‘The father of the nation…’ That’s how former Deputy Prime Minster John Anderson described his former boss, John Howard, during a podcast interview last year.

Mr Howard these days certainly carries the presence of the elder statesman.

The stability of his time as Prime Minister reminds us of a different – and better – Australia. The days before Rudd-Gillard-Rudd and Abbott-Turnbull-ScoMo made the nation’s top job a precarious short-term reign.

But Howard himself coined a term that could be the ultimate demise of the Liberal Party: ‘a broad church’.

‘We should never, as members of the Liberal Party of Australia, lose sight of the fact that we are the trustees of two great political traditions. We are, of course, the custodian of the classical liberal tradition within our society, Australian Liberals should revere the contribution of John Stuart Mill to political thought,’ Howard opined, during a 2005 speech.

‘We are also the custodians of the conservative tradition in our community. And if you look at the history of the Liberal Party it is at its best when it balances and blends those two traditions.’

I wonder if John Howard envisaged at the time how his broad church would look two decades later?

In marketing, there’s a different philosophical approach: if you try to be all things to all people, you’ll soon be nothing to nobody. The double negative being grammatically and logically incorrect, but (as marketers prefer) the alliteration is nice and you get the point.

Another core tenet of marketing is differentiation. People don’t make purchase decisions based on a rational analysis of all the pros and cons of a certain product versus a competitor. They make decisions on a few memorable points that instil a positive emotional response. They then post-rationalise their purchase later.

Most importantly, faced with a new product option, consumers tend not to change unless there is a compelling ‘reason’ to do so. The risk of change is usually seen as not worth taking unless there’s a potential for significant reward.

All of this, I believe, explains the failure of the Liberal-National coalition to win any of the last federal or mainland state elections it’s faced. And it points to the Queensland LNP facing a more difficult path to victory next month than should be necessary (and probable minority government) given the contempt in which a majority of Queenslanders hold the incumbent Labor crew.

Howard was a stable and solid Prime Minister worthy of fond reflection, but he betrayed the core values of the party at least twice. The introduction of one of the greatest administrative burdens ever to be placed upon small business in this land – the curse of GST and BAS – was a bureaucratic manoeuvre worthy of Mao. And the failure to introduce a pro-family policy of permitting a household to split its combined income for tax calculation purposes – something he himself had championed for many years – was a capitulation to the left’s long march to destroy the nuclear family as the basic unit of our community.

Is John Howard’s broad church sustainable? I don’t think so.

The Australia of 2024 is different. There is a sharper divide in political ideology and a geographic shift has occurred too.

This could work in the Coalition’s favour, but it will require burning down the broad church and a decisive move from a market-responding stance to a market-shifting approach.

Geography now maps political ideology fairly nicely. Forget the inner-city mentality. It’s a lost cause and worthy of ignoring. Focus 100 per cent on rural, regional, and suburban Australia. Grow the pie from the outside-in and you’ll not only win votes, but the culture too.

The rapid rise and fall of Scott Morrison should have been a clear lesson. The fearful trepidation surrounding every policy position as strategists nervously consulted the ‘market research’ at every turn, is a path to destruction.

At some point you have to lead. You have to sell an idea to the market.

To quote someone who had a tiny bit of success in his lifetime selling products nobody realised they needed, Apple founder Steve Jobs: ‘It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.’

Every so often an opportunity comes along to really lead. To seize a modestly popular position and expand upon it.

Such an opportunity landed in the laps of the federal Coalition this past week and was met with the lacklustre response of a church that may indeed be too broad.

The Other Side (my weekly online video show alternative to the ABC’s left wing cultural bias) has a modest 27,000 followers on X. It is unusual for any of our tweets to receive more than a few dozen likes or re-tweets.

But every now and again something hits a public nerve and generates a huge unexpected response. And this one shocked me. A post on Friday about the government’s hideous Frankenstein reincarnation of the dud Misinformation Bill garnered 77,000 views, 1,300 retweets, and 4,100 likes in a matter of hours.

Even among a right-wing-leaning sample on an atypically politically engaged platform like X, that’s a response that should alert any politician to a golden opportunity.

What was even more telling was the nature of the response. I had rhetorically posed the question, ‘So… Where is Peter Dutton and [the Liberal Party] on all this?’ I never anticipated the veracity of the response. A significant proportion of the comments were more critical of the Opposition for not doing the job of opposing, than of the government.

‘The lack of a true opposition party in this country is completely astounding. The Australian people must reject this bill at all costs,’ wrote one.

‘This bill is now so toxic it will destroy every politician that doesn’t come out and totally condemn it… That any politician thinks it’s okay to gag the majority of the population is utterly contemptuous,’ one particularly articulate commenter noted. ‘That they also think it’s okay to exempt themselves and their mates is utterly despicable. The outrage at this is palpable. Any party which makes this a fundamental part of its platform will win the election.’

‘There are many of us who have addressed [Dutton] directly asking for a clear statement in response to this bill. It’s reminiscent of the eSafety Commissioner saga. He waits and then delivers a response. It’ll be interesting, given his support of Covid vaccines, Digital ID, eSafety Commissioner, and his 16-year-old threshold for SM accounts,’ laments another.

This is a skewed sample as the market research boffins would say. True. But the quantity and quality of this reaction to a tweet from a modest independent news commentary channel, is a red flag. It’s also a flashing green light of opportunity.

The ‘moderate’ Liberal Shadow Minster for Communication, David Coleman, is astoundingly – but sadly not surprisingly – busily looking this gift horse in the mouth.

Elon Musk accused the Australian government of being ‘fascists’ with these new laws that threaten to fine global companies 5 per cent of their global revenue for breaches of what ACMA deems to be a failure to properly police ‘misinformation’.

Coleman, with all the leadership and force of a wet blanket wrapped in a lettuce leaf, told Sky News Australia he would not use the same words Musk did.

Why not?

He said merely that ‘there are a lot of problems with this bill’ and that the government was being ‘contemptuous of free speech’. Shadow Cabinet needed to carefully review the details before commenting further, his advisor told me, as he turned down an interview spot on my show (the audience isn’t small).

How about a blanket in-principle condemnation of this ghastly piece of legislation that is not worthy of any kind of consideration, but only immediate relegation to the garbage bin of bad left-wing authoritarian ideas?

The conclusions more right-leaning classical liberal and libertarian Australians can draw from all of this are stark: either this opposition is full of politically strategic fools or they actually like and want this bill to proceed. Either is a troubling concern.

‘It’s possible to imagine the ex-copper Dutton is in furious agreement with the moderates on this one,’ a former senior party figure told me this week.

Oh dear. We may now have the worst ‘broad church’ of all in play. The authoritarian bureaucratic Liberal Party left locked in a joyous embrace with the party’s conservative authoritarians.

If someone doesn’t burst this bubble of groupthink soon, the quiet Australians who see these draconian laws for what they truly are – an abomination in a modern liberal democracy – will remain tragically unrepresented by an Opposition incapable of opposing even the most obviously bad laws.

And for the Coalition many more years of opposition or, at best, minority government, awaits.