London, 7 February 1769 may seem a distant place to begin a discussion about the troubles of Australia’s Liberal party. Bear with me. In the context of recent events, lessons in both history and the political usefulness of a long memory have become imperative.
That particular date marks the publication of a letter in The Public Advertiser, where a writer known as Junius drubbed the ministry of King George III. “If the affections of the colonies have been alienated,” he mocked, “if Corsica has been shamefully abandoned, if commerce languishes, if public credit is threatened with new debt, and your own Manilla ransom must be dishonourably given up, it has all been owing to the malice of political writers, who will not suffer the best and brightest characters ... to take a single right step, for the honour or interest of the nation.”
The habit of those with power to blame others for their haplessness, is of course, somewhat more than 249 years old. Yet to observe its persistence, one need look no further than the Twitter account of backbench MP Tony Abbott – once upon a time, prime minister. Last week he laid into commentator Peter van Onselen accusations of “unsubstantiated bile”, demanding to know “if my office was so hopeless why is my former deputy COS (chief of staff) now director of the Liberal Party ...?”
More unsubstantiated bile from @vanOnselenP. If my office was so hopeless why is my former deputy COS now director of the Liberal Party and why does my former COS rate more highly than PVO ever did?
— Tony Abbott (@TonyAbbottMHR) March 26, 2018
This exhibition of behaviour is so antique it borders on the charming. Abbott’s real problem is that van Onselen has already answered his question, as well as affirmed the resonance of Junius to the political moment.
The pretext given by Malcolm Turnbull for rolling Abbott from the prime ministership was Abbott’s loss of 30 consecutive Newspolls. Turnbull has just endured a 29th defeat, the backbench are restless and the ghost of John Howard has stirred from its crypt to give advice. But van Onselen’s of the opinion that Turnbull “needn’t worry”. “There is no challenger this time around,” he said, “not even a viable alternative.”
Old Junius’ invocation of “the best and brightest” to mean somewhat the opposite – the first recorded instance of the phrase – is the crux of the Liberal party’s contemporary problem. Because van Onselen is right: even if a challenger emerges, who’ve the Liberals really got? Leaving aside the obligation for a prime minister to be drawn from the lower house, and not the Senate, let’s Fantasy Football the available players for a poll-turnaround challenge match. Julie Bishop? Christian Porter? Peter “Dead to Me” Dutton?
Michaelia Cash is bedevilled by press questions about those AWU raids . Matt Canavan thinks he was elected to the Senate by an electorate entirely of coal barons. Alan Tudge transformed Centrelink from a service provider into a digitised fiasco. Scott Morrison seemingly enjoys creative interpretation on the subject of economic “facts”.
Their individual failures are within inept company. As I write this, a movement of Coalition MPs are insisting Australia should open more coal-fired power stations. In policy terms, they might as well holler “the future is farthingales!” or demand greater government investment in wig powder, the industry of the now.
It’s kinda threadbare. How it got to this isn’t even a question of an ideological “my-side-good-their-side-bad” polarity so much as the logical consequence of the ideology the Liberals hold.
After the economy was transitioned to a neoliberal framework in the 1970s and 80s by successive Liberal and Labor governments, the Howard Coalition government’s record-breaking wealth transfer to the rich in the 1990s was a crowning structural achievement for the party of big business, creating conditions beyond favourable to their base. If one is a private-wealth-oriented, small-government, corporate Tory of any talent, taking a massive pay cut to pursue public office lacks logical appeal, especially now that the “pollie’s pension” is gone. Alan Joyce is banking $25m a year. Execs of lower-level enterprises bring home more than an MP does.
Yes, Turnbull and other wealthy Liberals may indeed have enough pre-existing fortune to indulge politics as a personal interest, but vanity projects are rarely popular and 29 losing Newspolls tend to agree. Of all the political movements represented in the parliament, only pro-business conservatives lose more from representing their constituency than joining it.
Let’s not limit analysis of the malaise to federal politics, so much as a rot movement-wide. On Good Friday, Victorian opposition leader, Matthew Guy, ratted on a pairing deal with the Labor party. By sneaking back into the chamber two members who’d earlier pled to be excused for religious observance, he gained two extra numbers in a vote at the expense of generations of parliamentary convention. He has bragged about doing so, and said he would do it again.
Guy would be rewarded with a read of The Best and Brightest. The 1972 book chronicles how a handpicked generation of American policymakers with “brilliant policies that defied common sense” mired that nation in the ongoing disaster of the Vietnam war.
One suggests – without malice – that if your best just ain’t that bright, Corsica is the least of your problems, and political disaster historically inevitable.
- Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
