Minor Parties Major Problems
Over the past decade, there has been a consistent pattern amongst Australian voters to move their preferred vote to the minor parties if they aren’t fully satisfied with the major party that they have traditionally voted for. This has been particularly prevalent amongst Liberal Party members and voters after Malcolm Turnbull sabotaged Tony Abbott’s Prime Ministership.
Australians were appalled at the revolving door of the Prime Minister’s office under that ALP government when they were in power between 2007 and 2013, when we had the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd years of occupants in the Prime Minister’s office. Australians were rightly appalled at the optics of the faceless men at ALP HQ continuously deciding who would be our Prime Minister, no matter how we voted. They took out those frustrations with the ALP when they voted Tony Abbott into the lodge in 2013 in a landslide, and we all thought a new dawn had arrived.
We were soon to discover how naive we all really were.
In 2014, Malcolm Turnbull pulled a coup that would’ve even made the faceless men at ALP headquarters blush. Liberal Party members and voters were disgusted and left the party in droves. This sort of sabotage was only supposed to happen in the Labor Party, not with the party that had been the traditional party of government at that time and had only recently enjoyed an 11-year stint in government under one leader in John Howard.
From that point on, the Liberal party was hopelessly divided between Turnbull moderates and traditional conservative m.p.’s, and despite enjoying another 9-year stint in government, the LNP adopted a Labor-lite approach to government which ensured the conservative base that deserted them in 2014 never returned.
A host of minor parties have since tried to take advantage of this disenchantment leading to a fracture of the right-of-centre base, and a confusing mix of policy platforms, none of which were entirely appealing to the lost conservative base of Liberal voters, all of whom were looking for a temporary place to park their vote until the Liberal party came back to its senses.
I know this as I was one of them, and for over a decade now, conservative types like me have been political nomads ever since Turnbull committed his nefarious deed.
So while the Liberals surrendered their position as a natural party of government that they had been since Menzies formed it, a vacuum has been created in the political landscape, and no end of minor political groups have tried to fill this limited space. Intertwined with true believers, opportunists emerged who embedded themselves within these minor party ranks along with their own nefarious agendas.
Throughout this period, I was frustrated and looked for alternatives and landed on the Liberal Democrats, soon to become the Libertarians. That frustration elevated to anger during the COVID-19 years when, for the first time in my life, I joined a political party, the Liberal Democrats themselves. As normally happens when you start upon a new journey, I jumped into this experience with unbridled enthusiasm, offering opinions, services and even nominated myself to be considered as a candidate for what I considered to be the winnable lower house seat in Goldstein.
When the seat was lost to the Teals, I was proven correct. It could have so easily been the Liberal Democrats winning that seat.
After sitting in on numerous Zoom meetings for members throughout COVID-19 one thing that became crystal clear to me was that the Liberal Democrats had zero interest in joining forces with other minor parties. This question was asked in every Zoom meeting by myself and other members.
We were all desperate for a new third major party in Australian politics, a party that could win government and provide us with another legitimate option outside the major parties. The responses to these queries were an eye-opener for me. It was bleeding obvious from this that there was long-held animosity towards PHON and UAP, and in particular their leaders, Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer. I am a person who has been on the receiving end of some vile vendetta campaigns through sports associations, whose politics can be every bit as grubby as those engaged in by our various parliaments across the nation. So it was abundantly clear to me that there was no chance of there ever being any unification between these three minor parties for no other reason than personal pettiness and vendettas.
Around this time, Victorian State Upper House M.P. David Limbrick joined us for one of our Zoom meetings. David was one of the reasons I had joined the Liberal Democrats, I had found him to be a man of integrity, honour and most importantly honest throughout the COVID-19 years. When I was writing an article at that time, I contacted his office, and they were one of the few that actually answered the phone when I did call.
Little did I know at the time that the man who inspired me to join the Liberal Democrats would also be one of the reasons I ceased being a member. David that night, explained what being a true Libertarian was about and how, despite several areas of common agreement, Libertarians and Conservatives also had distinct differences in their ideology.
This led to me researching these differences and understanding that while I could vote for a Libertarian candidate when push came to shove, I couldn’t, with any integrity, as a Conservative, make my bed within the Libertarian party as a member. If there is anything I hate more than a politician, it’s a politician who is a fraud. I don’t consider David Limbrick, Tim Quilty or Jordan Dittloff in that manner. All three are true blue Libertarians who are ethical men who believe in their ideology, their values and beliefs. While I can vote for them, I knew after listening to David I couldn’t be one of them without being a fraud myself.
That’s a sentiment that escapes many within the Libertarian ranks, especially in New South Wales, which is, from my perspective, invested with former lifelong conservatives. Individuals have failed previously in securing seats within our parliaments and the careers and perks that go with them. In my opinion, they aren’t legitimate Libertarians, they are the frauds I had chosen not to be and now that I have ceased being a member, that much became crystal clear to me. They were, and they are, using the Libertarian Party as a vehicle to accommodate their own agendas, and in doing so, making them no different to the career politicians that infest our Major parties.
