Crisis on the right, part 1

The big story in Australian politics so far this year has been the surge in the polls for our far-right party, One Nation, and the consequent disarray in the Liberal and National parties. The coalition between the latter, patched up last May after a brief split, has now broken down again, with both parties torn by infighting over their leadership. An opinion poll last week showed the combined Liberal and National vote down to 21%, three points behind One Nation and ten points down from their record low at last year’s federal election.

This is far from unique to Australia. The rise of the far right is a world-wide phenomenon, producing debate and disunity in centre-right parties (and not only there) about how to deal with it. But Australia is one of a small group of countries whose centre-right parties seem to face an existential threat: whether of being replaced by a far-right party (as in Britain and France) or of being taken over by far-right forces from within (as in the United States). The Australian case has elements of both.

Voting systems matter. It is no coincidence that all four countries have single-member districts rather than proportional representation. In proportional systems, a vote is a vote; if you get extra votes, it doesn’t much matter where they’re coming from, you still get the benefit. But competition under single-member districts is more cut-throat, because parties are fighting for actual chunks of territory. They have to win votes in particular places, and that often means having to beat parties who might otherwise be their allies. (We’ve seen this on the other side of the spectrum, in the relationship between Labor and the Greens.)

So for most of its history Australia has had a two-party system (with the Nationals a sort of permanent auxiliary of the Liberals), with the parties both covering broad ideological ranges. That breadth makes the present crisis hard to understand, because the Liberal Party is actually trying to bridge not one but two ideological divides: between liberal and conservative, and between centre-right and far right.

To try to disentangle what’s going on it might help to look at the history. The Liberal Party was explicitly established as a big tent, embracing both liberals and conservatives, united by a common interest in opposing socialism and working-class politics. Over time, some of the liberals drifted away – first in the 1960s to the Australia Party, later to the Liberal Movement and the Australian Democrats – but many stayed, forming an important component of the party at least until the 1990s.

No doubt there were also some Liberal voters from the start who could be described as far right, but in the early days no-one much worried about them. The biggest war in human history had just been fought to defeat fascism, so its adherents stayed pretty quiet (and from the mid-50s some of them were siphoned off by the DLP). But as memories of the war faded, and as the threat of socialism diminished, ideological tension within the Liberal Party began to rise.

By 1996, when One Nation first appeared, the three currents of centrist/liberal, centre-right/conservative and far right were all trying to coexist within the same party. In a proportional system, such as in most of Europe, they would have constituted separate viable parties, which might have co-operated (or not) on an ad hoc basis. In Australia, however, the electoral system discouraged that route: One Nation flourished for a short time, as did the Democrats in the centre (with the Greens also taking some centrist voters, although their philosophical pedigree was rather different), but mostly the three stayed and fought for control of the Liberal Party.

For a long time the conservatives had the upper hand. Under the ascendancy of John Howard they kept the liberals in check, but at the price of admitting the far right to a share of influence on the other side. One Nation faded to irrelevance, with many of its policies adopted by the Liberal Party. Howard was a skilful enough political operator to keep the balancing act going, but by destroying the equilibrium between liberals and conservatives he set the party on a course for disaster.

The liberal vs conservative struggle dragged on until 2018, when the second deposition of Malcolm Turnbull confirmed that liberals would not be permitted any real power within the party. Meanwhile the rise of Donald Trump had boosted the far-right wing. Voters who sympathised with the liberal side started deserting in droves, and in 2022 the Teals were able to ride that disaffection into a substantial presence in parliament from what had once been heartland Liberal seats.

The Liberal Party in effect was left with just two possible directions, either centre-right/conservative or far-right/Trumpist. It tried to straddle them by choosing a centre-right leader and giving her a far-right platform to fight on; like its counterparts in Britain, it discovered that this just gave voters a licence to shift to the far right. If we’re going to get Trumpist policies anyway, why not vote for someone, a Nigel Farage or a Pauline Hanson, who really believes in them?

But the alternative is far from clear, and not just because Sussan Ley’s opponents can’t agree on which of her two challengers to support. Again it’s the problem of the electoral system. European centre-right parties can have a sensible debate about whether, and how much or on what terms, to engage with their countries’ far-right parties. But for the Liberals, compromise on any terms with One Nation (or for that matter with the Teals, were anyone minded to try that) is fraught with difficulty because they are fighting for much the same territory.

So tomorrow we’ll continue the story by moving from history to geography.