Mateship Rules

Australians instinctively vote for the unifying policies of conservatives over Labor’s divisiveness, says James Mathias, and the nation is stronger for it.

Speech delivered by MRC chief-of-staff James Mathias to the FedCon2020 conference, Melbourne, January 25, 2020.

What a fantastic topic to be asked to speak about!

My immediate thoughts about my speech today weren’t about what I would say. As a Liberal, my beliefs, and the beliefs on which the party campaigns, are solidly grounded on the guiding principles of our establishment.

Instead, my immediate thoughts were how my counterpart at the Chifley Research Centre would approach, say, the topic of Campaigning for socialism in the 21st century.

I often do feel sorry for the poor guy. His research centre is named after Chifley, a prime minister whose legacy is based on bank nationalisation, petrol rationing and the inability to control the communists in his caucus or unions.

That smorgasbord certainly does not emulate a party guided by principle like our own, but rather one characterised by “ad-hoc-ism”. The point is: our party’s principles have stood the test of time and are the underlying point of our discussion today.

However, I will come back to that. Before I do you need to know the score in the battle in which we all find ourselves. Since 1901 there have been 46 elections. The Labor party has competed in every one of them. Its record is 14 from 46.

In 120 years, it has been in government for just 34.

The greatest majority on the floor Labor has ever won was under Hawke in 1983, with just 25 seats.

Compare that to some of our majorities: Menzies in 1958 with 32 extra seats; Holt in 1966 with 41, Fraser in 1975 with 55; and Abbott in 2013 with 35. It goes without saying then that when we win, we win bigger, and for longer.

So why is it, then, that we have a track record of success, and how do we keep it in the future?

Fundamental to this is that when conservatives campaign we work tirelessly to bring people together as a movement. Bringing people together over a shared set of principles and over the commonality of what works and what is rational.

Since it began, the ALP has not campaigned this way because in order to win it believes it needs to divide us, subvert our values of nation and society and elevate those of group identity and individual self-realisation or narcissism.

Put simply, at the last election Labor sought to reward the young and punish the old, extol the inner cities and denigrate the regions, punish mining and support renewables, advance LGBTI rights and mock the religious, launch a tax assault on almost every asset class and signal support for identity politics, undermining the notion of a shared common good.

Is it any wonder Morrison won? Many commentators think this was confined to economics and tax. But I think that’s wrong: Morrison also won on culture and values, exploiting Labor’s attempts to try to divide rather than unite us.

As Menzies put it so well in May, 1942, in the early days of forming the Liberal Party: “The disease of thinking that the community is divided into the rich and relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved with the question: what side are you on?”

The practicality of this in current day campaigning is no more obvious to me than in the debate about climate and energy, and the impact this had on the election campaign.

In November last year, we at the Menzies Research Centre watched in disbelief as Mark Butler doubled down on Labor’s 45 per cent emissions reduction and 50 per cent renewable energy commitments.

When asked about the costs to the economy, in typical fashion Leigh Sales let him off with the answer that “the cost of not doing anything would be far greater”.

There and then we knew that they had not costed their policy and that for the previous six years all they had sought to do was categorise Australians as either supporters of their ambitious policy or, if one was not a supporter, one of three other types of other Australian:

1. “A stupid Climate Change Denier”

2. “A greedy rich person whose self-interest means more pollution makes you even richer” or

3. “A wide eyed ideologue to the right of Genghis Khan.”

With the pragmatism of our principles, our party determined that we would not send a wrecking ball through our economy and go ahead of the world in exceeding our Paris commitments based purely on ideology. And then we costed their policies.

The results were staggering. If the ALP had its way, the policy would cost 332,000 Australian jobs, put a $500 billion hole in the economy and reduce wages by $11,000 by 2030.

We were not concerned with the arbitrary categorisation of Australians, so we accurately framed the issue as an economic one – there is no morality in exceeding our Paris commitments at the cost of other Australians’ jobs.

Naturally, we won the debate. We brought Australians along with us and the proof was in the pudding with the polling we did. I won’t go into great detail, but it showed that by the end of March just 21 per cent of Australian’s were supportive of Labor’s policy whereas 63 per cent of other respondents were supportive of the Coalitions policy or doing less.

As long as principled pragmatism characterises our campaigns and we continue to seek to bring all Australians with us, with our beliefs and values instead of the divisive, aggravating influence of identity politics and virtue signalling we will continue to campaign as the natural party of government in Australia.

I’d like to finish just quickly, if I can, by reverting back to Chifley after his crushing election loss to Menzies in 1949.

By 1950, ALP supporters, much like they are now, were growing increasingly nervous that they would be left in the wilderness for some time.

In an attempt to quell the groundswell in January 1950, Chifley told a meeting of trade union officials they should “not to be disheartened by the election results as Labor would rise again.”

As history shows, that didn’t happen for another 22 years!