It’s the endgame for Liberal moderates. Here’s what happens next
Mainstream news has created the illusion that the Federal Liberal Party’s “Moderates” were still important before the net zero vote; Michael Pascoe He says the group is already nearing the end of a seven-year decline.
More coverage was given to the coalition turmoil than the Melbourne Cup, but missing was the fact that the Liberal Moderates had been scraped ahead of the race. A curtain was drawn around them. It’s just a matter of the vet coming to finish the job.
Switching from horse metaphor to dog metaphor, I’ve written about this before and it’s worth writing again: Queensland’s LNP is the Coalition dog, the Liberal Party is the tail, while the “Moderates” are just fleas on the tail.
And last week the hybrid showed off a new anti-flea collar and ingested a double dose of NexGard, which also covers ticks and worms.
What is overlooked is how few fleas are left to deal with and how they have been jumping off the dog for seven years.
flea escape hound
Leaving aside the Queensland LNP hybrids, there are only two Midrange candidates left with a city seat. There’s Tim Wilson at Melbourne’s Goldstein and Julian Leeser at Sydney’s Berowra, and there’s even quite a bit of bush at the northern end too.
Wilson won back his seat by just 175 votes. Leeser fell nearly six percent, reducing its margin to 3.2 percent. The LNP’s climate policy will not benefit either of them at the next election.
There are probably only three other moderate MPs: Susan Ley, Mary Aldred and Melissa Price, all rural/regional.
The moderates’ power is in the Senate, which is, loosely speaking, a sheltered workshop for members who have lost their House seats or have little chance of winning them, in terms of what eight people can do; here our binary politics provides party votes, and the real choice of Senators is their party primary.
Eight – Dave Sharma, Maria Kovacic and Andrew Bragg from NSW; Anne Ruston, Kerrynne Liddle and (maybe) Andrew McLachlan SA; Richard Colbeck Tasmania; Jane Hume Victoria – has varying expiration dates. The right’s persistence and financial support, as well as mid-level members abandoning a party that no longer represents them, does not bode well for future primary battles.
They are somewhat of a protected species, largely due to the difficulty of the Please Don’t Call Us Teals, a movement of independents from the community, coming together to form the party structure needed to win Senate confirmation.
Teal Senate ticket – why we can’t have nice things
This may not always be the case, and with or without the Teal competition, a party dominated by the right would be expected to place Moderates in less secure positions on the Senate slate.
In any case, it is in the House of Representatives that all the hopes of the leadership and the government lie. That’s where the LNP’s future appears to be.
Queensland’s hybrid system of LNP members choosing to identify as Liberal or National when they arrive in Canberra makes sense for the remnants of the Liberal Party whose policy is already determined by the National Party.
The two or three so-called “moderate” LNP members who identify as liberals have more in common with National LNP members such as Littleproud and Canavan than with Julian Leeser and Tim Wilson.
A single conservative identity?
On the path taken by both parties, a federal LNP will gain increasing traction and eventually a single conservative identity will emerge.
So what happens to the moderate remnants? They would fold as they always do to keep their jobs for as long as possible, except for Julian Leeser, who could do Andrew Gee and perhaps retain his seat as an independent.
It is the inevitable end of the process that started when Malcolm Turnbull lost the Prime Ministry in 2018. That’s when the moderates resigned.
As a political force moderates had already left the building Before the teal revolution.
To plagiarize an article I wrote before the 2022 elections:
The moderate leadership resigned between the 2016 and 2019 elections, leaving those who remained powerless.
These eight included the party’s leader and deputy leader, the space vacated by the “Morrison club/centre-right” and Peter Dutton’s “national right”.
And there are more liberal Liberals not running in this month’s election: John Alexander, Scott Ryan and Tony Smith.
The Sydney Morning Herald used euphemisms when it described the three most “influential” moderates (Simon Birmingham, Marise Payne and Paul Fletcher) as “cut from similar cloth”. and… quieter personalities than their factional predecessors Christopher Pyne, Julie Bishop and George Brandis”.
Regardless of their personality, their silence represents weakness to the point of indifference.
And all three of these “most influential moderates” resigned before this year’s election, leaving the current fleas.
It’s hard to see Leeser sticking with the Liberal Party for much longer when he comes to the point of leaving Sussan Ley as leader, and will he continue after Sussan is dumped or will he turn to Malcolm?
Others are moderates. They have things to think about.
Andrew Bragg offers a good example of moderate backbone. He said he would leave the front row if net zero was introduced. It was thrown away. From what I heard, he did not resign.
Coalition lashed for ‘horse-and-cart’-like policy
Michael West was founded Michael West Media Focusing on public interest journalism in 2016, particularly the increasing power of corporations over democracy. West was previously a journalist and editor for Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and was even once a stockbroker.
