Malcolm in the Middle?

Ronald Reagan once famously remarked that he (up till then a long-time Party member) had not left the Democratic Party, it had left him. In a recent issue of the Spectator British left-wing commentator Nick Cohen made a similar sort of argument about the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party. Cohen said that tearing up his decades-old Labour Party membership card was not a sign of having significantly changed his political positions, but rather of the Party’s having done so.

I wonder how many right-of-centre Australian voters are feeling much the same after September’s Liberal Party coup that defenestrated Tony Abbott in favour of the darling of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Malcolm Turnbull. How many of us who favour policies that might be described as reflecting a worldview in favour of small government, tough control of our borders, no wasteful spending on “it won’t do anything at all anyway” climate over-reactions (including on renewable energy corporate cronyism and disguised carbon taxes), scepticism about supra-nationalism, pro-free-speech positions, being tough on terrorism, and reining in the ABC’s bias and bloated budget will now be experiencing that Reaganesque epiphany that they have not left the Liberal Party; rather the Malcolm Turnbull version of it has left them?

Of course movement within a political party is a relative thing. No sane single voter can expect any political party to espouse policies wholly in line with his or her own preferences. Not all of any party’s slate of policies will be welcomed and supported by you, or by me, or by anyone. Voters have to pick between the choices on the table and they have to do so in a world where some issues matter more to them than others. There may be occasions in which a voter might feel that a party position on issue x outweighs all other stances it takes on all other issues. As voters we have to pick between what is on offer.

Now those of us living in Canada, the UK, the US and here in Australia are lucky in myriad ways, but one of which is that we live in countries with majoritarian voting systems. Put bluntly, a core feature of these voting systems is to deliver majority governments. These systems accentuate winning and magnify losing while being harsh to marginal, fringe, designer (call them what you will) political parties. In these Anglosphere countries you can think of the voting system as creating two big political camps or broad-church alignments or big tents. On the Centre-Left the big tent encompasses many union supporters, redistributists, environmentalists, feminists, human rights lawyer types and so on. On the Centre-Right there are economic dries, social conservatives, Hobbesians as regards defence and national sovereignty, a few libertarians and so on. Within each big tent nothing is ever fixed-in-stone; there is flux and internal competition, with each sub-grouping pushing against the others.

Winning elections is what ultimately resolves these internal conflicts for the time being—think of what sixteen years of losing to the Tories did to a Labour Party that moved from the socialist extremes it presented to the voters in 1979 to what it offered them under Tony Blair. Or think of how losing has now, perhaps inadvertently, pushed the Labour Party back to those seemingly unelectable extremes under Jeremy Corbyn today.

The point is that voters under majoritarian voting systems get a choice between two alternatives where nearly all of the compromising has taken place already inside the big tents and the results have been made clear. To a significant extent the voters know what they are getting; the voters therefore have plenty of say.

Nothing like that is true of the proportional voting systems in most of Europe (and, tellingly, in elections to Australia’s Senate). In such proportional representation (PR) voting systems the general goal is to achieve a legislature where a party’s percentage of MPs closely aligns to the percentage of voters who voted for it. In one sense this seems fair. But in others it patently is not. No political party will win a majority on its own under a PR system, so small parties carry massively disproportionate influence, as they will be needed to form any possible future coalition. Worse, all the negotiating and bargaining that in the Anglosphere takes place before an election (and then is presented to the voters) under PR systems takes place after an election; the voters are frozen out. Parties can promise what they like, they can be as pure as the driven snow, since everyone knows (the voters included) that such promises are largely meaningless when post-election coalition negotiations start. When that happens it is inevitable that some small grouping of voters, some small party, representing a fraction of a sliver of a soupcon of the voters’ views will need to be wooed and will get its way. (Look at the Senate’s bizarre and illegitimate version of this dance—the claim that a majority government that won 53 per cent of all votes in the Lower House, the one that picks the government, is now supposed to bargain and compromise with a Jacqui Lambie or a guy who loves cars or a minion of Clive Palmer before that government can do what it promised the voters before the last election, the one it won in a landslide!)

