A lot’s been written already about how over the coming months Malcolm Turnbull needs to placate the hard rightwing base among his voters and especially in his party room. To some extent that’s true; the Liberal party room supported Turnbull in large part because they felt Abbott’s policy direction was out of kilter with whatever they understand Liberal party values to be.
So Turnbull shouldn’t make the mistake of excluding dissenting voices among his base from his decision-making process. After all, that was his downfall the first time around.
The bigger challenge for the new prime minister is to define a clear right-of-centre vision for the Liberal party that pays heed to changing social attitudes and expectations of government among voters.
That will mean defining who the Liberal party is for, because the Abbott government was very good at telling us who it was against: boats, gay couples who want to get married, terrorists, journalists, the ALP and the Greens.
Tony Abbott and his ministers weren’t very good at telling us who the government’s policies were ultimately intended to benefit, which might explain why those policies were often so wildly inconsistent.
In the past, the Liberal party has sought to define its constituency as the upwardly mobile middle class. But the net effect of policies advocated and undertaken under the Abbott government has effectively destroyed goodwill among this constituency.
The failed GP copayment tax, fuel excise increases, GST changes, the “Netflix tax” – all of these are policies that resonate poorly with exactly the group of people that the Liberal party has previously claimed to speak for. These policies actively cost the aspirational middle class money, and in doing so, threaten their upward mobility.
There’s a fair overlap between the set of swinging voters and the set of upwardly mobile middle class voters, which is of course why Howard was so keen to sweeten the deal for them with directly personally-relevant economic policies, like income tax cuts aimed at middle income earners.
And in Howard’s early years at least, these economic policies were delivered within a broader ideological framework of deregulation, competition, and improving market efficiency. Liberal economics 101.
Now, that might not do it for you but dude (apologies to Jeff Bridges) at least it’s an ethos. And it’s probably an ethos that the Liberal party will have get back to.
The great tension in the Liberal party, and especially within the Coalition, is between those who are motivated by deregulated and open markets and tend to be more socially liberal, and those who are primarily motivated by conservative values - and tend to deprioritise market-based approaches to policy if they conflict with their conservative social vision.
This, as poorly articulated as it was, was what we saw from Abbott: the prioritisation of often ridiculous culture wars issues above core messages on jobs for the future and economic management.
The problem, as has been made abundantly clear by the events of the last week, is that nobody was buying what Abbott was selling. He’s talking about knights and dames, Islamic State and union corruption, when what people really want to know is more fundamental: Will I have a job next year? Will my kids have a job in the future? Are my schools and hospitals up to standard?
The “vision thing” is important. Which is why Turnbull’s biggest challenge is to answer these questions within an ideologically consistent framework. How does the Liberal party’s vision of the journey to the future differ from the ALP’s and why should we care?
So how does a modern right-of-centre political party define itself? A charge I often hear from social conservatives is that “you can’t win elections from the left”. But modern politics has, as it so often does, proved them wrong. Look to the successful and long-term right-of-centre governments of David Cameron, John Key and Angela Merkel, all of whom have been frothed at by the hard right outrage squad for various social policy thoughtcrimes.
Failure to adapt to changing social attitudes is not a mark of success. But the Party’s rejection of Abbott’s DLP-era conservatism is unhinging the hard right commentariat. It seems a large part of the problem for them is that for their particular brand of oppositional conservatism, the end is very much in sight.
It all feels a bit out of touch, doesn’t it? Railing against gay marriage when 72% of Australians support it; decrying climate change as a myth when a majority of Australians believe there is at least some blame to be laid at the door of humans; and insisting that the ABC is some hotbed of leftist insurgency when trust in the public broadcaster is actually pretty high.
It’s one thing to abandon your values, but conservative values have never told the entire story of the Liberal party. And political values need to adapt to changing public attitudes, which are increasingly unconcerned by moralistic social policy, and more concerned with what government can do to make life easier and less costly.
So for Turnbull, it’s time to dismiss the conservative dinosaurs and get back to explaining to voters how the Liberal Party works to benefit individuals where it matters most: in their hip pocket.
