At the moment the Liberal party is a burnt and broken enterprise and to repair it may be quite impossible.
Tony Abbott’s baton of failure has been passed to Malcolm Turnbull. The party is stuck in a miserable warp that locks out the country’s crying unresolved issues, and there’s no one in the wings with the integrity, intellect and command to drag it out of its pitiable state.
The great issues of the day that define who we are as a country were not part of the Coalition’s play sheet, and this includes: climate change, offshore imprisonment of refugees and marriage equality. Instead, we had the mirage of an economic “plan” for jobs and growth, which on closer inspection turned out to be trickle-down economics based on a bunch of tax cuts for the better off.
Turnbull says he can form a majority government, in which event it will be a sour little victory – a victory without a mandate. The hard-right soul of the party is also in flames – just look at what happened in Tasmania where Senator Eric Abetz’s Christian regressives run the local machine. There’s no moral authority to be found there – all we might hope for is that now he sits quietly in a corner for a very long time.
The party started to take a primordial direction under John Howard, who is now paraded as a patron saint. The Liberals failed to heed the message that was delivered in 2007 when the saint was flung ignominiously by voters out of his own seat.
Turnbull and Scott Morrison crying foul on Saturday night about Labor party lies was a treat to behold. The “we wus robbed” line coming from the people who brought us children overboard, Islamic scares, the “intelligence” for the Iraq war and fake budget projections is an exciting new audacity. Even the party’s very name is a lie.
The campaign was laced with warnings about “hung parliaments”, “vote sharing fiascos”, “chaos”. The obverse is that MPs should be puppets and parliament a rubber stamp for the party with the majority of seats, doing what the executive commands – yet “stability” has not been a uniform feature of the long history of Westminster-style parliaments. Indeed, the Senate has ensured that in Australia hung parliaments are the norm and minority governments are not unknown.
Importantly, this state of affairs is not always unworkable. Julia Gillard’s government operated both as a minority and in a hung parliament quite effectively, even if chaotically.
With the support of crossbenchers and the Greens, the Gillard Labor government passed 561 bills through parliament, not one of which was defeated on the floor of the House of Representatives, including the National Broadband Network, the carbon tax, the resource rent tax (even though it turned out not to be very effective), the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the household assistance package, and pension increases. Despite the raucous attacks from the Coalition, by any standard it was an effective government.
The federal election of September 1940 delivered a hung parliament in wartime. Menzies lost the confidence of the House with the result that John Curtin emerged as Australia’s most important prime minister. And it’s not as though that parliament sat on its hands – it passed the Statute of Westminster, legislation that gave Australia its own sovereignty, and created a uniform income tax regime, one of the most powerful public policy instruments. The Senate was hostile to Labor 21 to 15. Political historian Rodney Cavalier argued that Australia today lives “in the shadow of the 1940 parliament more than any other”.
The election of December 1961 produced a situation most akin to today’s circumstances. The House of Representatives was then composed of 124 seats and following the election, and after provision of a speaker, the Menzies coalition clung on with a majority of one: 61-60. That was because the two Labor members for the territories were only permitted to vote on matters that affected the ACT and NT.
The wafer thin majority did not impede Menzies entering the great pantheon of do-little conservative heroes.
The mother of Westminster parliaments is also the mother of all hung parliaments where prime ministers have frequently failed to win majorities on the floor of the Commons – most notably and recently David Cameron in 2010, resulting in a Conservative Liberal-Democrat power sharing arrangement but an effective government nonetheless.
In fact, governments that control both houses invariably flop. Malcolm Fraser’s government had control of the Senate for a time and it is widely believed not to have done anything much with this unique opportunity. On the other hand, when the same advantage was delivered to the Howard government in 2004, the Senate was treated dismissively and arrogantly, the beginning of the hubris that saw voters turn the tide.
A government that has to fight for its ideas and legislation on the edge of a razor is no bad thing. The contest is more alive and substantial arguments have a better chance of winning the day.
One encouraging aspect of the 2016 election result is that the very best and worst efforts of the Murdoch press have not mattered a hill of beans in the outcome. If anything, the over-larded bias proved to be counterproductive to anyone other than the rapidly decreasing clutch of rusted on believers.
Now the smugness and swagger has been taken down a notch, or 10, from a Coalition that has assumed a god-given right to rule.
I remember two elections ago standing in the queue outside a polling station in the seat of Wentworth when a van pulled into the kerb, the door flung open to disgorge a small tribe of Turnbulls. Father and Mother Turnbull, little Daisy Turnbull and some retainers.
While Father Turnbull worked the queue, from which no one could escape, pumping hands and spreading charm, young Daisy bounced up and down advising the slack-jawed constituents that her father is “awesome”.
Alas, awesome no more.
