Life gets even worse for the Liberals

David Butler, the great pioneering psephologist, used to say that “electoral history is littered with unexpected landslides.” Nonetheless, there are degrees of unexpectedness. Most pundits (myself very much included) were surprised by the size of the swing to Labor on Saturday, but we knew that something like that was a possibility, and that by the end of the campaign an increased Labor majority was more likely than not.

In the Coalition leadership, however, there was no sign of such a realisation: they appeared genuinely unaware of the disaster that was heading for them. And it was more specifically a disaster for the Liberal Party. The irony is that in the first campaign run by a leader from Queensland, the state where the Liberal and National parties are merged, the fortunes of the two have come apart very noticeably.

The Nationals have done reasonably well. They have lost just one seat, Calare, whose sitting MP retained the seat after leaving the party to become an independent, and they still have a fighting chance of gaining Bendigo from Labor. They will lose a senator from New South Wales, but that’s not their fault; she is on a joint ticket with the Liberals. Nationwide their primary vote is up by 0.5%, with increases in each of the four states in which they have a separate existence.

But for the Liberals it’s a very different story. They have lost 13 seats to Labor; their primary vote nationwide is down 3.0% (plus another 1.0% for the LNP in Queensland, which is mostly Liberal) and they’ve suffered a two-party-preferred swing of maybe 2.8%, on top of a bad result in 2022. They have only won back one seat, Goldstein, with a chance also at Kooyong, but they’re at risk of losing Bradfield, Monash and Longman (the last of those is a contest with Labor; the others are all vis-a-vis the Teals). [See note below]

After the last election, nearly every serious commentator said that the Liberals needed to move back towards the centre to recapture their lost ground and to address the issues that had particularly hurt them – things like corruption, climate change and the status of women. But the party paid no attention. It chose a leader from the hard right, Peter Dutton, and it continued to take its ideological lead from the peanut gallery at News Corp: which, as I have pointed out several times, is geared to maximising its take from committed readers, not to attracting the uncommitted as a political party needs to do.

Dutton’s election strategy was based on two things. Firstly, the idea that there were gains to be made in traditionally working-class areas of the outer suburbs, and that this should be prioritised over winning back the Liberal heartland; and secondly, that there were big potential gains in Victoria, where the state Labor government was in big trouble and it was reasonably hoped that some of that would rub off on its federal counterpart (as it famously did in a big way back in 1990).

The second prong worked, after a fashion: the swing to Labor was noticeably lower in Victoria than in the other states, and if they win Kooyong and hold Monash then the Liberals will have suffered no net losses there. But the project of winning outer suburban seats appears to have been a total failure; while there’s an occasional seat of that description where Labor is doing poorly (Werriwa, for example, where the swing to it is just 0.9%), the swing is generally quite uniform and the Liberals never looked like picking up seats.

As we’ve seen in the past, most of the damage was done in seats that are neither outer suburban tradie havens nor inner suburban heartland, but rather average middle suburbia. That’s where the largest share of votes are, and those average voters didn’t like what they saw in Peter Dutton.

Now the Liberal Party, with its ranks further depleted, faces the same choice as last time. Does it double down on a Trumpian strategy, or does it tack towards the mainstream? Does it, for that matter, still have a membership base on which the latter option could be founded, or is it trapped in a downward spiral where the extreme voices are the only ones that can be heard? Either way, the available leadership talent is so poor that the immediate future is going to be a desperate struggle for relevance.

The task will be complicated by the role of the National Party. It always tends to play a greater part after a big defeat, because more of its seats stand out against an adverse tide, and this time it will be better placed than it has been for a long time. It will have probably 15 lower house seats as against 28 Liberals,* and will demand a corresponding influence. And although its authoritarianism is gangsterish more than ideological, it is equally unlikely to appeal to the urban swinging voters that the Coalition needs to recover.

But the Liberals are the ones with the big decisions to make. The track that John Howard set them on thirty years ago has run its course and brought them to a dead end. If they are to remain a major party they will need to find something new. We’ll have a look at what that might be on another occasion.

NOTE Added 2.05pm: Among the possible Liberal gains I should also have mentioned the new seat of Bullwinkel, which they have a chance of taking from Labor, although they are currently trailing.

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* Yesterday I said 14 and 29, but I missed Hinkler, which should be National not Liberal.