by NINA NGUYEN – FORMER federal senator Amanda Stoker has warned the Liberal Party to return to its roots instead of becoming the “Diet Coke” version of Labor and Greens.
Her comment comes after the Liberal Party’s loss in the 2022 federal election sparked calls for the Party to adopt progressive policies and preselect more women to win back government and inner-city voters.
- Vital Liberal Party learns “right lesson,” which is to have “courage and intellectual rigour”.
- If you want to be inoffensive, politics is the wrong business.
- The 2022 election saw large numbers of moderate Liberal MPs losing to so-called “teal” independents.
But Ms Stoker argued that doing so means that there’s “really nothing in terms of differentiation in perspective to attract people to voting for our cause”.
Speaking at Australia’s largest annual liberty conference on July 15, she said that from a marketing perspective, “if you’re in a sea of Left-leaning candidates, it can help an awful lot if you offer something different”.
PROGRESSIVE
“Why do you go for the Diet Coke version of being a Left-leaning progressive when you’ve got three sorts of full-strength Coke options for which to choose?”
The three-day Friedman conference held in Sydney from July 15 to 17 attracted more than a hundred participants and featured prominent figures including Victorian MP David Limbrick, former Liberal MP Tim Wilson, Indigenous community leader Warren Mundine, as well as academics and think tanks.
Stoker also noted that ethically, the traditional Liberal Party values, which focus on freedom, families and businesses, have been known to “deliver the greatest liberty, the greatest individual choices, [and] the greatest human flourishing”.
Failing to consistently uphold such values would result in the loss of trust among its voter base.
A lesson the Party has learned after an “era of capitulating to progressives”, she added.
“As a government, we have largely vacated the field for a number of years leading up to that election; then we shouldn’t be surprised that the belief set that dominates is one that doesn’t match ours,” Stoker said.
LOSS
The 2022 election has seen a large number of moderate Liberal MPs losing to so-called “teal” independents who advocated for strong climate action, including former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, while the Nationals retained all its seats.
NSW Treasurer Matt Kean, a leading moderate, said his interpretation of the Liberals’ loss is that “when the Liberal Party goes too far to the right, we lose in the centre”.
“The Liberal party is at its strongest when we represent the diversity in the community,” Mr Kean said.
“Tonight, we have had a very strong message from our heartland that we are not representing them.”
Moderate Liberal Senator Simon Birmingham said in May that the Party needs to invest in Labor’s agendas such as gender equality, diversity and climate change to claim back the government, but new Liberal leader Peter Dutton said he would instead focus on appealing to suburban voters’ aspirations and small business people.
INTELLECTUAL
Ms Stoker told the conference that it was vital that the Party learns “the right lesson,” which is to have the “courage and intellectual rigour” to make arguments that might be unpopular at times but aligns with its principles.
“What we need are people who are prepared to make hard arguments, to do them as articulately as they can and to do them with a view to moving the dial,” she said.
“If you want to be inoffensive, there’s plenty of other fields in which you can work … but if you want to come to politics, it’s not the right place for you if what you want to be universally loved.” PC
To suggest the lib’s are too conservative is wrong! If there is still to be Dear Amanda, a Liberal Party? Then there needs to be solidarity on the principals of “Far Right” Where commonsense, morality, virtue are practiced and upheld! There will be lots of Blood letting to get there. And there will be those like kean who won’t want to pay the price 🙂 Which is why LNP came about because Kean like Politicians were already rife in the libs!
This mysterious silent majority of conversative die hards is a fantasy.
Perhaps in the retiree villages and north shore golf clubs, but not in real Australia.
Remember the same sex marriage vote, when conservatives thought there were pulling a swiftly putting it to a vote. They got smashed.
Do they really think Australia has become MORE conservative since then?
I understand that it was the LINO dominated at the time Turnbull Government, not “conservatives” meaning traditional Liberal Party of Australia (Menzies creation).
Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd claimed that if Labor were elected to government in 2007 he would be Prime Minister John Howard lite. Earlier appearing on ABC Compass meet the leaders programmes Rudd confessed that he is a Christian Socialist like his “friend” then Prime Minister Tony Blair of the UK, but later and closer to the election date he announced that he was a “fiscal conservative”.
His choices remind me of the Liberals In Name Only (LINO left).