Anyway, in my view majoritarian voting systems are significantly better than PR systems, and our preferential version of a majoritarian voting system is slightly better than Canada’s, the UK’s and the US’s first-past-the-post version, largely because ours also measures whom you don’t like and accounts for second choices while still giving us majoritarian outcomes.

But here’s why I indulged in this digression on voting systems. First, no broad-church political party operating in the majoritarian-voting-system Anglosphere world can remain static over time. A party will change in response to its internal dynamics, but that in turn will be driven by how a party does at elections. Everyone accepts that. Yet be clear about this. Big changes are supposed to come as a result of the voters’ decision, or at least this should overwhelmingly be the case. For a party to commit regicide against a sitting prime minister (who by definition won the last election, and so is in a very different position from that of an Opposition leader, who has no mandate from the voters) is in a sense an act of betrayal by the party against its own voters.

I cannot think of a single instance in post-war Canada of any political party defenestrating a sitting prime minister. Even by the end of Brian Mulroney’s prime ministership, when polls put his and his government’s popularity at world record lows, he was allowed to retire just months before the election. Of course in the United Kingdom there is the well-known example of Margaret Thatcher. She was deposed by her own party, and the Tories in Britain are still feeling the after-shocks of that decision even today. And more than a few commentators think the party’s shift to John Major—which in the event did deliver the Tories one more election win—was not worth the thirteen years of Blair–Brown Labour government rule that the Thatcher defenestration helped bring about.

If we return to the Liberal Party’s removal of Mr Abbott we can now see that for any right-of-centre voters who feel aggrieved by what happened—and that includes me—the gravamen is not that the Party changed direction (we know that political parties are bound to change direction) but rather how it did so and when. Yes, in a Westminster system the voter votes for a party via his or her local member of parliament, but the voter also votes for this particular version of the party, with all the built-in compromises that the leader took to the previous election. No one in Australia voted for Malcolm Turnbull’s version of the Liberal Party. Indeed it is quite likely that without Mr Abbott’s work on the boats and the carbon tax that not enough voters ever would have opted for Mr Turnbull to make him prime minister.

This point about the voters having been offered an Abbott Liberal Party, not a Turnbull version, and why this matters in a jurisdiction with a majoritarian voting system, is the second reason I had for not resisting the temptation to make a short digression on voting systems. The sense of grievance a voter will, and should, feel when a sitting prime minister is terminated by his party behind the backs of the voters is much, much higher in a voting system that forces political parties to take a more-or-less solid package of policies to the voters (as is the case in the Anglosphere, as I set out) than it ever would be in countries with PR systems where everyone is well aware that nothing any party offers you is anything more than a bargaining chip in the coalition negotiations that will assuredly follow. (Julia Gillard did not understand this difference.)

Now these are early days as far as the Turnbull reign is concerned, but before I get to how one might respond to Mr Abbott’s ousting—and why it is problematic to ask people who voted for the Liberal Party at the last election to give the newly transmogrified Liberals their vote in the future—let me first set out the case for thinking that the Liberal Party has indeed changed direction.

Well, tax reform talk has already been revamped to make clear that it will leave tax increases on the table. Indeed, talk of “eliminating tax concessions on superannuation for the rich” has been explicitly ruled back in as a possibility, though a more honest description would be that a Turnbull government will now consider taking more money in taxes from those (and let’s be clear it will not just be the rich but the middle classes too, and even then it won’t do much to fix this country’s spending problems) who have been forced by the government to contribute to superannuation rather than spend today or save in some other way. This would be a tax increase, full stop, however much such blunt talking is avoided.

Next? How about the clear softening on the renewable-energy corporate cronyism, the scam under which businesses (think solar, think wind) that would be uncompetitive on their own get huge dollops of our money channelled to them. So electricity prices go up and we have rent-seeking par excellence. Of course we had that with Mr Abbott. Odds are we’ll have more with Mr Turnbull.

