Not competing

Yes, sorry, it’s the Liberal Party again. It’s just too tempting, with the news yesterday that the party’s leaders are toying with the idea of a “non-compete” agreement with One Nation, in which each would allocate its resources so as to concentrate on fighting Labor rather than each other (I suggested this possibility back in February). Angus Taylor’s denial of such a plan was less than convincing.

What the Liberals really want to say to One Nation is something like the following: “Look, you just replace the National Party. We’ll concede some seats to you just the way we do (or did) to them, and we can have low-level contests in a few more, but you leave some rural seats and all (or nearly all) of the urban seats to us.”

And for the Liberal Party this makes complete sense. If One Nation was the sort of party that would agree to this it would work well for the Liberals and possibly even for the country. But it isn’t. The suggestion reveals a total misunderstanding of what One Nation is and where it is.

One Nation’s main strength is in the bush, but it’s not a rural party in the sense that the Nationals were (I think we can already start speaking of them in the past tense). It doesn’t exist to protect a particular economic interest, but to advance a particular view of the world. There is no easy geographical compromise available with the Liberals, and One Nation has no reason to concede anything to them: having already signalled that they will preference One Nation, what else do the Liberals have to offer in return?

The problem, from the Liberal point of view, is not the ideological incompatibility. One Nation is just a slightly stronger version of what the Nationals have been serving up for years – but the Liberals could live with the Nationals becoming a hard right party because by and large they accepted a subordinate position and stayed in their geographical lane.

On the one occasion when the Nationals seriously challenged in urban areas, in Queensland in the Bjelke-Petersen era, it was a disaster for the Liberals. Having rolled over to National demands for so long they were utterly ill-equipped for a fight and were reduced to minor party status. One Nation now poses the same sort of challenge nationwide, and the lesson is that if the Liberal Party wants to survive it has no choice but to fight, and fight hard.

There are different ways it could do that. It could offer an alternative ideological vision; it could endorse One Nation’s ideology but attack it as unfit to implement it; or it could reject the whole ideological project and insist on its status as a class-based party. The first option was closed off with the elevation of Tony Abbott, last month if not in 2009. With a far-right ideologue at the helm – and we can surely stop pretending that Abbott is anything less than that – we know that there will be no ideological crusade against One Nation.

But to concede the ideological ground in advance is a recipe for disaster, as several European centre-right parties have demonstrated. Moreover, to make the argument on competence, given the Liberal Party’s recent record, is going to be a hard sell. “Sure, we know we’re a dysfunctional lot, but just look how bad these other guys are!” will not appeal to many voters.

Taylor and his colleagues would much prefer the third option, to just ignore the things that make far right different from centre-right and go back to the comfortable world of class politics where the Liberal Party began. Pollster and pundit Kos Samaras, whom I don’t usually have much time for, put it well yesterday: “Menzies built the Liberal Party precisely to deny the fringe a foothold: a broad church anchored in the centre-right, big enough to make minor parties irrelevant. His successors are now negotiating the terms of their own irrelevance.”

Menzies’ world is gone. Fascism is back on the agenda, and pretending it isn’t there won’t make it go away.