View from The Hill: Liberal frontbencher James Paterson delivers some sharp messages to his party
- Written by The Conversation
Victorian Liberal senator James Paterson has, figuratively speaking, taken his Liberal colleagues by the scruffs of their necks and given them a good shake. His blunt message is, get out of your funk and cooperate in rebuilding the house.
In his Tuesday Tom Hughes Oration, Paterson did put it more politely, but he still didn’t mince words. “We must call time on the apology tour.”
“[We must] resolve our internal differences about our direction amicably”, he said (stressing both the importance and the difficulty of this), and “develop a coherent and compelling alternative policy agenda”.
Debate and discipline have to be balanced, which means “there is a time limit on this soul-searching process.
"We must do it now at the start of the term so it does not drag on forever. An ongoing mass public therapy session doesn’t exactly scream ‘ready for government’.”
There was more. Forget being tempted to ape Nigel Farage’s right wing Reform Party that’s doing so well in the United Kingdom. Apart from anything else – and Paterson expressed scepticism about what Reform preaches – he pointed out the obvious. Lurching off in that direction won’t work in our compulsory voting system.
Nor should the Liberals “become a free market version of the Teals, which accepts the cultural zeitgeist and contests no social agendas advanced by the left”.
And certainly they should forget the idea of a split in the party on ideological grounds. That “would be about as successful for us as Labor’s split in the 1950s was for them”.
“Instead, we must seek to understand and incorporate the reasonable concerns of the good faith actors on the right who today express dissatisfaction with the direction of the Liberal Party.”
Of course the adjectives are significant: what are “reasonable” concerns, and who are “good faith” actors will be, to an extent, in the eyes of beholders.
Paterson, who is finance spokesman and a member of the leadership team, is seen as one of the best talents in the much-depleted Liberals.
He’s a skilled attack dog. After Andrew Hastie’s dummy spit, he stepped in temporarily as acting home affairs spokesman, and last week gave the government an awkward time in Senate estimates over the ISIS brides.
If positions were based on merit Paterson, not Michaelia Cash, would be Liberal leader in the Senate.
Paterson is now taking it upon himself to analyse his party’s parlous situation, to make suggestions about what needs to be done (as well as warning what should not be done), and to argue to the demoralised and fractious troops that they can actually do it.
On Wednesday Liberal Leader Sussan Ley was initially coy when pressed about whether Paterson had discussed his speech with her before delivering it. Later she said she had read it beforehand.
Who really cares what she knew of it? There was hardly anything Paterson said to which Ley could reasonably object and indeed, this was the sort of speech she should be giving.
Paterson’s contribution is notable not just for its content, but for who he is – a conservative who voted for Angus Taylor after the election but is supporting Ley’s leadership. That’s at least for the time being.
His support is especially important when radical conservatives such as Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price are rejecting her leadership (despite Hastie’s declarations on the contrary). If Ley loses a pragmatic conservative like Paterson, she’s probably done for.
Paterson frankly acknowledged and used history to make his points, including the failure to make generational change (from John Howard to Peter Costello before the 2007 election) and misreading electoral victories (after 2019).
On the tricky debate about whether the party’s eyes should be primarily on the “base” or on swinging voters in the centre, Paterson argued this was a “false choice”.
“We need to appeal to both our traditional supporters and swinging voters. It is only a question of sequence,” he said. He advocated starting with the base (with support for the flag, the ANZAC tradition, Australia Day and the like): symbols valued by the base that do not turn off the swinging voters.
Paterson’s faith in such sequencing, let alone the practical management of it, does seem overly optimistic. Juggling the base and the pitch to the swingers is at best a delicate operation and can at times become near impossible.
In broad terms, Paterson wants the Liberals to land on “a policy agenda based on limited government, free markets and lower taxes”. Making that fit together in the contemporary world, however will require a big effort. Let alone crafting politically acceptable detail.
“At the same time, we must not shy away from important debates about our culture, identity and sovereignty which are not going away in an age of disruption, and which matter so much to our supporters,” he said.
The Liberal party is full of those who see the glass as half empty if not drained altogether. Paterson is seeking to present it – at least publicly – as potentially half full.
