2009 all over again?

It’s less than two months since I described the Liberal Party’s predicament like this:

Left to themselves, it’s possible that [Sussan] 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.

And so it turned out. Last week, the parliamentary Liberal Party effectively expressed no confidence in Ley, its leader, by insisting on a policy that rejects action to address climate change, symbolised as “net zero”. She remains in the job for now, but her days are clearly numbered; as one Liberal MP told the channel nine papers during the week, “What was the point of voting for Sussan if we end up with the Nationals’ climate policy?”

As Bernard Keane, for one, pointed out last week, the Liberals have been here before. Sixteen years ago they dispatched a leader, Malcolm Turnbull, for the crime of having taken climate change seriously, turning instead to the hard right in the form of Tony Abbott. But Abbott, contrary to expectations, was an effective opposition leader; Labor panicked, abandoning first its plan for climate action and then the leader who had produced it, and the Coalition almost won the 2010 election, setting itself up for victory three years later.

Could it happen again? I won’t say it’s impossible, but there are some important differences. Turnbull came to grief over his reaction to the Rudd government’s proposal: the opposition had to choose between co-operation with the government and confrontation. But the current fracas within the Liberal Party is self-generated – the government isn’t giving them a target to hit, it’s just comfortably sitting back and watching them self-destruct.

The party was also better placed electorally in 2009. The 2007 defeat, although serious, had succeeded in saving much of the furniture. The Liberal Party emerged with more than a third of the lower house seats, including a substantial urban contingent. It now has only half as many, and has been almost wiped out in the major cities, where the Teals have emerged as an alternative for disaffected Liberals.

In 2009 the party’s self-styled “moderates” feared what Abbott might do for their electoral fortunes, but most of them were not really worried about their own seats. Now they are. MPs like Tim Wilson, who narrowly won Goldstein from the Teals in May, are facing almost certain defeat if they present with a denialist policy. That accounts for their greater visibility this time: they are still rolling over, but they are making more noise about it than they did then. Recapturing any sort of party unity will be harder for Andrew Hastie or Angus Taylor than it was for Abbott.

Moreover, 2009 was a different time. There was nothing like Donald Trump and his acolytes on the scene; even One Nation was quiescent. Since then the world has been reminded of the dangers of far-right politics, while extreme weather events have brought home the increasing urgency of climate action. And perhaps more than anything there’s the sheer improbability of Labor making as many unforced errors as it did in 2009-10. Surely lightning couldn’t strike twice in the same place?

Certainly some are dismissive of the idea. Pollster and former Labor strategist Kos Samaras argued at the weekend that the Liberals were acting in simple ignorance of or refusal to believe what the polls are saying; he blamed “amateurs with institutional power overruling professionals with data.” But while that’s no doubt part of the story, I think there’s more to it than that.

The hard right, whether in the party room or in the branches, aren’t just out for power; some of them are also true believers. For them, to win elections with moderate policies has no appeal: it would be a sort of apostasy. So winning and keeping control of the party is the priority. Elections can to some extent be left to look after themselves – with the party in their hands, they will be confident that one day Labor will screw up badly enough to lose office, regardless of what its opponents are doing. After all, that’s pretty much what happened in 2013.

So Ley, with more than two months still to go to overtake Alexander Downer and avoid the record of the shortest Liberal leadership tenure, is not looking a good bet. It seems unlikely that her execution will be as drawn out as that of former Victorian leader John Pesutto, who lasted an unhappy 21 months after his party first mutinied against his leadership, but her situation is otherwise similar.

And on the other side, Labor’s right wing is concerned that a Hastie-led Coalition will steal its clothes and thus discredit the policies – protectionism and social conservatism – that it wants Labor to adopt. But that will have to be a story for another day.