Betrayal at the top

Both Liberal and National parties have confirmed that they will recommend preferences to One Nation in the Farrer by-election, to be held on 9 May. You can see the Liberal how-to-vote card yourself here: David Farley is the One Nation candidate, numbered “4”, well ahead of his most serious opponent, Teal independent (although not branded that way – her color is orange) Michelle Milthorpe, numbered “9”.

This is a scandal. In fact, it’s two different scandals.

It’s a scandal firstly because these preferences matter. Most of the time, major party preferences are only symbolic, but that’s not the case in Farrer. Labor is not running a candidate, and it’s very likely that Liberal and National will both be eliminated, with their preferences deciding between One Nation and Teal. If the far right wins, it will win its first-ever seat in the House of Representatives courtesy of Coalition preferences.

Although it’s taken a battering lately, we still have fundamentally a two-party system. It is therefore always understandable, if not defensible, when those parties treat each other as the main enemy and preference whoever else is available ahead of the other major party. That’s how One Nation achieved its first successes, in Queensland in 1998, when the Coalition parties without much thought put it ahead of Labor on their how-to-vote cards.

But that’s not what’s happening here. Labor is not an option; this is not a case of Liberals and Nationals saying, well, better One Nation than the Albanese government. This is a community-based independent, clearly somewhere in the centre of the spectrum, in no way a threat to normal politics. But the Coalition parties regard her election as such an awful prospect that they are willing instead to open the door to the fascists.

We already knew that the new Coalition leaders, Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan, were keen to narrow the policy differences between their parties and One Nation. Foolish as that is, it need not extend to assisting One Nation itself – indeed, Canavan’s rhetoric had suggested that he was willing to treat the far right as an enemy. Yet here we are.

But that brings us to the second scandal. Where is the outrage? A major party has gone rogue; one of the two pillars of our political system has abdicated its role, becoming an assailant instead of a defender. Why is this not front page news?

The Guardian has the story, but it’s hardly in a prominent position. (The Australian has it too, if you think of it as a newspaper.) But not a mention that I could find in this morning’s Age, and almost nothing in the electronic media. I understand that people by now might be desensitised to stories about the decline of the Liberal Party, but this is more than a routine failure: this is treason against the fundamental values of Australian democracy.

Perhaps vigorous editorials are being prepared; perhaps George Brandis even now is writing a scorching op-ed. But I somehow doubt it. More likely, I think, is that the Coalition parties have passed a point of no return without even noticing it go by. And the media, the watchdogs that we set to guard against precisely this sort of betrayal, have simply stopped caring.

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

ADDENDUM, Friday: James Campbell in comments kindly points out his column on the subject in yesterday’s Herald Sun. It’s not a paper I would normally link to, but his analysis is very good. In one sense it illustrates my point, because his outrage is over the Coalition’s strategic stupidity rather than moral bankruptcy, but of course the two complement each other.

As Campbell explains, electing a One Nation MP – giving it, in his words, a “beachhead in the House of Representatives in a regional seat that resembles basically every National Party and regional Liberal electorate in the country” – would be a political disaster for the Coalition. It would make it impossible to avoid the implication that it is willing to govern in partnership with the far right, and “If the Liberals don’t understand how hard selling a Taylor-Canavan-Hanson government will be, they seriously can’t be helped.”

Campbell’s diagnosis of why this is happening is that the Liberal and National leaderships are frightened of their own branch members, who insist on treating One Nation as allies: the “demand for a unity ticket is too great to ignore.” (He doesn’t mention that part of the reason branch members think this way is that they’ve been fed a diet of paranoid fantasies from News Ltd, his employer.)

I’m not so sure about this, in that I think party leaders are quite capable of ignoring branch sentiment when it suits them. But his description of that sentiment is sadly all too accurate. Nor is it new. The last word can go to one D. Handley, a letter writer to the Sydney Morning Herald almost thirty years ago (1 December 1997):

As any other short-lived and former member of the Liberal Party will tell you, the average party member is a very close cousin of Pauline Hanson. Previously among Liberals these people were considered bores who drove everyone else away from party meetings. Now it seems this type is all that is left.

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Disclosure: For reasons that should be obvious from the post, I will be volunteering to assist on the Milthorpe campaign.