One of the great Liberal party pastimes is to simultaneously look for both scapegoats and Messiahs.
Sussan Ley is today’s scapegoat, and Angus Taylor is its new Messiah.
While it’s easy to make Ley the fall girl for the Liberal party’s current problems, the truth of it is there’s no personality or tactical solution to the party’s core problem that an increasing number of voters don’t believe they have shared values with the Liberal party.
In politics, values are more important than policies. Policies are an expression and extension of a candidate or party’s values.
Values help define what candidates and political parties stand for, not what they are against.
In all of our research, voters are most interested in shared values: what values do political parties hold, how are those values personally relevant to them, and how do they translate into real world results and outcomes. It seems like a trite point, but voters want to know what you’re about, and what you can do for them.
Campaigning on a message that “we’re not Labor” or “we’re not Liberal” is a shapeless position. It communicates nothing about a vision for the future, and the sort of society we want Australia to be in three years, 10 years, and 50 years.
But in qualitative research we have conducted over the past five years, soft voters are more readily able to identify which constituencies the Liberal party are against and less able to articulate who they are for.
These voters are in the market for economic policies that offer them hope, but in recent electoral cycles the Liberal party have gradually lost economic management as a campaign equity to leverage. In our focus group research, if voters think the Liberal party are “better at economic management”, it’s only due to a fading historical perception.
In our most recent national sample poll, taken last fortnight, just 19% of Australian voters believe that the Coalition are the better economic managers. Somewhat relatedly, that figure of 19% is also the Coalition’s current primary vote share.
If Taylor is going to turn around the Liberal party’s fortunes, he will need to rebuild the party’s equity on economic management with personally relevant policies to differentiate from Labor.
If Taylor is smart, the Liberal party can own the economy again. But that’s going to require re-engaging with the electorate on issues that are personally relevant and not be distracted by fringe debates that only animate fringe constituencies.
At the moment, there’s no bigger or more important economic policy to most voters than housing attainability. Housing attainability is the new political fault line in Australian politics.
That’s in part because in Australia we tax income punitively, but we tax wealth at nominal levels, and we’ve allowed wealth to accumulate in property as an asset and investment class through favourable tax concessions and superannuation treatments.
The effect of that untaxed wealth transfer will be to entrench generational wealth in this country, and we are going to see a sharper divide between those born into families whose wealth is represented by capital assets taxed at nominal rates, versus the aspirational class paying effective marginal income tax rates of around 50%.
That sharp and expanding divide is in part responsible for the current fragmentation of the vote. In our last national sample poll, the combined non-major party vote was 47%. At the last federal election it was 33%. In 1996, when John Howard was first elected, the non-major party vote was just 14%.
Rebalancing this equation with significant income tax cuts for the aspirational class, including the expanding Gen Z and Millennial classes which are typically locked out of the property market, with a more reasonable taxation regime for the asset class is an economic and moral challenge that we must address.
No government or political party has engaged in significant debate about economic reform since Howard and Costello in 1999. There’s a good reason for that – economic reform is difficult to communicate, particularly in today’s fragmented media market among a largely politically disengaged and despondent audience.
The Liberal party can only rebuild its brand by articulating a long-term values-based narrative with the electorate.
To do that, Taylor will need to cast the net wide in the Menzies and Howard tradition and accept that the Liberal party has people with a range of views on a wide variety of topics, and almost all of those views can be accommodated. It also means accepting that the idea of compromise and acknowledgement of difference is actually a good thing.
That also means giving people a reason to be Liberals – values to aspire to, not litmus tests that demand that unless people subscribe to a particular view, they are somehow not a ‘real Liberal’ or not a part of the ‘real Australia’. Dismissing those constituencies is not the path to electoral success.
If Taylor is going to return the Liberal party to a competitive position in those urban electorates where they are currently polling around 20%, he needs to pitch a message to these voters that if you share a vision of a free and expansive Australia, if you aspire to own a home, run your own business, educate your children in accordance with your own values, create wealth in a way that makes not just your life and your children’s lives better, but also contributes to the prosperity and connectedness of your communities, then you belong with the Liberal party.
The Liberal party used to see itself as a “big tent” before it began imposing litmus tests and reasons for internal difference rather than a prioritisation of common ground which has only succeeded in turning itself into a ‘small tent’. Unless Angus Taylor can align Liberal values with economic policies that demonstrate those values, there’ll be no Liberal tent left.
• Tony Barry is a former Liberal party strategist who has worked for Christopher Pyne and Malcolm Turnbull. He now runs political research company RedBridge Group and is a regular media commentator
