FORMER PM Tony Abbott has warned frustrated conservatives not to give up on the Coalition, saying it would simply fracture the centre-Right and hand government to Labor and Greens.
Mr Abbott said Australia’s preferential voting system made it difficult for dark horse candidates to win power and that it was essential to work within the Parties to change their direction.
- Right-wing splinters eliminate centre-Right governments in favour of Left governments.
- Australia’s preferential voting system made it difficult for dark horse candidates to win.
- Left-leaning voters are more disciplined in allocating their preferences than the Right.
His comments come following the July decision by former Queensland premier Campbell Newman to resign from the Liberal National Party (LNP) – a Party his family members were a part of creating – saying it no longer represented values like fiscal responsibility and free speech.
CRITICAL
Mr Newman was also critical of the Party’s “heavy-handed” response to COVID-19.
Mr Abbott said Newman was an effective leader during his tenure as Queensland premier, and that he personally had “a lot of time” for him.
“I am nevertheless very disappointed that he’s chosen to leave the Liberal Party the way he has,” Mr Abbott told the Institute of Public Affairs in a podcast.
“I very much wish that he’d gone into the LNP State Council and said all of those things to the Libs in the hope of generating a different response from within the Party, rather than simply going away in this ugly public breach.”
“When people split from the centre-Right to go further to the right, the consequence is not normally a better centre-Right; the consequence is normally a Labor-Green government,” he added.
The former prime minister cited the formation of One Nation as an example, claiming that its formation in 1997 ended up splitting the Liberal-National vote in Queensland (1998 election) and Western Australia (2001), causing the then-governments to lose power to Labor.
While Western Australia has swung between Labor and Liberal governments for the past 20 years, Queensland has largely remained under Labor control.
Abbott also noted that Australia’s electoral system meant newer parties or candidates were unlikely to rise to power, which is a key difference to other systems overseas that have allowed “populist” candidates to win.
For example, elections in the United Kingdom’s parliament or the US Congress use the “first past the post” system, which means whichever candidate receives the most votes, wins.
However, Australia has a preferential voting system, which allows voters to select their second, third or fourth preferred candidate. This means that even after a candidate wins the “primary” vote, the remaining votes will be distributed and can change the result.
SPLINTER
Abbott said Left-leaning Greens’ voters were more disciplined in allocating their preferences compared to Right-leaning voters.
“Green preferences invariably go back to the Labor Party at the rate of about 80 to 85 per cent. Whereas conservative splinter group preferences tend to come back to the (Liberal-National) Coalition at the rate of more like 60 per cent,” he said.
“The field evidence is that Right-wing splinters eliminate centre-right governments in favour of Left governments, and surely no one who thinks that the current state of the Liberal Party is not to their taste really wants a Green-Left government.”
“So my advice to people who are feeling frustrated with the state of centre-right politics right now is not to give up in disgust … but to stay in and fight.”
Meanwhile, Mr Newman has joined the libertarian-leaning Liberal Democrats to run for a federal Senate seat representing Queensland.
Some analysts believe the move places current Liberal Party Senator – and staunch conservative – Amanda Stoker at risk of losing her seat.
Mr Newman said: “(Prime Minister) Scott Morrison has, sadly, let us down with very illiberal big government over-reach.
“(Labor leader) Anthony Albanese represents outdated socialism that will saddle our kids with huge debt and destroy our culture with woke nonsense and red tape,” he said in a statement.
“We need a return to real leadership and strong, sensible government.”PC
Too late Hon Tony; either you throw your good hat into the political ring? Say federal seat of Parramatta OR we’re off n running with the UAP.
No vaccine mandates, passports OR coerson!
Sadly Tony after 60 years a liberal voter & a member & worker in the Fraser era, I am afraid the wets & moderates have infiltrated the party & it no longer represents true conservative values, I voted below the line last election for Jim Molan & was hoping the Rosehill conference may have achieved some true direction, however, minor parties are now looking the only alternative.
Abbott can beg all he wants, the unfortunate Liberal rot has gone way too far for way too long. The patient is unlikely to recover.
Disillusioned conservatives shouldn’t need to remind a former Coalition PM that all we gain from Coalition Liberals in office are spectacles of them embracing the very worst of their political opponents policies. They ape the Greens on environment and energy. They’re more dangerously profligacy than the Rudd-Swan ALP in terms of absurd budget-settings. They’ve resorted to mass migration to prop up GDP growth. They somehow decided to revert to an ALP-of-old industry-policy masquerading as sensible defence-procurement (John Button would be proud).
