The Liberal postmortem

One of the good things about the last decade or two in Australian politics – and good news on that score can be hard to find; we have to take what we can get – is that it’s become the norm for parties to make their internal reviews public. Back in 2011, for example, this was still sufficiently novel for me to remark on it in the case of Labor’s review of its performance in the previous year’s Victorian election.

So what on earth Liberal leader Angus Taylor and his followers were thinking (if “thinking” is not too generous a word) when they decided to suppress the party’s review of last year’s federal election is hard to fathom. It was blindingly obvious both that (a) the review would quickly leak into the public domain anyway and (b) it would get more damaging publicity as a result than if it had been quietly released in the ordinary way.

And sure enough, this week it all came out: Anthony Albanese tabled a leaked copy of the review in parliament on Tuesday, and it’s now all over the internet. You can read it at Channel Nine’s site here, or at Crikey’s here, or in many other places. It’s well worth a look.

Of course we did not need the review to tell us that last year’s Liberal campaign was a disaster. Moreover, there is a danger of post hoc reasoning with this sort of thing: as Peter Brent never tires of reminding us, perceptions of political campaigns are overwhelmingly driven by results. A leader who was until that point regarded as a genius will, after losing an election, suddenly be portrayed as having been useless all along (and conversely for the winner).

Some of that is happening here. Although there was the usual low-level grumbling, three months before last year’s election it was hard to find anyone who thought the Liberal leadership and campaign were anything worse than average. The review impressively documents a host of failings, but it neglects to ask how exceptional they were. Its authors do not seem to have considered whether similar things could have been said of previous, more successful, campaigns – except that in a successful campaign, nobody looks for these things.

It’s all too easy to assume that because a party is dysfunctional and lost an election badly, those two things must be causally related. And an internal review like this one is predisposed to think that, because internal problems – things like the timing of advertising, or the relationship between the secretariat and the leader’s office, or the number of female candidates – are, if not exactly easy to fix, at least relatively simple to propose solutions for.

If, by contrast, the real problem is to do with deeper structural or ideological factors, then addressing it would open a much bigger can of worms. To pick one example: the review contains a section (pp. 39-41) on Teal seats, with ideas for more effective campaigning against the Teals. But there is nothing in it about why voters might actually prefer Teal policies to those of the Liberals. What if the optimal strategy for the party is not to fight the Teals but to lure them back into the fold, as it did with the Liberal Movement in the 1970s? The review is unable to consider a question like that.

Similarly, on page 19, there is a discussion of the effect on the campaign of the growing unpopularity of Donald Trump. The review concludes that this “required a nimble and flexible response from the Opposition Leader and emphatic demonstration that there was no similarity between the two.” It therefore simply ignores the fact that objectively there was a similarity between Trump and Peter Dutton: the perception was a problem because the underlying reality was a problem.

While I don’t dispute that in this election they were worse than usual, the problems that the review identifies are not new. (The review even notes that previous reviews have made the same points and been ignored.) Rivalry between the parliamentary leadership and the organisation was baked into the party from the start; over-centralisation of campaigns has been complained about for decades; so have rushed preselections, inadequate policy development and pollsters who are high on their own supply. Addressing these and other problems would be well worthwhile, but it still would not really tackle the problem of why the party lost so badly this time.

The fundamental problem is that the party has decided to become something that voters do not want, and to preach to those voters rather than trying to convert them. (For more detail, see my series last month on “Crisis on the right”.) But the review does not tell us that: perhaps because its principals, Pru Goward and Nick Minchin, had different perspectives on it, or because they knew that such a message would just be ignored, or simply because it was all too hard.

Nonetheless, there is an ideological message there if you read between the lines. The review knows that the Liberal Party has lost touch with mainstream Australia and has no plan to recover. It cannot present it with such a plan and cannot even openly admit to the need for one, but every now and then pieces of the reality seep through, as with the quote on page 36 (attributed to “Several unsuccessful metropolitan candidates and senators”) that “the Liberal Party needs to understand Australia as it is and not how we would like it to be.”

As Bernard Keane points out, that is enough to explain why Taylor, determined to make no concession to the interests of women, young people and (especially) immigrants, was so reluctant to see the review made public. Or perhaps he is really just a deep cover agent for the Teals and was trying to give it the maximum possible publicity.