Crikey

Desperate times, desperate measures. As the Liberal Party struggles to come to terms with last month’s election loss, its Queensland division is yet again pursuing that often-raised and often-failed tactic of a merger with the Nationals.

You don’t have to read any further than the Oz’s headline - “Rival conservative party bid” - to see the problem. If all a new party has got to hold it together is that it’s “conservative”, it’s doomed. Voters demand more than that; the ALP is already conservative enough for most people.

The Victorian Liberals have much the same problem. Upper house leader Phil Davis, one of the leaders of the anti-Baillieu group, has written a paper (leaked to The Age on Monday) calling for internal debate on the party’s core values.

Davis himself doesn’t seem to have any ideas to offer, other than a rather shopworn social conservatism. But talk of ideas is always a good stick with which to beat the party’s left, which finds its lack of ideas more embarrassing and is terrified of defending those that it does have, since they are very much a minority view within the party.

When pressed by The Age as to what the party stands for, Ted Baillieu came up with this woolly masterpiece:

The Liberal Party that succeeds is a liberal party — it’s open-minded, aspirational, inclusive, young at heart, it promotes on merit and it supports the things that we have historically supported.

Across the country (there’s been a similar brawl in South Australia) the party has the same problem: voters want their politicians to stand for something, but any attempt by the Liberals to work out what they stand for risks opening a deep ideological divide.

As the federal election showed, the Liberal Party is still based on class - on resistance to the working class and especially to the trade unions. Traditionally, that was presented as promoting the national interest (as opposed to narrow sectional interests), and was compatible with a fair bit of ideological diversity.

John Howard’s project of narrowing the ideology in the hope of drawing in the socially conservative working class has been revealed as a failure. But no-one has yet come up with an alternative.