The far right & the “Libertarians”

I was going to write something about the new Liberal Party leadership in the light of its electoral predicament, but we’re now so close to getting final figures that it makes more sense to wait a couple of days until we can be definitive about its performance. Instead we’ll have a look at the far right, and that most incongruous component of it, the “libertarians”.

I remarked last week that the far right is treated badly by Australia’s electoral system, winning only one seat – Kennedy in Queensland, held since 1993 by Bob Katter, who now represents Katter’s Australian Party (he started out with the Nationals) – for its 11.6% of the vote. (At the time it was 11.7% but has eased slightly with the late counting.) That’s divided among seven parties: in addition to Katter there’s One Nation, Trumpet of Patriots, Family First, the Libertarian Party, People First and Australian Christians.

That division among different groups, who preference one another only imperfectly, is one reason for their lack of electoral return. But even in aggregate they’re just not getting enough votes in the seats they would need. One Nation is the leader with 6.4%; that’s up 1.4% on its 2022 result, but well short of the 10% that some pundits were suggesting. And Trumpet of Patriots, which was next with 1.9%, failed to justify the vast quantity of advertising that Clive Palmer’s millions had bought. Money isn’t everything.

While Teals and Teal-like independents have won eight seats and reached the top two in as many more, One Nation can boast only one second-place finish, and it’s a long way back: in Hunter, where it managed 23.1% three-party-preferred (off 16.1% primaries) and will go on to lose to Labor by something around 60-40. It’s best primary vote that I can find is in Wright, in Queensland, where it has 16.3% (helped by the donkey vote) and the far right in total has 29.1%: still not enough to get them out of third place.

In the Senate it’s a similar story. The far-right parties in total are running at 12.9%, with One Nation again the best at 5.6%. It will hold its Queensland seat, but its chances of expanding beyond that now look poor (Western Australia is its best shot). The strategy of exchanging preferences with the Coalition has failed to pay the expected dividends – although Trumpet of Patriots, which refused to play ball in that fashion, has done even worse, not being in the hunt for a seat anywhere.

The Libertarians, formerly known as the Liberal Democratic Party, managed only 0.54% in the lower house, down 1.2% from 2022: a strong argument against those who claimed their previous vote had nothing to do with being mistaken for the Liberal Party. Once upon a time grouping them with the far right would have been philosophically confused, if not malicious. But times have changed.

In recent years many self-styled “libertarians” around the world have embraced the politics of Trumpism and conspiracy thinking, and the party in Australia has been a prime example. It now sees One Nation and the like as its natural allies, and in New South Wales actually ran on a joint ticket with People First (the vehicle of senator Gerard Rennick, elected as a Liberal in 2019 but denied preselection this time after his Covid denial and general craziness proved too much even for the Queensland LNP) and the anti-vaxers.

Rennick himself, seeking re-election in Queensland, scored a credible 4.6% (on a joint ticket with the Katters), and the joint ticket in New South Wales managed 1.9%, but in no other state did the Libertarians get more than 1%. Their survival as a going concern must now be in some doubt.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in what actual libertarians can contribute, don’t miss a piece by Noah Smith from a couple of weeks ago, humbly titled “I owe the libertarians an apology” and subtitled “It turns out there are worse monsters than the market.” The rise of Donald Trump has convinced Smith, who has penned some fairly strong critiques of libertarianism in the past, that it was actually playing an important role in keeping the Republican Party relatively sane.

Like many people, Smith had failed to realise that there was a well of irrational and anti-market thinking on the right that Trumpism was able to tap into, unleashing demons from deep in the Republican soul. Here’s how he puts it:

I should also have realized that as right-leaning ideologies go, American libertarianism was always highly unusual. I had lived in Japan, where the political right is protectionist, industrialist, and sometimes crony-capitalist. I should have realized that this was the norm for right-leaning parties around the world, and that the American right’s Reaganite embrace of free markets and free trade was the anomaly. That, in turn, should have given me a warning of what would happen if libertarianism fell in America.

Smith hasn’t actually become a libertarian; he’s still critical of the underlying philosophy in ways that I think are misguided (although he also makes some valid points too). But it’s well worth reading the whole thing. He has good things to say about where the Democrats have gone wrong on economic policy, suggesting that they as well as the Trumpists could benefit from listening more to Milton Friedman. He even finds it within himself to have a kind word for Ayn Rand.