Asia | Banyan

Australia’s ruling party faces annihilation

Some members appear to want it that way

A FEW DAYS ago a respected member of the Liberal Party, which governs (if that is quite the word for it) in coalition with the smaller National Party, dropped a bombshell in Parliament: she was quitting the party to sit on the crossbenches as an independent. Julia Banks, the only Liberal to snatch a seat from the opposition Labor Party in the most recent general election in 2016, said she was sick of the direction her party was taking. “The Liberal Party has changed,” she said, because of a “reactionary right wing who talk about, and talk to, themselves rather than listening to the people”. As if in support, the women’s minister, Kelly O’Dwyer, said in a leaked discussion with colleagues that the party’s leaders were seen as “homophobic, anti-women, climate-change deniers”.

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The Liberal Party has a problem. Not least, Ms Banks’s move to the crossbenches, which follows an earlier defection, leaves the government two votes short of a majority. What is more, many voters agree with Ms O’Dwyer. They also think the party ignores people’s worries about affording a home and having sufficient savings to retire. And though successive governments have come to grief trying to craft a policy on climate change, this government strides purposefully away from a solution—despite the strong popular desire for one. Yet in place of any introspection, allies of the prime minister, Scott Morrison (who once sang an ode to a lump of coal in parliament), call Ms Banks a traitor.

That’s rich. Mr Morrison owes his current eminence (if, again, that is the right word) to a cabal of what a senior Liberal calls a bunch of “crazy, right-wing nutjobs”. In August they defenestrated the man, Malcolm Turnbull, who had called and won the previous election, and had attempted to govern as a pro-business and socially liberal centrist. One of the cabal, Peter Dutton, a vituperative populist, failed to secure Mr Turnbull’s crown. In the ensuing scrimmage, which did few of its participants credit, Mr Morrison won it almost by accident. The most competent moderate, Julie Bishop, was swiftly trampled.

Over the years, party leadership “spills” have become ever more frequent—of the five prime ministers of the past decade, four came to power in one. They are usually launched when leaders are blamed for their party’s poor showing in the polls.

They do little good. Parties almost always perform worse in an election after a spill than they did at the preceding one. In a tacit admission of this, the Liberal party changed its rules this week to make spills harder. Too late: before the one in August, the Liberals were trailing Labor by two or three percentage points; today the gap has widened to ten. It is as if voters are even keener to punish the party, for presenting one candidate for prime minister only to kick him out. Astonishingly, in October the party managed to lose the super-safe seat Mr Turnbull had vacated. Earlier this month in a state election in Victoria, it saw a dramatic drop in support, paving the way for Labor’s re-election. John Howard, (Liberal) prime minister from 1996 to 2007, dismissed the setback by explaining that Victoria was the “Massachusetts of Australia”, glossing over the fact that it is home to a quarter of Australians. The party is staring defeat in the face in an election in March in New South Wales, long a Liberal stronghold.

The party faces a thrashing in a general election due by May. Yet, says John Hewson, another former Liberal leader, all Mr Morrison, a former marketing supremo, has to offer is “a pocketful of slogans”. Several of the party’s spillers may well lose their seats, including Mr Dutton and Tony Abbott, the arch-conservative ringleader who was briefly prime minister before Mr Turnbull spilled him in 2015. (Mr Abbott had spilled Mr Turnbull in 2009.)

When local party members looked set to deselect Craig Kelly, a cheerleader for coal and backer of Mr Dutton, he threatened to quit the party unless Mr Morrison overrode party rules. The threat worked, yet he was not called a traitor.

In politics, says one senior party member, you used to make progress through compromise. “Now, it’s, ‘If you don’t give me something I want, I’ll blow the place up.’” Perhaps Mr Abbott and his like really do have a death wish. Perhaps they fancy that defeat by the Labor Party will have a wonderfully purgative effect, clearing the wets out of the Liberal Party and allowing their faction to enjoy unadulterated rule. What is nearly certain is that a grand old party faces a whipping next year. The question is whether it can survive at all.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Self-harming Liberals"

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