Then there are the outreach genuflections to the fashionable thinkers of the inner cities, none of whom are likely to have voted Liberal in the recent past (and in my view few of whom will do so under Mr Turnbull). So we are going to push to be part of United Nations Human Rights Council from 2018. I’ve written a bit about this body in my most recent book Democracy in Decline. This UN body has made more resolutions against Israel for breaching rights-respecting behaviour than it has against every other country on earth put together, all 190-plus of them including such stalwarts as Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China and the rest. Ponder such claims as that, say, women’s rights or minority rights or homosexual rights are less well protected in Israel than in Saudi Arabia (where they stone homosexuals to death every week) or in Somalia or in Russia or in China.

Consider the list of nations which are members of the UNHRC. For at least half of them you wouldn’t take moral advice from their leaders or top officials if your life depended upon it. Spending even one cent to get on this UN body is a total waste. Mr Abbott saw that. Mr Turnbull doesn’t—though I suppose that if you have the sort of acting talent that would allow you to move to Los Angeles tomorrow and immediately find work in Hollywood then you might be able to argue with a straight face that the point of becoming a member state on the UNHRC is to reform it and make it less of an Israel-hating, US-loathing, ineffectual body. Mr Turnbull just wants to bring about change on the UNHRC, because all these other countries are bound to do whatever a small country of 24 million at the bottom of the world tells them would be morally better.

What else? Well, the new prime minister is sounding softer on terrorism. On top of that, his government is sounding much more friendly to the ABC, to the point that the new minister in charge made the patently ridiculous claim that there is no problem about bias on the ABC—that Mark Scott’s behemoth does not breach its statutory obligation to be balanced. The new minister overseeing the ABC should be fired immediately for mouthing such patent propaganda. The old Abbott regime saw the problem with the ABC but lacked the will for a fight (unless you call a paltry 5 per cent cut to a bloated bureaucracy something that amounts to having a bit of backbone). The new Turnbull regime, perhaps grateful for the ABC’s unrelenting two years of attacks against Mr Abbott, is for now happy to pretend that wall-to-wall lefties at the ABC does not affect their impartiality (a joke, a joke on stilts when one looks at their track record, and a sleight-of-hand joke in the sense that being against right-of-centre policies need not mean being against Mr Turnbull if he is sufficiently left-leaning himself).

Don’t forget too the weakening on standing up to the climate-change alarmists. Any accountability by the Bureau of Meteorology has been removed. Then there is the total cave-in on the universities front—talk of fee increases of the sort that are working fine in the UK and that are not lowering access by the poor while making future lawyers and doctors pay more for the educations that will make them personally rich has disappeared; the university cuts have also been deferred. My tertiary kingdom for the Abbott outlook on that one, even if the rogue Senate independents blocked all such changes!

Industrial relations reform is still verboten—just as it was under Mr Abbott, to be fair. But Turnbull is supposed to change things, and not just in a left-leaning manner.

Then there is the corporate cronyism that has been on display. We have seen a Kevin Rudd, 2020-style summit bringing together government, unions, social welfare groups and big business—every vested interest going but not a trace of taxpayers or taxpayer groups or small-business advocates. To no one’s shock these groups see our taxes as a free good, something that is theirs almost by right. They want more. The Turnbull team seems a lot more sympathetic to this Italian and French-style capitalism than was Mr Abbott’s, or than anyone would be who sat down and read Adam Smith.

As I said, these are all just indicators of where things seem to be going. It is still early days. But every move by this new Turnbull Liberal government has been to the left. Sure, they’ve left in place the Abbott policies to stop the boats, though not without a big wobble when Mr Turnbull made the error of saying what he really thought. And the Libs have kept the Abbott compromise on the same-sex marriage plebiscite and, so far, Mr Abbott’s rejection of any carbon tax, even one disguised as an ETS. Would those hold were Mr Turnbull to win next year’s election and get his own mandate?

What we can say, or at least what I think I have now shown to be plausible, is that the current government under Mr Turnbull has moved to the left. Mr Abbott was far from perfect. Indeed no one was a bigger critic of his than I when it came to his disgraceful cave-in on free speech, on his politically correct pieties that led to him favouring “Team Australia” (the members of which lifted not a finger in his support when the chips were down, quite predictably) over the core Liberal voters to whom he had promised a repeal of the 18C hate-speech laws. We are seeing nothing better out of Mr Turnbull on this front, not even a few hints to shore up his flank. In fact, the Turnbull government already looks worse on free speech—just ask the American who wanted to come here and speak about abortion.

