Category: Political parties

Should the Liberals adopt ‘progressive liberalism’?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 50 Comments

A recurrent critique of the Liberal Party is that it is more a conservative party than a liberal party, and that it should become more liberal. This critique has a libertarian version (for example my article on ‘big government conservatism’), and also a ‘progressive’ version, which has found its way into book form twice since the early 1990s: Christopher Puplick’s Is the Party Over?: The Future of the Liberals (1994) and Greg Barns’ What’s Wrong with the Liberal Party? (2003), which I rather unkindly reviewed for Quadrant.

After the 24 November defeat, it was the ‘progressives’ who moved first to fill the ideological vacuum left by Howard’s departure. In The Age at the weekend, Victorian Liberal Senator Judith Troeth told us that:

the party has an opportunity to reinvent itself and recapture the inclusive and progressive liberalism that once made it electorally strong. (emphasis added)

While some aspects of ‘progressive liberalism’ are in my view worthy, as John Roskam rightly points out it is not an election-winning strategy for the Liberal Party. Can anyone name an election the Liberals won because they were more ‘progressive’ than Labor?
Continue reading “Should the Liberals adopt ‘progressive liberalism’?” →

Will we get a new opposition party?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 40 Comments

There is a now familiar aftermath to significant Liberal defeats. People say that the Liberal Party is finished, and needs replacing as the opposition party. BA Santamaria took this view in the mid-1980s (see his essay in Australia at the Crossroads). Norman Abjorensen is the most frequent advocate of this position today, in his rather feverish Crikey contributions and elsewhere. John Quiggin has joined in the funeral rites, and Steve Biddulph argued in the SMH last week that the Greens would replace the Liberals as the main opposition party to Labor.

While I can see the theoretical argument as to why existing political alignments don’t neatly match the Australian population or contemporary issues, in practice the major parties are deeply entrenched. In the last 60 years, only three minor parties have had a lasting parliamentary presence outside of a Coalition with the Liberals, and of these only the Greens have a secure future.

While the Green sociological base is large enough to give them a base vote larger than the Democrats, it is not yet clear that the Greens can genuinely make the transition from an issue movement to a mass political party, with all the compromises and deals that would inevitably require. The consternation caused by the very idea of a preference deal with the Liberals in the 2006 Victorian state election, even though the Greens are unlikely to win lower-house seats without Liberal preferences, highlights the problem. Identity politics and democratic politics sit uneasily together.

The 7.5% Green House of Representatives vote in 2007 over-states their reliable support. Continue reading “Will we get a new opposition party?” →

Is a micro-party the best way to promote libertarianism?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 90 Comments

Liberty and Democracy Party activists seem happy enough with with their 0.13% national vote share in the House of Representatives and 0.15% in the Senate. I’m still not convinced that the micro-party strategy is the way to go in promoting classical liberal/libertarian ideas.

While LDP members did get publicity they would not otherwise have received, much of it was not favourable. Lisa Milat is hardly responsible for the actions of her brother-in-law, but pre-selecting her just about ensured that media coverage was not going to be on-message for the LDP. And Bede Ireland perhaps could have picked a better issue to promote than decriminalising incest.

As the LDP is not seen as a serious electoral contender, the mainstream media will only be interested to the extent that the LDP can offer some colour to alleviate the boredom of the stage-managed major party campaigns. But ‘colour’ in the media context means things that the public will think ridiculous, eccentric or outrageous. That isn’t the way to make people take libertarian ideas seriously.
Continue reading “Is a micro-party the best way to promote libertarianism?” →

Which candidate deserves to be put last?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 27 Comments

Having a longstanding party allegiance simplifies elections greatly, but still leaves the issue of where to direct preferences.

In my House of Representatives seat of Melbourne, my second preference will go to the sitting member, Lindsay Tanner. I quite like him, and he is the only candidate promising to cut government spending, albeit by not nearly as much as I would like. I think I will give the hapless Democrat my third preference out of sympathy for the only party with MPs in more trouble than my own. I’ll probably put the Greens fourth, going above Family First for their stance on gay marriage. Then Family First, who haven’t been nearly as bad as people thought they would be, but there is far too much family stuff coming from the major parties, so we certainly don’t need a whole party based on pushing the familist cause.

The most difficult choice is for the last three spots. There is the Socialist Party’s Kylie McGregor, the Socialist Equality Party‘s Will Marshall, and the looney LaRouchite Citizen’s Electoral Council’s Andrew Reed. They all deserve to be put last. I’ll see how their party workers behave on the booths.
Continue reading “Which candidate deserves to be put last?” →

Is the Howard government running against the issue cycle?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 17 Comments

In the Liberal election post-mortem, I think at least three levels of factors will need to be considered: the transitory, the cyclical, and the structural.

The media puts most emphasis on transitory factors, because these generate the material needed to fill the space and time allocated to Australian politics. Into this category I would put things like leadership issues, interest rates, various stuff-ups, and the campaign strategy. Most what-ifs belong here – what if Howard had left in 2006 and allowed Costello to establish himself as PM, what if Howard hadn’t promised in 2004 to keep interest rates low or if interest rates had stayed low, etc?

There will be some lessons for the future in all these experiences, but at least in principle things could fairly easily have turned out differently, and could turn out differently in the coming years. Analysis of these factors will have only modest value for the Liberals in planning their next move. Howard will be gone, and interest rates will be Kevin Rudd’s problem.

