Liberals aiming vaguely

I don’t read News Corp, but I couldn’t help noticing the headline on the Australian the other day: “Liberals’ vague aim to exit death spiral over net zero.” Indeed. Whether you think of it as a vague aim or quite a precise aim, the Liberal Party certainly wants to exit its death spiral. The problem is that it has no idea how to go about it.

Last time we looked at this question, five weeks ago, the focus had briefly shifted from climate change to immigration. The latter certainly hasn’t gone away as an issue, but it’s climate that’s back in the headlines, with the desperate search for a compromise between those who are determined to signal that the party believes climate change is real and those who are determined to signal that it does not.

That’s not something that readily admits of compromise. Worse still, the positions on the issue are to some extent just cover for a struggle over the leadership – not in the sense that the antagonists aren’t serious about their positions (they are), but in that the relationship between policy and leadership is a dynamic one.

It’s only with a centrist leader, such as incumbent Sussan Ley, that the party’s climate denialists feel the need to impose an explicitly denialist policy. A leader from the right, like her predecessor Peter Dutton, would be trusted to do the right thing regardless of what the policy said. Conversely, those on the right who are simply determined to unseat Ley at any price can keep ratcheting up their demands on climate policy, whether or not they care about it for its own sake, with the intention of reaching a point where Ley will have to push back and can be despatched.

A party meeting on Wednesday is supposed to sort this out, but anything short of the surrender of one side or the other will be only a temporary fix. And we know from long experience that the right never surrenders: confident in the support of the branches (and with outside backing from the aforesaid News Corp) it can afford to sometimes bide its time, but it never loses sight of its goals and is ruthless in pursuing them.

The left, on the other hand, repeatedly tells itself (and friendly journalists) that some outcome is unacceptable and then proceeds to accept it. To see the process in action, look no further than an op-ed piece in the channel nine papers today by former attorney-general George Brandis criticising the right’s golden boy, Andrew Hastie.

Since resigning from the front bench, Hastie has gone out of his way to affirm allegiance to a hard-right agenda, calling on the Liberals to abandon their residual liberalism and belief in free markets. Brandis rightly attacks this stance, noting that “Hastie’s remarks on immigration may or may not have been a deliberate nod to Enoch Powell,” that he “appears to be enamoured by the cult of Donald Trump” and that “his view that postwar liberalism is dead is eerily similar” to the position of Vladimir Putin.

In Brandis’s words, “You cannot become the leader of the Liberal Party if you make yourself an acolyte of enemies of liberalism.” Strong stuff, you might think. But there is no action plan. Brandis doesn’t call for Hastie’s expulsion, or suggest that the party should do something to rid itself of Putinists more generally. On the contrary, he says that Hastie is “undoubtedly an asset to the party,” consoling himself with the thought that the Putinists “represent a tiny slice of opinion on the very margins.”

In terms of voter opinion in general that may be right (although international experience warns against complacency even on that score). But when it comes to opinion among the Liberal Party’s narrow and ageing membership it is bordering on delusional. Hastie’s views are almost certainly more common there than Brandis’s, and their partisans are well-organised and relentless; it’s no surprise that they keep winning.

But the left (with which Brandis must now faute de mieux be identified) has no strategy for turning this situation around. Brandis’s whole tone is one of mild admonition: Hastie should “be careful of the company he keeps,” as if the problem was that he went drinking with the wrong sort of people rather than that he proposes to abandon the values of western civilisation.

Assuming that this fails to induce Hastie to mend his ways, Brandis shows no sign of having a fallback position. If within a few months Hastie (or Angus Taylor) is leader and the party has abandoned net zero, doubled down on its anti-immigrant strategy and signed up for an alliance with One Nation, what will people like Brandis do? On past performance, they will roll over yet again.