The abyss stares into the Liberal Party

[A milestone: this is our two-thousandth post, for which we return to a favorite topic.]

It’s a few weeks since we last looked at the fortunes of the Australian Liberal Party, when I noted that “the death wish of its hard right is undiminished” and that the party was behaving “as if no lesson had been learnt from the [May] election result at all.” Since then, things have gone from bad to worse.

The big thing, of course, has been climate change, the issue over which, way back in 2009, the lunatics first took over the asylum. Andrew Hastie, shadow home affairs minister and the most likely challenger to leader Sussan Ley, has gone out of his way to signal his opposition to meaningful climate action, evidently seeing that as the best route to preferment from the party’s far right and its associated media ecosystem.

He’s probably right about that. Its utility as a way of winning government is much less assured: Tony Abbott managed it in 2013, but voters who remember what followed from there will probably not want to repeat the experience. (Nor is the gift of such a dysfunctional Labor Party likely to be repeated.) And with an additional decade and a half of planetary warming behind us, the electorate might be more likely to treat the denialists as the killers that they are.

None of this logic, however, seems to penetrate the Liberal Party. For some understanding of why that is, it’s worth having a look at a piece in the Conversation this morning by Marija Taflaga, an ANU academic. She has noticed things that escape a lot of other pundits; I particularly liked the way she goes to the heart of the relationship with the National Party:

The Nationals add an additional layer of complexity, because the shared Coalition party room allows members of the Liberal Right to form policy coalitions across the party divide, placing additional pressure on the moderate faction.
. . . [T]heir additional numbers in the Coalition party room create more opportunities for policy entrepreneurs within the Liberal Right to push conservative policy positions.

The problem is made worse by the fact that the National Party is not constrained by electoral pressure in the way that the Liberals are. Very little that it does has any direct effect on the project of getting back into government; the seats that need to be won are nearly all a task for Liberals, not Nationals. As Ben Raue explained just after the election, “the Nationals [have] become a party that exists almost entirely in safe seats.”

So Nationals MPs don’t need to spend much time looking after their electorates – they can devote their attention to bomb-throwing instead. And while for the Liberals the Nationals are basically a side issue (albeit an irritating one), for the Nationals the Liberals are absolutely central to their existence, so it makes sense to spend proportionately much more time on intra-Coalition affairs.

Left to themselves, it’s possible that Ley and her supporters would be able to force the Liberal Party to stare down its crazies and face political reality, although you’d have to say the odds were against them. With the Nationals thrown in the scale as well, their chances seem all but hopeless. I notice that Sportsbet this morning quotes 9-5 against Ley still being leader at the next election, and if she does survive it will probably only be by accepting the policy dictates of her opponents.

So what happens to the party then? Taflaga argues that it will probably survive in some form due to the “significant institutional ballasts and supports” that it enjoys. Major parties in established democracies are hard to kill off. And even a party that seems mired in opposition is worth fighting for control over.

But if things reach the stage where one side sees itself permanently locked out of power, that could change:

The risk for the Liberals is that there comes a point where there is no viable future for a moderate Liberal in the party. It is no longer worth fighting over the remaining institutional infrastructure and brand advantage. In this situation, those candidates (and their voters) would need to find a new political home.

Yet remarkably little thought within the party seems to be devoted to that question. Its liberals can be forthright about the direction the party needs to take, but they show no sign of having a Plan B. If the party turns its back on them – as there’s every sign it will – what do they propose to do? At what point will they give it up as a bad job and try something else, and what sort of something else will it be?

More on that next week.