My main interests are in the other two sets of factors. Various aspects of public opinion in Australia are cyclical, with people’s views going back and forth without any long-term trend. Some of this opinion is of the what-is-to-be done variety. We have several decades of data, for example, showing that the public changes its mind over time on the balance between taxing and spending and on the right level of migration to Australia. We also have about 25 years of reasonably consistent survey questions on which issues people think are most important. The public’s basic stance on these matters may be stable – unemployment bad, hospitals good etc – but what varies is the emphasis placed on them as issues affecting votes.
Continue reading “Is the Howard government running against the issue cycle?” →

Can only a Coalition government deliver Constitutional Reconciliation?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

At a press conference on Friday, the Prime Minister implied that only a Coalition government could secure a change to the Constitution recognising Indigenous Australians:

The indigenous people of this country are different from anybody else because they were here first and they have a very special place and I think we have an opportunity to honour that place in a respectful, symbolic fashion by putting something in the Constitution. But you won’t do that unless you are able to unite conservative Australia with the rest of the country and conservative Australia will not vote for something that is built on shame and repudiation.

The SMH reported it more strongly: ‘”I don’t believe Labor could unite conservative and progressive Australia on this issue,” he said.’

Certainly, the record of Constitutional referendums that don’t have bipartisan support is a dismal one. And it is Coalition supporters that are least sympathetic to traditional Aboriginal politics. A Newspoll in 2000 on an apology found that while 60% of Labor voters favoured an apology, only 22% of Coalition voters were in support. The 2004 Australian Election Survey found that 60% of Liberal identifiers thought that land rights had gone too far, compared to 30% of Labor identifiers.

The relationship between voters’ partisan loyalties and their views on issues is, however, not straightforward. Continue reading “Can only a Coalition government deliver Constitutional Reconciliation?” →

The systemic consequences of big election victories

~ Andrew Norton ~ 59 Comments

Today’s Galaxy poll was more of the same old bad news for the government, another week of no rain in a long electoral drought. Because of the way single-member electorate voting systems exaggerate results, a uniform swing would see the Coalition’s 44% of the vote translate into only about a third of the seats in the House of Representatives.

An election victory that big would have systemic consequences. Voters wouldn’t just be changing the government now, they would effectively also be limiting their choices for the next couple of elections at least, since even being optimistic it would take that long for the Coalition to rebuild to the point that it passed the threshold of credibility as an alternative government. And unless parties pass that threshold, even bad or unwanted governments seem secure.

This is already the problem we have at the state level. In a Galaxy Poll last November respondents were asked whether, based on its recent performance, the NSW Labor government deserved to win the next state election. Only a third of voters thought that it did. Yet the same poll showed Labor leading on the 2PP 52-48, roughly what it in fact got at the subsequent state election. The Opposition has never really recovered from its dismal showing at the 1999 state election. At this distance, the Beattie/Bligh government in Queensland looks to be struggling towards mediocrity even less successfully than the Iemma government in NSW, but it too seems secure in power, because the Opposition is not credible.
Continue reading “The systemic consequences of big election victories” →

Menzies exhumed again

~ Andrew Norton ~ 41 Comments

When will poor old Robert Menzies be left to rest in peace? Time and time and time again this crusty old conservative is brought back to life as a more liberal Liberal than John Howard. Former Victorian Liberal politician Robert Dean gives the argument yet another run in (where else?) The Age this morning.

As with previous such accounts, there are some strange views of what happened in the past:

His passion for equality of opportunity was nowhere more evident than his belief in free education. He called for a 10-fold increase in university entrants.

While the Menzies government did provide scholarships to some university students, it did not introduce free university education, which came with Whitlam’s government in 1974. I’m not sure that he called for a 10-fold increase in university students, but it certainly didn’t happen during his term. Numbers actually fell in the early Menzies years, and eventually peaked at about 20% of current numbers.

And in criticising the government over Iraq, Dean says: Continue reading “Menzies exhumed again” →

The maternal state

~ Andrew Norton ~ 94 Comments

The Age reported yesterday on the first women-only political party, What Women Want Australia. Rarely has entitlement feminism been so blatant; usually at least a see-through blouse of principle covers the naked self-interest. According to The Age‘s story:

Launching the What Women Want Australia party in Brisbane today, Justine Caines said women needed better representation and were sick of being paid lip service on key issues.

These included paid maternity leave, post-natal services, access to child care, education and the environment.

Though relatively few women have held senior political positions, much more than lip service has been paid to policies affecting women. Indeed, for all the talk on this blog and elsewhere about redistributing money between income deciles and between household types, one of the biggest things the government does is redistribute income from men to women.

The ATO’s statistics show that men pay more than twice as much income tax as women. Yet they receive back less than women in return.

Nearly 60% of the recipients in the Budget’s biggest expense, the old age pension, are women. Continue reading “The maternal state” →

Do issues explain Labor’s lead?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 33 Comments

Labor’s lead in the polls is persistent and substantial, but the pundits are having trouble explaining why. Clearly Rudd personally is part of it, but his Newspoll lead over Howard as preferred PM (6%) is only half Labor lead’s on the two-party preferred (12%). The issue polling that has come out from ACNielsen and Newspoll this week helps us see what else might be going on.

Newspoll asks which party would best handle 18 issues, so it provides the widest scope for analysis. As The Australian, ever-keen to find a positive angle for the Coalition, noted this morning Labor has made no progress on probably the most discussed issue, industrial relations. I doubt this is a failure on Gillard’s part though – the labour movement has thrown everything they have into this issue for the last two years, and Labor was probably already as high as it could go.

Another traditional Labor strength, ‘health and Medicare’, has also seen only modest gains (I can’t even remember who their health spokesperson is), but it’s still the equal highest rating (45%) since Newspoll started polling this issue in July 1990. The Coalition on 33% is above their all-time low (26%), but it’s not much to show for the tidal wave of cash that it has sent over the health system- real per person spending up nearly 40% between 1995-96 and 2005-06.
Continue reading “Do issues explain Labor’s lead?” →