New Liberal leader Angus Taylor faces a challenge to make the party relevant. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
Anybody who is invested in a forward-looking democratic Australia should wish Angus Taylor all the best in his bid to turn around the fortunes of the federal Liberal Party.
The recent polling putting the primary vote of One Nation ahead of the Liberals should send a shiver up the spine of anyone who cares about an effective Parliament and the unity of the successful multicultural society Australia has become.
That should include the Albanese Government and Labor strategists who might only see opportunity in a fragmented opposition.
A strong centre has been the key to Australia’s political and social success, and any hollowing out by the far left or right will not be in the country’s interests.
Australia’s political system relies upon governments that can govern and oppositions that can hold those governments to account.
It is disappointing that the major parties have allowed One Nation to prosper at their expense by not calling out strongly enough its brand of toxic nativism and reactionary myth-making, and failing to grapple with voters’ genuine grievances.
Unfortunately, the Liberal Party has chased its defectors to One Nation by indulging in its own dog-whistling about immigration instead of articulating a clear, non-discriminatory policy on migrant intake.
But Mr Taylor’s first comments on immigration and protecting “our way of life” don’t augur well.
The Liberal Party also let the National Party tail wag the Coalition dog by abandoning net zero and becoming ambivalent about the energy transition and combating global warming, sticking with the half-baked nuclear power proposition.
Mr Taylor offers no change there, promising to get rid of Labor’s “bad carbon taxes on the family vehicle, on manufacturing” and electricity.
But the Liberal Party needs to win back the cities if it is to be a viable force, and pandering to the far right and the National Party will only alienate city voters even more.
It also will need to acknowledge the anger of younger voters who are now living with intergenerational inequality, so harking back to some golden Howardesque age, or, like Andrew Hastie, the 1960s, is not going to cut it.
Both Labor and the Liberals need to look forward, and that requires a hard focus on reforming a tax system that favours well-off older people, the asset rich and property speculators.
Bill Shorten lost an election by proposing a reform program that was taken apart in a scare campaign that only deferred necessary action.
Four years on, another cohort of young people has the vote amid increasing pessimism about their future and the mood has shifted, which is why Labor is now revisiting halving the capital gains tax concession and hopefully a bunch of other ideas for a fairer and more productive economy.
Mr Taylor will no doubt oppose this, but younger voters will want to know just what the Liberals plan to do to help them, beyond yet another counterproductive demand-side policy for first-home buyers that only boosts house prices.
Writing in the Guardian at the weekend, pollster and former Liberal strategist Tony Barry hit the nail on the head.
“At the moment, there’s no bigger or more important economic policy to most voters than housing attainability. Housing attainability is the new political fault line in Australian politics,” Barry says.
“That’s in part because in Australia we tax income punitively, but we tax wealth at nominal levels, and we’ve allowed wealth to accumulate in property as an asset and investment class through favourable tax concessions and superannuation treatments.
“The effect of that untaxed wealth transfer will be to entrench generational wealth in this country, and we are going to see a sharper divide between those born into families whose wealth is represented by capital assets taxed at nominal rates, versus the aspirational class paying effective marginal income tax rates of around 50 per cent.”
The danger for both parties is that without offering clearly articulated policies and showing leadership, the disaffected and alienated will be susceptible to the likes of One Nation and others harnessing grievances in the now-well-worn Trumpian way, blaming migrants for their problems and dividing Australians on racial lines.
There are no solutions there.
So congratulations, Mr Taylor. We look forward to your bright ideas for taking the country forward and keeping One Nation on the fringes, where it belongs.
