Downfall
The Liberal Party’s failure at the recent NSW state election has been a long time in the works and is due to a collection of mistakes not previously seen in modern political history. With a mixture of incompetence and arrogance displayed by those with their hands on the wheel, this latest shambolic outcome is more like a failed coup than an innocent mishap or well-intentioned misstep.
The absolute betrayal of the Liberal voter base on core policy has to be the number one cause for concern. Matt Kean is not a Liberal, in fact in my opinion he’s not an anything. To understand the base motivation of Kean, one has to look deeply into the core business of the modern Liberal Party, which in one word is Lobbyists. The primary concern informing all policy positions is not principle but rather who is asking. Hired gun lobbying is turning both the Liberal Party and the overall political landscape into a policy superstore, where corporatist interests are served, most often at the expense of the community and voting public. This is covered by a lazy veneer of promise, chiefly under the guise of “free stuff” for the public.
The nature of policy lightweights like Matt Kean, Alex Hawke and their advisory gang of barely graduated experts in sniping, is such that they are unable to understand the public and most especially the Liberal voter. When Scott Morrison lost the core Liberal heartland to Teals, the kid brigade immediately started spinning that the party is too right wing (or, as some may conclude, too principled). This has prompted the absolute destruction of every single value that true, committed Liberals hold. It has been spun as a female problem (which it isn’t); a green energy problem (not that either, or at least the way it has been is spun); and their solution was to lurch to the left of the Greens on social and economic policy.
The misread is abundantly clear: Scomo, Gladys Berejiklian, Dom Perrottet and Matt Kean took the left-wing approach to big headline issues – such as Covid, net zero emissions, women - and everything else that came from the bumper sticker production house of Sydney MP Alex Greenwich. In doing this, they forgot it was not so long ago that Tony Abbott swept to power on an anti-climate platform, and that Scomo had signalled to the electorate that very same message in his campaign to replace Malcolm Turnbull, only to completely turn on the electorate when he was successful.
The Liberal Party advisors are too young, inexperienced and so sheltered from the real world that they don’t have a clue. They will still think, even today, that the party needs to move further to the left. They do not understand the electorate and they don’t belong in the Liberal Party.
This is convenient to the lobbyist class because principles get in the way of business. The lobbyist class does not care who is in power, as long as they get to control one of the major parties, which to use a modern vernacular is something that can be greatly monetised. Selling access, favours and jobs, the revolving door between the corporate sector, parliament and staffing roles is a huge problem that must be addressed. We need our Liberal politicians focused on the members and voters as well as medium- and long-term Australia.
A number of people, of which I was one, were elected to the 2019 State Executive of the Liberal Party and together we began to fight to overturn the culture. Our thinking was that we had immense support from Kean and Perrottet, as they had pointed to Alex Hawke as the root cause of all of the Party’s problems. We agreed as a Party that we had a blind spot. We believed the factional brochures. But in reality, the factionalism in the Liberal Party is such that I would almost go as far as Malcolm Turnbull, insofar as there are no factions in the Liberal Party. It is window dressing. What is really evident is there is a triumvirate made up of left-wing gangs of power. There is the Kean/Zimmerman/Photios left, the Hawke/Campbell left and the Perrottet/Tudehope left. The power players in this triumvirate are all left wing, transactional and focused on property outcomes and corporate outcomes. In between, all they do is fill the world with cheesy social media posts that are of the melted-birthday-cake-with-flies variety.
The three factional groups compete for power amongst each other and try hard to feed their most loyal insider incompetents. The fastest path to a job in parliament is to be a loyal, transactional character with little prospect in the real world. The more desperate and hopeless the better. Occasionally, a good person slips through but over the past 12 years the triumvirate have been effective in filling parliaments with talentless, useless and gutless people. A case in point is Perrottet taking retiring ministers to an election, partly because he was too weak to spill positions but mainly because he was, rightly, too afraid to give positions to those left out over the prior 12 years. The lack of leadership is downstream from an utter lack of talent, principle and belief.
The ructions in the Liberal Party are not factional. The players within the triumvirate are, for the aforementioned reasons, not at war with each other. They are all at war with the Party members. For at least the past 3 years, the membership has started waking up to the game and has been coming to terms with the lack of talent and principle in the elected space. That lack of talent has washed through the back offices and most notably Liberal headquarters. Preselections were intentionally messed with at local government in 2020, which triggered a fight that went on for almost two years, and through the courts, as the triumvirate wanted to force special powers (using 90%) to hide the fact they were working together. I joined on the side of the Liberal Party and defended the constitution (the Party was going to submit) - and we won that one. But then the absolute circus to select Federal Liberal candidates began with Hawke as the ringmaster. This also ended up in the courts, this time the High Court of Australia, a matter in which I have been attached to, solely because of my willingness to fight for the Party’s members and its constitution. As it stands today, although I won’t give up, we are left in a bizarre situation where political parties are beyond the courts.
The doubling down on bad behaviour at the State level - the travesties that were the Upper House impositions together with a collection of unjustified and reckless expulsions - were entirely due to the fact that the Party is not justiciable. The members were told in no uncertain terms that their views, values and voices do not matter to the leadership, at all. So, they stayed home, withdrew funds, withdrew support and stopped telling friends to vote Liberal. Why would they? Nobody knows what sort of Government the Liberals would bring, not even the ministers. What is a political party if not for a grass roots movement that is driving toward a common set of shared values? The We Believe statement, once the sacred, guiding Liberal document proudly displayed on membership forms, has been relegated to a page hidden away on the Liberal party website.
It all boils down to trust, but the Liberal Party has no integrity for trust to exist. The level of political corruption is unbearable for all but the most seasoned political warriors. The triumvirate lacks principle. They might say the right things (well, perhaps not Matt Kean), but then they immediately do something different. That lack of integrity has also permeated through Liberal headquarters. Members speak as though the constitution of the Party will be treated merely as a subtle suggestion … “if there are preselections”, “if they get through NRC” and so on. The Nomination Review Committee (NRC) has been used as a means for the triumvirate to curate candidates. This has completely thwarted the preselection process. A few good people slip through, but in the main there are many great candidates, like Noel McCoy, who are punted by a bureaucracy that carries no more value than a piece of used chewing gum. In just one example of that self-serving hypocrisy, Jacqui Munro – a person you could say was at least as guilty of many policy crimes on social media as McCoy - sails through to candidacy and nobody even knows if there was an NRC at all. The triumvirate cause undeserved reputational damage to the potential candidate, and this has been going on since Hawke rose to prominence.
Hawke is the embodiment of the conundrum. On the surface he is super professional, smooth and well groomed, but he lacks any depth of substance and is out of touch with the Liberal members, voters and middle Australia. He is like an episode of the West Wing being watched by the cast of House of Cards on the set of Spin City. Empty, vapid, flag-based conservatives where the flag is whatever that means to you. It is frightening really, but not nearly as frightening as the fact that Perrottet, Scomo and Chris McDiven went into an administration team of three, which needed a unanimous vote, and they selected Alex Hawke. Perrottet saved Hawke, and then handed the Liberal Party to Kean. And that was the mistake. They all need to go.
The solution, at least on policy, is simple: the Liberal Party needs to go back to the We Believe statement, focus on making government smaller, lowering taxes, providing more individual incentives as well as incentives for small and medium business owners and operators.
But the solution for the right people to form and implement policy must surely include the Liberal Party members having their say about who represents them at all levels of government – and not the self-serving agents of greed who currently run the show.
