What do the Liberals stand for?

The Party must move beyond managerialism and summon the courage to fight the left on key values if it WISHes to capture the imagination of young voters. By Alexander Downer.

Even the Liberal Party’s most passionate and partisan spin doctor would have to admit that 2022 has been one of the worst years electorally in the history of the party.

In March, the Liberals lost the state election in South Australia after being in power for just four years. Then there was the federal election in May, when the party not only lost government but lost some of its most treasured seats. And finally, the weekend before last saw the Liberal Party annihilated in the Victorian state election.

Many will argue that each of these elections was different. In every case, the leaders of the Liberal Party were very different people. They also had different political experiences in recent years.

The Victorian Liberal Party was in opposition throughout the great COVID-19 panic whereas the federal and South Australian Liberals were both in government.

The federal government’s handling of COVID-19 received mixed reviews from the public. They loved all the lockdowns and border closures, state and national, but they thought the vaccine rollout was too slow.

In South Australia, the public was on the whole supportive of the state government’s termination of traditional civil liberties.

Liberal governments – as well as their Labor counterparts – spent eye-watering amounts of money in support of the lockdown policies. Debt burdens exploded, and it is this spending which more than anything else has contributed to inflation and rising interest rates.

The policies Liberal and Labor governments pursued on COVID-19 were not very different. At the federal level, Labor in opposition called for more spending – but in Victoria I don’t recall the Liberals proposing a dramatically different approach from the Xi Jinping-style policies of Dan Andrews.

Why bipartisanship on lockdowns and spending has apparently played into Labor’s hands is an interesting question. In the short term, the explosion of debt and spending by state and federal governments, be they Liberal or Labor, has delegitimised the arguments for fiscal restraint which have been the bread and butter of Liberal Party campaigns for many years.

The public was led to believe by Australian governments that modern monetary theory was right, after all: it doesn’t matter how much a government spends and how much debt it accumulates, because the Reserve Bank can just print money – and that’s the end of the matter.

As we wrestle with rising prices and falling real wages, we now know that argument was nonsense, but over the past couple of years no one in government, and certainly not the general public, was too fussed about fiscal policy.

The failure of the Liberal Party this year runs a good deal deeper than the management of fiscal policy. The Liberal Party has for many years dominated the values debate in Australia. As the party of selfless individualism, from the 1949 election until the demise of the Howard government, people knew its core values, which they associated with freedom to choose.

They also associated the Liberals with achievement and ambition: the opportunity to succeed financially by investing in a home and in the wealth of the nation, and to be rewarded for hard work and enterprise. The public also knew the Liberal Party was the party of free speech and free expression, and that it believed in economic competition and debate about everything, from science to literature.

The Liberal Party was also the party of nationalism. It unapologetically stood up for the national interest rather than bowing at the altar of multilateralism. It believed in strong defence of the nation and saw the Australian Defence Force as a symbol of the nation’s independence. It also believed in strong alliances, particularly with the United States and Britain.

And even though not every member of the Liberal Party is a Christian, it has been in essence the party of Christian values. And it has been unashamed in its articulation of those values.

This was successfully juxtaposed with the Labor Party, which placed emphasis on central control and government intervention in people’s lives, and judged that the collective was more important than the individual.

The Labor Party was also, and still is, the party of what we now call identity politics. It used to be the party of class warfare, but it has added to that unattractive notion the concept of race and gender warfare.

Looked at from afar – and I spend much of my year in the UK – it seems the Liberal Party’s arguments for government hinge much more on management than values. Liberals argue they would build a road here or there, or a hospital somewhere else, and that is better than the Labor proposal.

Of course, good management is important – but it isn’t easy to win the argument that just because somebody is a member of the Liberal Party they are a better manager than a member of the Labor Party. Liberals may think that is true, Labor Party zealots may think it is manifestly false, but my guess is independent thinking people just shrug their shoulders and move on

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me what was inspiring about the great conservative leaders of the postwar era such as Adenauer, Churchill, Thatcher and Reagan wasn’t the details of managerialism but the inspiration of their values. They made speeches articulating their broad strategy for their nation and the values they aspired to see permeating throughout all of their policies.

Many may criticise me for this, but I haven’t heard much of that from the Liberal Party since the overthrow of the Howard government in 2007.

The values of selfless individualism and individual freedom and responsibility are timeless. The Liberal Party shouldn’t allow them to be cast as anachronistic, replaced by the idea that the only values worth embracing today are the values of the progressive left.

The Liberal Party must be able to summon up the courage and energy to fight the divisive and negative values of the so-called progressive left. You can’t expect young, idealistic people to flock to the Liberal Party if all it is about his management. Management is important but, honestly, it’s terribly uninspiring. For a 20-something, it’s boring!

Alexander Downer will be delivering the 10th John Howard Lecture on ‘The Art of Statesmanship’ for the Menzies Research Centre on 13 December in Melbourne. To register click here.

Alexander Downer was foreign minister in the Howard Government. This op ed was first published in The Australian Financial Review.