. The central notion of meritocracy is that we should judge an individual on their individual merit; that we should strive for equality of opportunity; that we should pick the best person for a job. To date, that remains the fairest and most powerful organising principle in human history. We shouldn’t abandon it now.

And liberalism. John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, spoke of the harm principle; that individuals should be free except insofar as doing so would cause harm to somebody else. This notion of the rights and responsibilities of the individual, or liberalism, turbocharged by the notion of private property too, creates the conditions necessary to motivate individuals and families to aspire, to build and to accumulate.

And conservatism: Edmond Burke spoke of an intergenerational compact between those who are living, dead, and to be born. An intergenerational obligation embedded on the idea that incremental improvement enables us to harness millennia of human progress – all the learnings and trial and error of “mankind’s ascent from the swamps to the stars” – and to protect institutions that have stood the test of time.

Together these principles are a powerful and unbeatable combination. They empower the individual and they harness our civilisational wisdom. But, as I mentioned at the start of this address, they are not without their challengers.

Sixty years ago, in his “time for choosing” speech, Ronald Reagan spoke of two friends who had been talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who has escaped Castro. In the midst of his story, his friend had turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban had stopped and said, How lucky you are? I had some place to escape to.”

“And in that sentence,” Reagan said, “he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.”

But, there’s wisdom in that story for us too. What is the hope for liberalism in this country, if even the party of the individual abandons it? What hope for meritocracy, if even Liberals decide that quotas and targets should replace merit, aspirations, conviction, beliefs, and competency? Or for conservatism, if we fail to protect institutions – like the rule of law, liberal democracy – that have stood the test of time?

The march of identity politics through our institutions may seem unstoppable. This new wave of politics is based on the notion that only people who belong to a “tribe” or identity group can ever hope to represent others in that group – empathy was once the antidote to these concerns. But by restoring our faith in these three principles, we can reinvigorate the party and re-energise the base.

We do however, have to confront the issue of candidate quality. You’ve heard tonight that the most pressing issue is gender; I say our biggest challenge is choosing politicians with courage and substance. And the cause is factions. When given a robust, democratic preselection, members take their duties seriously and they get it right, but more often than not, we have removed their say.

We need to be honest here. Factionalism is crippling the NSW Liberal Party. Personalities, not ideas, are now the driving delineators in this struggle and the shift has created an incredible problem: a crop of risk-averse career politicians afraid of controversy, a culture where compliance is rewarded, and a disempowered membership, where good people see their efforts and talents wasted for factional ends.

All of these are hard truths, but we need to be absolutely clear about them. Before plebiscites in New South Wales, it was simply not possible for a candidate to win preselection without factional backing. Without an empowered membership, success is impacted by your factional subservience; your ability to navigate the internal processes of the political machine – not ideas, not skill, not merit.

This has produced what NSW Legislative Councillor Peter Phelps calls “lick-spittle yes-men”, “careerist weasels”, “the spineless blancmanges” (blah-mon-jers) who “believe that the fast-track to ministerial preferment is to be a bobble-headed appeaser of Executive diktat”.

This model is self-destructive because it produces cookie-cutter careerists. Mavericks and dissenters are marginalised, and the community responds with its own vote of dissent.

It is no accident that mainstream political parties are now routinely recording their lowest ever share of the vote. Factional game-playing in local, state and federal elections seriously inhibited our ability to win. Thousands of articles have been generated about our organisation.

Consider that in local government, faction leaders deliberately prevented the party running council candidates across two-thirds of the State, including in Parramatta. The outcome? We gifted Labor the mayoralty and that mayor then won the State Seat of Parramatta from us.  Party reform needs to be about more than a naked and audacious power-grab. Yet, in recent years, reformists have partaken in a perverse game of pass the parcel where power shifts between factions but never away from them.

As the organisation looks to the future, members need to take back control. We need to take this opportunity to restore the politics of ideas and to clear out the rot and dysfunction. There are some obvious places to start.

Firstly, we need to simplify our governing document. At a whopping 276 pages, the party’s constitution is a mess littered with contradictions and loopholes; it’s easily exploited. It’s longer than a Harry Potter novel; longer even than the length of the US Constitution, UN Charter, the Australian Constitution and Medicare Act put together.

Secondly, we need to streamline our governance. In NSW, the party’s board of directors, the State Executive, sits at a ridiculous 27 members. To put this into context, our State Executive is five times larger than the Executive Council of NASA. NASA puts people on the moon, the party can’t put them into North Sydney. That’s before you consider that in NSW, the party has a 90 per cent clause, meaning just 3 of those people can block many urgent decisions. Every discussion leads to the media.

Thirdly, we need to reduce the number of party roles. The anti-bureaucracy party is now entangled in its own bureaucracy. There are nearly 5,500 party roles in New South Wales, creating an environment where “everyone gets a prize”. That’s nearly 50 per cent of all members.

And, finally, we need a growth-oriented party that increases the threshold to reject members. Branches are closing more than two times faster than they are being created, but a staggering 75 per cent of members are rejected in non-Liberal seats. Nearly 40 per cent of these applicants are being rejected in marginal seats we need to win. Many of these are in conferences with less than 100 members and it speaks to the command and control incentive structures currently in place. We cannot win if our party structure means we cannot grow in the areas needed.

When we ask people to join a political party, we ask them for their time and energy. Those energies are directed at internal games and the politics of destruction. Reform done right can change that; it could restore the politics of ideas and revive the hopes of a great institution.

The question of tonight’s proceedings was “what is to be done?” What next for the Liberal Party? It turns out that the answer is simple after all. “Not an easy answer, but simple.” We need to be bold and brave; we need to offer Australians a real choice and we need to take back control. Take back control of our party, of our country, and of our lives.