Which is why it is not unreasonable for reasonable people to think that they may do more good than the present harm if forced to fight from opposition. As Australia’s most successful Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott will know what I write here has more than grains of truth. As things currently stand Albanese would do less harm than a returned Morrison.
Our two-party system is a wonderful thing; it gives us all a choice of either:
(a) The Labor Party, which will destroy the country, or
(b) The Liberal Party, which will destroy the country a little more slowly.
It’s surprising that Tony doesn’t realise this, given all his years as a journalist and politician.
“Abbott also noted that Australia’s electoral system meant newer parties or candidates were unlikely to rise to power.”
So Tony can understand that it’s the system itself that is broken – thereby affording the major parties the opportunity to pursue their toxic agenda – but his solution is to drift with this political tide to nowhere, rather than to seek a definitive and lasting solution.
“Mr Abbott said […] ‘I very much wish that [Campbell Newman] had gone into the LNP State Council and said all of those things to the Libs in the hope of generating a different response from within the Party […]'”
How much chance does anyone believe that there was of a “generating a different response”? Does Tony really think that Socialists who hold the whip hand are going to discuss anything with their sworn enemies, or that they give a damn about what Campbell Newman or any other conservative thinks?
Tony should wake up to himself. What is clearly required in these circumstances is the Ben Tre approach: it is necessary to destroy the Liberal Party to save it.
This is another existential dilemma for any Party, Liberal or other….do you reform from within, or without? The rise of One Nation is in part due to parties not tackling policies on immigration and integration and people naturally get frustrated at being treated with contempt and rejection by the major parties. Witness the utter failure of the Libs in recent WA election! It was not an overnight move, but born of illiberality in the Party processes (eg pre-selection should be by paid-up Branch members, not by some over-riding central clique). No wonder voters give up and stray to another splinter Party…similar to the DLP-Labor split of 1955. A splinter Party that reclaims the principled high ground either in its own right or as an influence on a major Party to return to the Sensible Centre is one of distressingly few influences and restraints we have in our political system to drive for better Party and political governance. One solution could be the American system of Recall of a poorly-performing MP mid-term (remember Governor Schwarzenegger??) as a resort to popular democratic Will of the People.
I am a member of the NSW Liberal Party but I wavered recently when renewing my membership. I am so disappointed that the LP continues to lean ever further to the left. I understand that voting One Nation, LibDems and the like puts the LP in jeopardy and we risk having having an ALP government but the LP really needs a good shake up. The situation right now is so unfair on conservative voters as we have nowhere else to go. What are we to do? I believe the factions within the party are to blame when they promote left leaning candidates in favour of conservatives. Voters have no control over this system where people we don’t vote for seem to have all the power. The LP will die a slow death if they don’t change their ways. Get rid of the lefties. They don’t belong in our party
Greatest respect for Tony, one of few Liberal MPs who ever bothered to reply to email. A warn and caring person quite different from his media persona. But I cannot agree here, I did not abandon the Liberal party that I joined prior to his election. No, the liberal Party abandoned me, the Liberal party abandoned its values, its legacy and its deservedness of a vote.
For years now, Liberal has run the line if you don’t vote Liberal you’ll get Labor, turns out if you vote Liberal you’ll get Labor anyway, just in a royal blue colour scheme.
Liberal won’t be receiving my vote, nor will Labor, both of these now see themselves as ruling elites, they no longer represent this great nation or its people, the time is right for a new alternative to arise.
Abbott is a good man but he has the political instincts of a cat lady. Now more then ever we need a Trump approach from the conservative side of politics; instead they’re shedding anyone who comes close: Kelly, Christensen; Stoker is already in an unwinnable position; the SA libs BANNED Christians, we saw what happened in WA, Kean runs the NSW pansies and BJ once he becomes DP becomes a company man. Scomo needs to pick up a lump of coal again and walk around with it. The LNP has piddled on its supporters too often.
In my opinion Tony Abbott was not given a “fair go” right from when he was voted Leader of the Opposition Liberal and National Coalition in 2009. He was undermined from day one just as Brendan was undermined after he was elected Opposition Leader after the November 2011 federal election.
