It’s not the first time it’s been suggested: forming a new party to represent socially progressive and economically conservative Australians, otherwise known as the many people who used to vote Liberal. But the rebirth and rise of One Nation and the increasingly desperate attempts by what remains of the Liberal Party to recapture territory has created a new momentum. “If not now, when?” is a common sentiment.
What Malcolm Turnbull calls a political vacuum applies to both policy and demographics. The Liberals have deserted the field on issues such as climate change and a sensible migration policy while losing the votes of women and young people. Many Australians might well be attracted to a new party with similar values to the teals — integrity, stronger action on climate change, gender equity, reducing the influence of lobby groups, even, dare we say, policy grounded in solid evidence.
Added impetus comes from new election funding laws, a blatant Labor–Liberal fix to tilt the field against independents.
Apart from contesting teal-type seats in the lower house, the best prospects for a new party in the immediate future could be in the Senate, which is elected by proportional voting on a state- or territory-wide basis. In fact, running for the Senate effectively requires registration as a party because it is the only way candidates can be placed above the line on the ballot paper, which is how most people vote.
The challenge lies in the execution. Persuading prominent people to join, for a start. Two teals, Monique Ryan and Kate Chaney, have already made clear that joining a party would compromise the basis on which they were elected as community independents. So have regional independents Helen Haines and Rebekha Sharkie.
Still, this might not be an insuperable obstacle: consulting with supporters about a loose party structure without the rigid discipline imposed by the Labor and Liberal parties could be an acceptable compromise.
Enticing Liberal MPs to defect is another matter entirely. It means not only risking failure at the next election but also weathering accusations of treacherous sabotaging of a Liberal Party already down on its knees. Neither moderate sitting Liberals nor former MPs like Keith Wolahan have so far shown any appetite for such a move.
Building name recognition in a crowded field would require massive publicity and major funding. A party organisation and campaigning machinery would need to be established or at least build on existing structures such as Climate 200.
Who should lead such a party? Malcolm Turnbull has the public profile but in the minds of many carries too much political baggage. Allegra Spender, who holds Turnbull’s former blue-ribbon Liberal seat of Wentworth, figures prominently in recent discussions. David Pocock, the ACT senator whose comments triggered the latest debate, is widely admired but is not advancing his leadership credentials.
In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, Spender shied away from a question about becoming leader as “hypothetical, hypothetical, hypothetical.” While she is “at least open to conversations” about ways to work more closely, including as a new centre right party, “if a few people got together, why would you need a leader? If you have a few people to start off with, I think that may be how you get things going.” More dipping a toe into the water, then, than leaping off the deep end.
Before his death in 2015, former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser was the last person to put serious effort into forming a new centre party. John Howard, who boasted in the era of Reagan and Thatcher that “the times will suit me,” had increasingly alienated Liberals who adhered to the liberalism espoused (if not always practised) by Robert Menzies — “progressive…, in no sense reactionary.” Fraser was one of them, at least after he shed his former persona as a hard-right cold war warrior.
Fraser was patron of the new movement, together with former Labor minister Barry Jones and businesswoman Janet Holmes à Court. The equally stellar cast of founding members included former Fraser minister Ian Macphee, barrister Julian Burnside and Simon Holmes à Court, son of Janet and founder of Climate 200.
A constitution was drawn up and policies commissioned in areas such as health and the economy. By 2015 there was a “Founding Members’ Statement of Values and Purpose” for a party under the working title of Renew Australia, which was later changed to Reform Australia. It is striking how many of the issues identified align with the current debate.
“Our corroded national politics has led many Australians, particularly young people, to increasing disillusionment, disengagement and despair,” said the statement. It went on:
[W]e will be a party free of organisational affiliations to either the union movement or associations representing business or special interests… We will advocate strongly to limit the influence of money on party policymaking and government decision-making by requiring that donations to political parties be capped and fully disclosed — publicly and immediately. We see advancing the status and position of women in society as one of our most important objectives… We particularly recognise the importance of intergenerational equity and hence we reject policies that would impose unfair and unreasonable burdens on succeeding generations… [W]e recognise that nothing short of a profoundly different way of structuring the global economy will avert the catastrophic effects of a warming planet.… [W]e should not cede to any foreign country the capacity to decide whether Australia is at peace or goes to war, nor will we participate in war just because our traditional allies go to war.
Work on a new party continued for several years after the Fraser’s death but, as one of those involved put it, “it didn’t survive the loss of his remorseless energy.” The reality is that many ideas for new parties have started with high hopes but few have risen to prominence and fewer still have endured.
The Labor split of the 1950s saw the creation of the stridently anti-Communist and socially conservative Democratic Labor Party. It won Senate seats and directed its lower house preferences to help keep Labor out of power in successive elections. It faded into obscurity following the Whitlam government’s election in 1972.
Don Chipp, a minister in pre-1972 Coalition governments, formed the Australian Democrats as a centre party after Malcolm Fraser left him out of the ministry in 1975. A man of passion and conviction, he coined a slogan with real impact — “keep the bastards honest.” The Democrats held Senate seats from 1977 to 2008, reaching a peak of nine senators in 1998.
The Greens, one exception to the rise-and-fall pattern, have endured since Bob Brown first won a Senate seat in 1996. The other existing long-term party is One Nation, with Pauline Hanson first elected as a disendorsed Liberal in 1998, though the party subsequently shrunk to seeming irrelevance before a recent revival that threatens to wipe out the Nationals and seriously wound the Liberals.
Built on grievance and nostalgia, One Nation’s support is strong but also shallow. If its standing in the polls is sustained, its moment of truth federally will come at the next election, when voters take a closer look at Hanson’s leadership credentials, her lack of policies that aren’t unrealistic, incoherent or harmful, her enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump, wars and all, and her patronage by Gina Rinehart. Unless, like Trump supporters, none of that bothers them at all. •
