Still hanging in the closet
A few weeks ago in this column I contemplated coming out of the closet – the Liberal one, that is – by floating the possibility of voting Liberal at the next state election.
Since then, however, I’ve seen in action precisely what it is about the Libs that fails to convince me that in their current state they’re a valid alternative, even to the basketcase Labor administration.
In NSW there is talk of resurrecting the career of former moderate Liberal premier Nick Greiner to take the place of the apparently reasonable though painfully low-key Opposition leader Barry O’Farrell.
But while recently addressing a function celebrating the 20th anniversary of his election to government, Greiner lashed out at his own party, claiming it would never win the votes it needs if it failed to weed out the internal factionalism, and specifically the growing dominance of the far-right, that is negating any attempt to present itself as a balanced party concerned more with broad electoral than petty internal interests.
Sure enough, as Greiner speaks out the hard-right is playing its usual dirty preselection games and Farrell appears either unwilling or unable to counter this through strong leadership.
South of the border, long-time civil and LGBTI rights supporter and genuine Liberal moderate, Petro Georgiou, is again under siege in his safe inner Melbourne seat, with a Howard baby expected to challenge him for preselection.
The loss of Georgiou – who incidentally achieved the best result of any Victorian Liberal at last year’s federal election – would be a terrible blow to moderate politics and only affirm in many people’s minds that the future of the Coalition is at the very far right of the spectrum.
In fact, perhaps the hard-right’s poster boy Alex Hawke has a point – those in the party who support human rights, equality and environmentalism should just defect to the Greens or left faction of the ALP, and let him and his cohorts get on with organising a narrowly conservative party.
In modern Australian politics, with so little distinguishing the Libs from Labor economically, the left/right divide is drawn largely along social lines. Maybe it’s time to officially organise party policy and platforms accordingly; the Libs’ failure to be an all-encompassing ‘broad church’ could be precisely what’s condemning it to opposition in every state and federal government.
However, given the unlikelihood of a new coalition of genuinely small-l liberals from all major parties forming any time soon, we still only have two serious choices for the next state government – and it would seem the Opposition is too busy battling with its own identity crisis to be landing what should be easy blows against the stale and incompetent Iemma administration.
And it’s we humble – and very frustrated – voters who suffer most for this.
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