The LINO leftists in the Liberal Party were behind the undermining and smearing campaigns, and PM Abbott advised a media gathering shortly after he lost the leadership in 2015, when he asked them not to use anonymously leaked material and require the informant to give permission to be indentified. The leaking apparently came from inside the Abbott Cabinet, no doubt those LINO MPs who also used the unions supported and funded GetUp activist organisation to get Abbott.
Accordingly, Tony Abbott was always dealing with saboteurs and the misleading media reports that they were behind, with the cooperation of the left leaning media of course, ABC one of the worst critics, and so much for ABC required to be impartial, private sector taxpayer funded.
Here is a link that explains on a history timeline the relentless negativity Tony Abbott was dealing with;
https://web.archive.org/web/20180807112958/http://stopturnbull.com/relentless-undermining-2009-2015
Is ten-pound Tony still in Australia?
People like Abbott still talk of the old paradigm of Left Vs Right which has been shown to have been broken since World War 2 when Stalin changed the dynamic to distance Communism from Fascism though they are both Socialist and of the Left. I believe the new paradigm is better described as one of Totalitarianism Vs Freedoms.
This puts any overly regulatory ideology firmly in the same pigeon hole. The media like to label parties as left, and far-Right (there doesn’t seem to be a space for just ‘Right’ anymore) with the Centre flopping back wards and forwards depending on the wind. The popularist parties are uniformly labelled as far-Right whereas I believe they are somewhere on the scale but trend towards freedom.
All Australian main stream parties in my new Paradigm are not centrist at all but on the Totalitarian side to varying degrees. At the moment in Australia they are all on the extreme fringe of that. This is what politicians like Abbott do not understand. The scamdemic and egregious government over-reaction have woken many people to the extent of Governmental control. People are now aware, they not only want the freedoms back which have been taken over the last 21 months but they also want to see smaller government control and regulation. People are also more aware of myriad laws which have slowly removed personal freedoms over the past decades usually under the pretence of ‘security’ and use politically flexible definitions like ‘terrorism’ as their weasel words to justify removing yet more freedoms. The concept of personal freedoms in an anathema to the main stream Australian political parties. The ALP/Greens ignore it while some of the LNP talk it up while ignoring it as party policy, but also ignore it. As is easily evidenced by their actions.
The political system in Australia is broken, over the last few decades it has slowly but increasingly let the Australian people down and sold them out. Many now see the political system for what it is, a show-boating vanity project for career politicians which does nothing for the people at all.
Australians have always been close to the centre of the political spectrum, fortunately there are centre-left and centre-right in the majority, with far-right radical fringe dwellers who are rarely identified.
But the far-left factions of the left lean from the Greens into the ALP where, according to former Labor Opposition Leader who wrote about it in The Australian Financial Review a few years ago, there are a number of factions and not all of them on friendly terms with one another, but others have reasonably good relationships. But clearly, as a number of ALP MPs are demonstrating, the centre-left remains active albeit not in agreement with their further left colleagues and therefore their leader. As journalist Max Walsh wrote in The Bulletin magazine during 2006 there was what he described as a “corporate-style takeover” by the Union Movement of the ALP including union trained executives being placed into safe Labor seats and sitting Labor MPs evicted. The ultimate objective is for Union control of Australian governments.
Note that the Union Movement via the AWU helped to establish and finance the leftist activist organisation GetUp. And also note that the leftists from the Liberal Party (LINO) used GetUp to undermine Opposition Leader Abbott and then Prime Minister Abbott. I understand that the LINO leader and colleagues want to form a single most powerful governing party alliance of like minded leftists including ALP left. They have worked to undermine/wreck the Liberal Party from NSW and elsewhere.
At the 2019 federal election GetUp was involved in supporting candidates masquerading as Independents targeting Liberal and National MPs, with vested interest groups of merchant banking and other investors in so called renewable energy and other climate hoax related businesses (as compared to naturally changing climate zones and weather conditions). Another in the political manoeuvring has adopted a deceptively similar name to the Liberal Party.
Some might know about the 1950s split in the ALP that resulted in formation of the Democratic Labor Party? That was caused by the far-left Communists within the ALP opposed by further to the right ALP members. The Communists were behind the original push for the Commonwealth of Australia to become a republic, many or most before and after Federation of States unionists from the UK.
I agree with Tony Abbott that people must continue to support the Liberal Party (and the National Party). The not LINO real Liberals have been working hard to regain complete control of the party for some time to repair the damage that has been done since or just before the Howard Liberal-National Government was voted into office in 1996.