Malcolm Fraser and the Teals

There was a flurry of excitement a couple of weeks ago with claims that Australia’s Teals – centrist-cum-progressive independents elected with the backing of Climate 200 – were planning to convert themselves into a political party. The claims were met with at best lukewarm confirmation from some Teals, and outright rejection from others and from Teal-adjacent MPs.

My view is that their determination to remain independent, while no doubt well-meaning, is ultimately foolish. For a host of good reasons, parties are the main vehicle for democratic political activity, and if the Teals aim to have continuing relevance then I think organisation as a party, or at least something very like one, is the way to go. The need is particularly strong since one of our two traditional major parties seems determined to deal itself into irrelevance.

Similar thoughts seem to have prompted Mike Steketee, writing last week at Inside Story, to revisit a previous abortive attempt to launch a new party: the project that Malcolm Fraser worked on in the last years of his life. Steketee says “It is striking how many of the issues identified [in its founding statement] align with the current debate,” but notes that the effort fizzled out after Fraser’s death in 2015.

As it happens, I reviewed the idea of the Fraser party at the time, raising the question (otherwise curiously absent from the discussion) of why Fraser and his associates didn’t just join the Greens:

For many refugees from the Liberal Party, that question has an intelligible answer: while rejecting tribal conservatism, they remain economic liberals and therefore are uncomfortable with the host­ility to the free market found among many Greens. But that is manifestly an answer not avail­able to the Fraserites, whom the document reveals to be – as one might expect from Fraser’s history – every bit as sceptical of the market as the Greens are.

A side issue for many ex-Liberals would be wariness about the Greens’ tendency to utopianism in international affairs, which slides easily into a reflexive anti-Americanism. But not surprisingly, the Fraser manifesto follows them down the same path.

In these respects, it seems to me, the Teals stand on the opposite side to the Fraserites of an indistinct but very real divide. They are by and large free-marketers and not anti-American (not, that is, anti pre-Trump America). But Fraser had always been dirigiste in his economics, and in his later years his views on foreign policy veered towards Putinism. He would not have been a good fit at all with a Teal party.

Things have changed, of course, in the intervening decade. Whereas then I suggested it was mainly a class barrier keeping Fraser away from the Greens – “The Fraser group would feel that to muck in and make common cause with the Greens would be to get their hands dirty” – in more recent times the Greens have gone further left in ways that would make them a less attractive ally to both Fraserites and Teals.

But the rest of the spectrum has changed as well. In 2015 it was a matter of the Liberal Party choosing whether it wanted to be a liberal party or a conservative party, and the more it decided on the latter (as it conclusively did with the second deposition of Malcolm Turnbull in 2018), the more a space seemed to open up for a new alternative on the liberal side. That is still, roughly, the space that the Teals aim to fill.

Now, however, the Liberal Party, and perhaps the political community more generally, faces a further choice, between conservatism and Trumpism, or centre-right and far right. Having given up its claim to be a liberal party, it is now being urged by powerful voices to also give up the claim to be a centre-right party and reinvent itself as a junior partner to One Nation.

That is more than a liberal vs conservative question: a party can be conservative while still firmly shutting the door to the far right (witness, for example, Germany’s Christian Democrats). But if the Liberal Party continues to give the Hansonist answer, then what we will need is not specifically a new liberal party, but a new centre-right party: a party to fill the niche that the Liberals are abandoning.

I don’t think that’s what Climate 200 and a lot of the other Teal backers are looking for; they have a much more clearly progressive option in mind. A Teal party would stand to the left of Labor in some respects, which a substitute Liberal Party can hardly do. But however the different projects are reconciled, somehow we have to try to find space for two major parties that are both in the mainstream.

As I’ve said before, and as the US demonstrates with dreadful clarity, a two-party system where only one party can safely be allowed to hold power is a recipe for disaster.