Danger for the Liberal Party coming from the right as well as the teals – Sydney Morning Herald

The Liberal Party has fallen out of love with itself. It is evident; it is unmissable. But a divorce is not necessarily the right answer.

The greatest challenge that the Liberal Party faces at this election is not the Labor Party, but the disaffection of former Liberals to the left and the right. While comment has focused on the fear of moderate Liberals that a teal wave could dislodge many of the factions leading lights, turning the party over to the conservative faction, the danger of soft Liberal voters with other priorities peeling off to a range of non-teal minors is just as destabilising. Even a Liberal Party reduced to a conservative rump may be optimistic as new arrangements of Liberal defectors position themselves to attract the traditional conservative base.

Those on the right who have split with the Liberal Party are coming for the partys conservative voters: George Christensen, Craig Kelly, Campbell Newman, John RuddickCredit:SMH

One-time Queensland Liberal premier Campbell Newman and erstwhile Liberal Party reformer John Ruddick are now courting voters with libertarian leanings as senate candidates for the Liberal Democrats. Then there is the United Australia Party with star candidate and former Liberal member for Hughes Craig Kelly. Resigning Liberal member for Dawson George Christensen has, perhaps venally, aligned himself with Pauline Hansons One Nation. For the sake of convenience, though not accuracy, lets refer to those three groupings as right-wing.

While all these men have niche appeal and low chances of gaining the senate or representative spots they are contesting, the softness of the vote makes them important factors in this election and after it. For one thing, the return of the Morrison government depends on whether the sizeable soft vote favours the major party or creates crazy preference flows with the parties of principle. For another, how the party reconstitutes after polling day will be influenced by their voices.

One thing both the supposedly left-Liberal and right-Liberal defectors have in common is that they believe only they represent real Liberal principles and they are willing to kill the party to save it from others. In the media this is most visible among the supporters of the purportedly Liberal-lite teals, like former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former Liberal leader John Hewson (and thanks to the ministrations of these gentlemen, the term moderate Liberal risks becoming synonymous with one who wants anything other than the Liberal Party to win). But by splintering the main party, the right-wing defectors are also destroying an alliance that the Liberal Party depends on for scale as well as representative breadth.

This sectarian war is, of course, not new. Before Morrison assumed the prime ministership, the decade of leadership guerilla war and knifings in the Australian Liberal Party reflected a phenomenon that was taking place in similar democracies. The marriage of conservatives and classical liberals was on the rocks. The children had moved out of home, as it were, when the Cold War ended. Mummy and daddy were starting to think they didnt have so much in common anymore.

Rattling around in the philosophical house together, without socialism to jointly oppose, they began to realise each others flaws. As classical liberals celebrated the virtues of globalism, conservatives worried that the liberals breezy acceptance of disruption and globalism had lost sight of the value of tradition and the virtue of nationhood. Conservatives began to posit the notion that the liberal freedom doctrine led not to less state intervention, but to an inevitable requirement that the state regulate all freedoms. As the alliance fell apart and the philosophical alignments came into conflict, liberal scholar Anne Applebaum wrote poignantly about the parting of friends.

But it is, like many late-life break-ups, nonsensical. Rather than a liberation, it is a failure to appreciate that even imperfect relationships make us whole. Thats something that should resonate with conservatives, who seek a return to a more wholistic understanding that society is not built around individual freedom, but around mutual care. If only environmentalist moderates understood this, they might also find a way to connect with conservatives on conservation.

Indeed, the shortcomings of each of the groups that have splintered from the Liberals shows how much they need one another.

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Danger for the Liberal Party coming from the right as well as the teals - Sydney Morning Herald