Mark Riley: Liberals under Angus Taylor need to emulate Tony Blair, not John Howard

Phil Thompson knows something about near-death experiences. He had one in Afghanistan. Thompson was severely injured by an improvised explosive device while serving with the Townsville-based 1 RAR in 2009. It took him several years to recover. So, when he says the Liberal Party is “in a death spiral” he knows what he is talking about. And that’s what Thompson did Thursday morning as he joined other Liberal colleagues resigning in choreographed succession to bring on a spill of the leadership. That death spiral has been crystal clear in the polls over the past decade. The Coalition’s primary vote has fallen from 42 per cent at the 2016 election, to 41 in 2019, 36 in 2022 and a record low of 32 in last year’s electoral obliteration. Just nine months later, it’s at a miserable 18 per cent. Conservative Senator James Paterson put the dimension of the voter drain under Sussan Ley in devastating fashion: “That’s more than 200,000 votes a month, more than 50,000 votes a week and more than 7,000 votes a day.” And that is what a death spiral looks like. All Liberals concede that things have to change. Drastically. And soon. The word reverberating around the corridors of parliament is “reset”. But the question is what that reset should look like? The impulse among most Liberals is to return to Howardism. That’s utterly understandable. John Howard is the party’s most successful leader of the past 50 years. He survived his own existential war between his conservatives and Andrew Peacock’s moderates in the 1980s to finally seize power from Labor. And he got re-elected. Three times. Howard did that by being a conservative in government and a centrist during election campaigns. He listened to voters and reacted accordingly. But as they now re-examine “Howard’s way” the Liberals should also study an equally successful template from the progressive side of politics — that of Tony Blair in England. Blair took a mouldy, moribund Labour Party base and re-energised into a fresh and attractive electoral product by adding one small word that had an immense impact: New. It was a triumph of branding and marketing that allowed Blair to draw a line through everything the British public believed the party to be and present it as something more in tune with the times and the people: New Labour. That is the opportunity today for the Liberal Party. It can jettison its present into the past and rebrand itself as something different and fresh: the New Liberals. It sounds simple, perhaps simplistic, but beneath the superficial change would need to be a profound reworking of the party’s policy superstructure, buttressed by new ideas, new policies and a new approach to leadership. The rush of support from the Coalition to One Nation shows that people are looking for something different. Australian voters are seeking a third way, just as the Britons were when Blair came onto the scene. The Liberals have to become that. The party’s traditional base is literally dying off. To survive, it must attract not just younger voters but aspirational, middle-class, middle-aged Australians to its fold. Doing that requires a comprehensive overhaul of how it communicates and applies its defining ethos as the party that promotes and protects individual freedoms, enterprise and opportunity. It demands clarity on the central issues, such as the cost of living, housing, immigration and modern nationalism, which are driving people on the right side of politics further to the right and into the hands of One Nation. But it must also refine its messages to those who have deserted it from the centre-right for the teals in urban Sydney and Melbourne. All that equates to a new pragmatic conservatism that remains true to the party’s traditional values but applies them to the new and emerging traditions of modern Australia. Achieving it won’t be easy. It wasn’t for Howard. And it wasn’t for Blair. But a new version of the third way under the banner of the “New Liberals” might be the party’s only path to survival. Because bouncing from one near-death experience to the next — irrespective of who wins Friday morning’s leadership spill — will eventually send them the way of the dodo.