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The Liberals need to return to Menzies’ values

This is a lightly edited interview between Arthur Sinodinos, a former Liberal Minister and Chief of Staff to Prime Minister, John Howard, and ABC Radio National’s Sally Sara.


Sally Sara: You know from many levels how campaigns work. Where do you think this Liberal campaign has gone wrong? Is it from the leadership, the campaign manager? What's your assessment of what's happened?

Arthur Sinodinos: The easy answer is, all of the above. Clearly, there were issues between the leaders’ office and the campaign headquarters. There were clearly issues with the polling, of the veracity of some of the polling from the stories now coming out and from other stuff that I've heard.

But look more fundamentally, this is a structural issue for the Liberal Party. We've shown a tendency not to … reform or pick up the vibes over a long period of time, and often success has meant that you don't have to do that. You feel, well, we're going ok, what do we need to change? The reality is that you need to change because the world is changing around you.

And that doesn't mean ditching liberal values as they're no longer relevant. They're very relevant, but it's how you apply them to a changing world, and it also goes to how you engage with the community around you, and that means being representative of the community as much as possible. And there are clearly still some issues in that regard.

In New South Wales, I thought we always at the state level had a very good understanding and relationship with the ethnic communities, both from my own experience and what I saw in New South Wales - that's important.

Gender issues are important. This is not about wokeness or political correctness. It's about when we look in the mirror, do we represent the community that we aspire to represent, and that is the challenge going forward.

And Liberal values, the Menzian sort of values, many of those values are as relevant today as they ever were, and they go to things like the tolerance for each other, the respect for difference, how we approach actually solving problems.

It's not about culture wars. Culture wars are an artifact of a very fragmented social media landscape that we face now, but the culture wars will not win you government alone.

Yes, you have to stand up for values, but you have to do it in a way that relates to people and their needs now, and what the Labor Party did was to put together a policy offering that came good at the right time towards the end of the term, that clearly was better pitched at some of the needs of Australians. And we looked as if we were doing this in an ad hoc and reactive way. The grievance politics was not enough. We had to have our own coherent plan, and we didn't.

SS: What's driving this inertia? If there have been lessons there to be learned in the past, and there are certainly plenty from this election as well, why is that not happening in your view?

AS: I think part of it is because there are too many people in the Liberal Party who have fiefdoms that they want to protect. And so we have this old issue that the faction or the fiefdom comes first, rather than what is the central party interest.

We don't also have, as we did in the so-called old days, party grandees. These were the sort of people behind the scenes who could knock heads together, get people to be sensible, but who were taking a corporate view, a whole of party view of situations, rather than the situation today, where too often between factions, it's been winner take all.

I hear people today saying we should have gone more to the right, or we should have done this or done that. The reality is Australian politics is firmly grounded because of compulsory voting and preferential voting in the centre. So you have to pitch a broad tent, and that means you have to go to people where they are, rather than shove your own ideology down their neck. And Menzian Liberals are not ideologists. They're practical. They're pragmatic.

SS: How do you manage that, meeting voters where they are and going to the centre when in some cases, it's those who are closer to the centre who've been defeated in this election because the policies weren't right for that?

AS: Well, that tells you there's a disjunction between the policies and where people are, and the way to fix that is to actually listen to the voters - that's part of it - and then sit down and say, well, in accordance with our values, how do we address the issues people have got.

Housing is an example that is now a generational crisis in Australia. Young people facing the prospect of never being able to own their own home, that has to be a number one priority of any government. Clearly, we've got to do more than is being done now because we're not creating sufficient momentum to solve the problem, and young people are very concerned about that. At the moment, if you come out of university, you've got a HECS debt, you have a superannuation guarantee of at least 10% plus you want to try and save for a home - how's that going to work? So these are the challenges.

We've got to treat some of these things as crises, as urgent crises, just as we've got to treat defence and national security as a geopolitical issue that needs a lot more attention in Australia. Yes, there will be debates about how much we spend on defence, but the world around us is changing very quickly and in ways which are not necessarily in Australia's interests, and we have to address that.

There's a whole slew of these issues, economic reform, all of that has to be accelerated, and these are all things that can be done in accordance with long standing Liberal values. But we have to argue the case.

And we can't fatten the pig on market day. You've got to put in the work beforehand, and that requires, ultimately, leadership. It is leadership that will drive the party to do this, the Liberal Party group of individualists. You have to have people at the top who can herd the cats and basically set that direction. We've had those leaders in the past. We can have them again.

I mean, the situation the Liberal Party is dire, but it is not terminal. The Liberal party is one of the great election winning machines in Australia, and it can win again, but only if we do the hard work because that's how we've done it in the past.

SS: Arthur, what sort of role do you think Donald Trump's second presidency, tariffs and culture wars and the language of the Trump presidency has played in this election for the Liberal Party.

AS: To the extent that the world is now more uncertain place, if there are questions around our relationship with the US in economic terms, as other countries are questioning, and one of the most effective lines in the campaign, I thought, was Americanization of policies. That was clearly code for some of what is going on in the US and in Australia. I think in the end, they [the Australian voters] opted for a version of relaxed and comfortable over a leap into the unknown.

 

Arthur Sinodinos is a former Liberal Minister, Chief of Staff to Prime Minister, John Howard, and Australian Ambassador to the US.

 

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