So we will now take it as read that Mr Abbott was deficient in terms of delivering a right-of-centre package of policies (even of delivering such policies to the Senate, where they may well have been blocked but the government could at least have built up sixty or seventy triggers for a double dissolution election and then …). But we will also take it as read that in these early days of the new regime Mr Turnbull appears to be a good deal worse. True, it is not yet clear whether Malcolm will move an Abbott party that was not particularly right-wing under Tony just a bit to the left, or a good deal to the left or heaps to the left. But move left it will.

That being the case, the rest of this article will deal with how supporters of Mr Abbott might respond to this Turnbull coup. First, what are the options for those of us who worry, à la Ronald Reagan, that we’re not leaving the Liberal Party but rather it is now leaving us? Is it worth voting for the Liberals under Turnbull? Are there other ways to show your anger? Second, what are the effects of all the various pleas one now hears to get on board the Turnbull express, the “all pull together now” preaching? Do these entreaties to disaffected Abbott supporters have any weight? Last, what does the coup mean in terms of Australia’s voting blocks?

Is it worth voting for the Coalition at the next election? Well, this is a question of future consequences, and none of us can know for certain what they will be. Smart, nice, well-informed people will disagree. Some will bite their tongues and vote for Malcolm. Some will not. Of course compulsory voting (about which I have moved from being against when I arrived in this country eleven years ago to being in favour today) makes things easier for the regicides. The laziest, and most tempting, option for us latter-day Reaganites would be just to sit at home and not vote for anyone. That’s what many of the disgruntled would do in Canada or the UK. But not here. Here one’s choices cover the following spectrum: You can spoil your ballot, keeping your own hands clean but giving nothing to either Shorten or Turnbull. Or, you can avoid giving the Libs your first preference, but give them your second. This will aid the Libs in winning the constituency, but it will hurt them financially because of our campaign finance rules. Indeed it will hurt them quite a bit financially if enough plump for this option of making the Turnbull team their second preference. Sure, it would still be like a slap on the wrist in one sense, but better than nothing. Or, you could vote for the Libs in the House, but not in the Senate. Many of the ringleaders in Mr Abbott’s defenestration were in the Senate. The government is formed based on how it does in the House of Representatives. So if you’re really angry at the Libs for how they knifed Tony, but can’t bring yourself to vote for Electricity Bill, then you can show your anger by not voting for them in any way in the Senate. Or, you could just vote for Labor on the calculation that the immediate pain of such a government would be outweighed by the long-term benefits that would flow from seeing the back of Mr Turnbull (and these include having something to the right-of-centre to vote for as opposed to choosing between the least-bad lefty). This is a distasteful option, to be sure, but remember that the Australian opted for Mr Rudd at the 2007 election over Mr Howard, and there is little doubt in my mind that Mr Shorten is no worse—indeed he is better—than either Rudd or Gillard. None of these choices is self-evident and all are defensible.

The second issue is what to make of all the pleas for party solidarity and cohesion coming from those who showed none to Mr Abbott. When a Niki Savva or the Australian or any of the conspirators begs for a rallying around the new leader, what do those of us who supported Mr Abbott make of such hypocrisy? And how do we respond? I suggest that the insights of evolutionary psychology offer some insights. I went through this in more detail in a recent piece in the Spectator but the gist is that tit-for-tat or reciprocity-type thinking seems to be hard-wired into us under the pressures of millions of years of evolution. Be nice to others. Give them the benefit of the doubt. But when you are cheated or metaphorically stabbed in the back then all trust and co-operation end. So when those who undermined and consistently attacked Mr Abbott now demand fealty of the sort they themselves did not give, one’s instinctive response is to declare war and do unto them as they did unto us. Such thinking, by the way, has great evolutionary advantages; it is adaptive. Sitting MPs who voted for Mr Abbott have stronger reasons to fight these sentiments than others, namely self-interested motives. But we voters will need more reasons for jumping on the new bandwagon than the pleas of Turnbull supporters that their man is better than Bill Shorten.

