A Liberal split isn’t just viable, it’s necessary

Senator James Paterson offers the correct diagnosis but the wrong solution to the Liberal Party’s woes. Most likely it cannot offer the right solution.

In his speech at the meeting Tom Hughes’ speech last nightPaterson – after correctly noting that the Albanian government’s war on transparency is the work of third world autocracies (omitting that his side is no better, often worse) he suggested:

The reality is that, despite these abuses of power, there is no way Anthony Albanese or Labor will ever become the natural party of government at the federal level. Only the failure of the Liberal Party can achieve this. If you want to understand what the consequences of a settled, long-term Labor government would be like, just look at Victoria. Take it from me, it’s not nice. We have a moral duty to prevent the Victorianization of Australia.

This is exactly right: there is a significant risk that a damaged and electorally impotent federal Liberal Party will federally deliver what a deeply dysfunctional and malevolent Victorian Liberal Party has provided in Victoria: a virtual one-party government that allows a mediocre and often corrupt Labor government to lay waste to the state’s finances amid a rising and dangerous crime wave and a disastrous infrastructure. state. agenda.

But what to do? Paterson is particularly excited by the now-gaining suggestion that it will be impossible for the Liberals to win back the metropolitan seats they lost by the dozens in the last election, that a new center-right party is needed to rally the votes of moderate, affluent urban communities whose ranks include right-wing culture warriors and climate deniers and who once voted almost reflexively for the Liberals.

… There are some marginal voices arguing that the Liberal Party should be split. They argue that the differences between people who call themselves “conservatives” and “liberals” today are unbridgeable and that we should go our separate ways. Our job is to ensure that these voices remain marginalized. Because if they were successful it would be a disaster for the Liberal Party and Australia.

This is where Paterson’s assessment goes off the rails. There is a threshold problem in his analysis: there are no conservatives left in the Liberal Party. Genuine conservatism in the liberal ranks has been overthrown by right-wing populism, a politics of resentment from angry old white people and corporations like News Corp that profit from their alienation. This is the politics of culture wars, oppression, climate denialism, hostility to immigration, hostility to evidence-based policies and durable public institutions, even hostility to traditional free market economics.

Paterson, a graduate of the increasingly far-right Institute of Public Affairs, proves this himself. It confirms Peter Dutton’s commitment to nuclear energy, an idea more about culture wars and climate denialism than serious public policy. Nuclear energy in Australia antithesis It’s an example of a conservative policy: It radically changes the role of the federal government to become a generator of energy production, calls for hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending or makes the government sign up to truly massive and risk-laden debt guarantees, ignores the evidence of nuclear power construction in other Western countries, and relies on fantasy about small modular reactors that literally don’t exist in any meaningful sense.

And Paterson is emulating Dutton in opposing immigration. For Paterson, the Liberal Party is not the party of Malcolm Fraser, who welcomed Vietnamese refugees against Labour’s racist hostility, or even the party of John Howard, who combined tough border enforcement with high immigration. This hostility to immigration stems not from liberal or conservative traditions, but from the far right, policies that old white people complain about, and MAGA Republicanism in the United States. The right tells itself that immigration will be the issue that will bring them back to power, but that Former Coalition voters in regional communities They hate immigration much more than young people in cities (who are probably the least exposed to immigrants of anyone in the country).

Most importantly, Paterson wants to continue fighting the culture wars; Even Dutton felt this did not help the Liberals’ cause. “We are often told that we need to stop fighting the ‘culture wars,’” he says. “But that doesn’t mean the culture wars are over. It just means we cave in to the left beforehand against them.”

This is a perfect example of the old white victimhood narrative; It is the right that is the unfortunate victim of angry progressives, acting only in self-defense when they take jabs at Indigenous people, Muslims, trans people, women, “progressive elites.”

As News Corp has masterfully demonstrated, culture wars are good for selling newspapers because journalism no longer makes money. These are not for politicians who want to appeal to mainstream Australians who vote based on their perception of who will best manage the economy, living costs and essential services. Culture wars are a form of right-wing virtue signaling and identity politics; It’s a surefire way to show voters that you’re not focused on their needs, just as virtue signaling and identity politics dominate progressive political rhetoric.

But all of this makes perfect sense because Paterson is not a conservative. He is a right winger. He may seem more reasonable with his endless appearances in the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft and support Sussan Ley for now, but he is merely a more attractive version of everything the moderate Liberals must run from if they are to begin the operation to rally the centre-right in the urban electorate. And as Paterson correctly observed, the rescue operation cannot come soon enough.