The Liberal Party needs to go back to where it came from

The Farrer byelection this Saturday is being cast in almost existential terms.

Will this mark the far-right party’s foothold in the political mainstream with its first-ever federal lower house MP? 

Does it signal the end of National dominance on the wombat trail? 

Much less the Liberal Party’s political demise?

For all the noise around One Nation’s supposed rise, unlike the increasingly chaotic fever dream engulfing American politics, and many European democracies facing similar populist, nationalist, anti-immigrant insurgents like Reform in the UK, AfD in Germany or the National Rally in France, parties on either extreme of the political spectrum will never form government in Australia.

That’s thanks to Australia’s compulsory, preferential electoral system, which means that unlike the UK and US’s first past the post systems, government in Australia has generally been won by the so-called ‘sensible centre’.

Nonetheless, One Nation’s rise reflects many voters’ frustrations that nothing much seems to happen there.

Nobody could accuse ALP leaders like Anthony Albanese, Chris Minns, Peter Malinauskas or Jacinta Allan of being wedded to traditional ALP values – much less ever attempting the more serious reforms their predecessors Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, and Paul Keating undertook.

Which makes the Liberal Party’s hard turn to the right, especially on immigration, understandable – and perplexing.

While Australian elections favour the middle ground – something the ALP has successfully taken from the Coalition since Hawke and Keating first introduced the economically neoliberal and socially liberal approach Bill Clinton called ‘the third way’ and Tony Blair dubbed ‘New Labour’ – political party membership, particularly for the Liberals, has cratered.

Membership across most state Liberal branches has plummeted to almost half in the past decade to less than 10,000 each, with the Liberals in WA and SA now little more than minor parties. Members’ average age is 68, and increasingly conservative. 

These members preselect candidates who represent their values – even as these very conservative views don’t reflect broader social norms today. It’s evidenced by the lack of diversity in what remains of the Coalition in federal parliament, represented by no one of colour apart from Jacinta Price and only around 20 per cent women.

So, given its conservative, mostly Anglo base and One Nation outflanking it on the right, it’s understandable that the Liberals are parroting One Nation on issues like immigration, especially given how policy free they’ve been since the last election.

But is going hard on immigration really an election winner for the Liberals – especially in rural seats which depend on immigrants working in jobs in agriculture, food processing and healthcare many locals don’t want to do? Even One Nation’s weather vane candidate disagrees on that point.

While many might think it was Gough and Al Grassby who ended the White Australia Policy and embraced multiculturalism, it started with Harold Holt’s government in 1966. The Menzies, Holt, Gorton, and Fraser Liberal governments welcomed more refugees than any other before or since, from 170,000 Eastern European Balts in the 1950s, over 80,000 Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s and over 30,000 Lebanese refugees in the 1980s.

For all Howard, Abbott, Morrison, and Dutton’s harsh rhetoric and cruel treatment of boat arrivals, Howard doubled immigration, and nearly all the record-breaking 536,000 arrivals in 2022-23 were approved by the Morrison government. Nearly half of us were either born overseas or have parents born overseas.

And it’s the very skilled and affluent migrants successive governments have been bringing in in unprecedented numbers to make up for the Coalition’s defenestration of higher and vocational education who now comprise the fastest growing constituency. Until the 1990s, there were less than 20,000 people of Indian origin in the entire country.  Growing up, I knew almost every Indian person in Sydney.

Now, with over 971,000 people, they make up Australia’s largest overseas born population. 

Most Indians and Chinese – along with Muslims, the most maligned immigrants – are professionals and entrepreneurs, the Liberal Party’s natural constituency, often living in the very outer suburban seats the party now needs to win as it loses all hope of regaining inner city ones from teals (Tim Wilson’s 157 vote skin of the teeth ‘comeback’ in Goldstein aside).

Price’s comments about Indian immigration and refusal to apologise for them have cruelled the Liberals’ chances with this key demographic, just as Jane Hume’s comments about ‘Chinese spies’ sank the party’s chances in once-blue ribbon seats like Chisholm, which previously elected an MP with ties to the CCP. 

So while One Nation winning a seat might not seal the Liberal Party’s fate, Taylor’s aping of their anti-immigration stance can only end in ignominy, as noted by former independent Goldstein MP Zoe Daniel and former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

How is doing what Peter Dutton did to decimate their vote going to end any better?

If the Coalition wants to win back the ‘sensible centre’ perhaps it should go back to where it came from on immigration, especially given One Nation’s faltering polling, rather than following the even more dysfunctional minor party  down a very dark dead end.

Sunil Badami is a writer, academic and broadcaster. He’s appeared in nearly every major Australian media outlet, and is a regular on ABC Radio and TV.