Liberal voters who feel the coup was unwarranted (or something stronger) can perfectly well agree that Shorten is worse than Turnbull without also coming to the conclusion that a Turnbull win in the next election is desirable. It is a complicated question of likely long-term consequences. Will Mr Turnbull pull things so far to the left that it is better to plump for short-term pain (Shorten) in order to move the Liberals back some way to the right? There is no obvious answer to that. But the more those who had a hand in Mr Abbott’s defenestration now bleat on about unity and moving on, the less likely it is that I will move on. They would be wise to shut up.

And that brings us to my last issue: what the coup has done to Australia’s political landscape. Clearly things look a good deal worse for those of us who favour small government, tough control of our borders, no wasteful spending on climate over-reactions, scepticism about supra-nationalism, pro-free-speech positions, being tough on terrorism, and reining in the ABC’s bias and bloated budget. We had a Prime Minister in Mr Abbott who was sympathetic on most of these issues (I am doubtful about the small-government criterion), although on some of them he was either a poor salesman or not prepared to fight in his first term. Now we have a Prime Minister in Mr Turnbull who is worse than the man he defenestrated on each of these counts, with the possible exception of the small-government criterion—and even there the evidence thus far is that his government will be worse, not better.

So the political landscape has changed, and changed for the worse. The calculation made by the Turnbull team is that they can move left at little cost, as long as they stay a shade to the right of Mr Shorten. You, the former Abbott voter, will have nowhere else to go. You may not like it, but you—or most of you—will vote for Malcolm.

This may well be true. It was clearly the strategy of Mr Cameron in the United Kingdom. Of course up there this led to the burgeoning electoral success of the UK Independence Party which took over three million votes at the last election. Mr Cameron was lucky that such disaffection by former Tory voters did not cost him the election (just as he was lucky in facing an inept opponent in Mr Miliband). And even then as he neared the last election Mr Cameron was forced to move to the right on just about every issue.

This is the thinking of many who are now suggesting that a new conservative party needs to be established in Australia, that it could grow at the same rate as the UKIP in Britain. But that seems most unlikely. Up there they have the issue of the European Union, the democracy-enervating behemoth that overshadows all else. It is unlikely that any single issue in Australia could galvanise a significant chunk of right-leaning voters in the same way.

So a new party is at present, I suspect, a bad idea. That leaves the Coalition. The Nationals might keep Mr Turnbull in line on a handful of issues, maybe. And we can hope that the conservative rump of the Liberal Party might have enough backbone to baulk were the boat-return policy, or any blatant carbon tax resurrection (even in the guise of an emissions trading scheme), to begin to tempt Mr Turnbull. But the Liberal Party caucus does not give one cause for optimism. Think back to the attempt to repeal 18C, the hate speech provisions in this country, and remember how many Liberal MPs stood up for free speech: virtually none. Some backbenchers I spoke to at the time didn’t even think it was an important issue—unlike their expenses, or getting enough years under their belts to get the big pension.

So it would be a brave observer who thought the Coalition backbenchers would do much to keep Mr Turnbull in line were he to win the next election. We will have a prime minister whose personal views could easily see him sitting within a Labor Party. In a good many ways he strikes me as to the left of David Cameron. Yes, there will be constraints upon him. Most of those will come from the voters of this country, the voters he needs for a right-of-centre party to win office. Perhaps some constraints will come from any post-election caucus.

But there has been a significant shift in the political landscape, of that there is no doubt. The big-business block has seen its relative standing improve; so has the social-welfare block; and so, most definitely, has the ABC. Even the unions are happier with a Turnbull government, if the alternative is an Abbott one. The transnational lawyers’ brigade is happier too, and some will be beside themselves with joy at the prospect of Australia trying for a place on the UNHRC. But the small-business block has lost in relative terms; so have social conservatives, Hobbesians, and possibly even those who care most about free speech.

How the losers might react is anyone’s guess. But it will lie at the core of what the Liberal Party looks like in a decade or two.