Instead of politics with a difference, it’s just more of the same.
I started pushing back on social media across several issues, and what became even more obvious to me was that very few within the Libertarian ranks truly understand what being a Libertarian means. Liberty is now embedded within the very name of the party. To be a Libertarian means you need to value everybody’s right to their opinion, their beliefs and their right to live the life they wish to lead. Yet when I pushed back on certain areas, such as the right to life, immigration, free trade and drug legalisation, the pile-on from other social media Libertarians was instant, fierce and in many instances abusive.
Sadly for those piling down on me, I am not a person who steps back; I just keep throwing punches. In doing so, I have been called controlled opposition, a plant, a shill, amongst the many other descriptive adjectives.
Considering that all I was doing was expressing a different perspective, this was a strange phenomenon from an ideology that is supposed to respect each individual’s right to opinion and speech. Not so it seems. The glaring hypocrisy from those who claim to belong to a freedom party that embraces Liberty was enlightening.
The one issue that incites the most passionate response is if you have the temerity to challenge the voting strategy of many amongst the so-called “freedom party” movement to “put the majors last”, a strategy that puts their own party’s interest above that of the nation’s interest. If these parties valued freedom, they wouldn’t put forward a strategy that magnifies the chances of the naturally totalitarian political parties and ideologies of the left to win government.
They are not freedom parties, they are, in my opinion, wolves in sheep’s clothing that could facilitate a long-term succession of ALP/Green government. That voting strategy has a number of flaws, but the main one is that it relies on the entire voting public to engage in it. The reality is that the left and especially the far-left will be putting the ALP either first or second on their ballots, while the right-of-centre voting bloc will be having their preference votes and flows sprayed all over the place. Even worse, this “put the majors last” campaign is only been pushed amongst right-or-centre circles only.
All of this gives the ALP, Greens and Teals a natural advantage, especially in marginal seats where preference flows are crucial. This campaign could easily have been a put the Minors first campaign, where you could vote for your preferred Minor Party first, the LNP second and really get behind Minor Party candidates in the Senate.
This would have ensured the ALP gets punted out of Government, the LNP gets back in, but with an almighty scare, that we could elect some Senators from Minor right-of-centre parties to drag the LNP back to their historical centre-right position on the political landscape.
A cooperative approach that would have seen an LNP government be elected would have ensured that grateful LNP senators would’ve looked to work with Minor Party ones. Instead, prominent figures from within the Libertarian and Freedom Party movement have opted for a path of self-destruction and sabotage, not for their preferred parties, but for what is in the best interest of this nation.
These individuals have been venomous in their criticism of the major parties, but that venom will only impact the LNP, not the ALP, delivering us yet another term of Albanese ALP government of socialist incompetents. Even worse, it will potentially splinter the right-of-centre side of politics for a long period. You don’t have to go too far back in this country’s political history to see the repercussions of one side splitting into several factions, which we are on the precipice of doing.
In the 1950’s Labor was split and divided when their Catholic and Communist factions went to war, all of which led to the LNP, predominantly under Menzies, ruling in government for 23 years.
When you point this out to any “Put the Majors” last types, they are content to literally burn the house down in the vain hope that a new political force will emerge at some time to save us. Outside of destroying the LNP, they have no strategy for what comes next, outside of some forlorn hope of a phoenix rising from those political ashes.
To give them credit, their campaign has been effective and persistent and will, I believe, play an important part in returning the ALP to government, but it’s also a contradiction considering they want to remove totalitarian government from the throats of Australian citizens, but are, at the same time, facilitating the return of a government the closest to a totalitarian one that we’ve ever had.
If it pans out this way, then it’s the most woeful act of self-sabotage that I’ve ever seen in Australian politics.
To be fair, the Libertarians aren’t the only ones to be at fault here, there are now a plethora of right-of-centre minor parties that put their own interests above those of the nation. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has been around for nearly three decades and seems content to just win some Senate seats and do what it can to influence both legislation and our bureaucrats. Like the Libertarians, they have no ambition for government, where they would be made accountable for all the promises that they make during an election campaign.
The Trumpet of Patriots should be recognised as the circus that it is after its act of treachery this week, when it preferenced Labor and Teals candidates above all other parties candidates in several seats. They’ve been interesting and entertaining up to this point, but their actions this week have exposed themselves for who they truly are.
Even worse ToP, or under their previous banner, the UAP, only sets up its tent every three years when the main circus comes to town, when Clive Palmer floods the media waves and recruits the gullible and naive to his cause. The reason for doing this can only be rationalised in the mind of Clive himself.
I think the People’s First Party under Gerrard Rennick could evolve, but it is way too early in its political journey to pass a judgment on that. My hope is that Gerrard Rennicl, one of our most impressive politicians, is returned by voters back into the Senate. How he wasn’t promoted by the LNP instead of evicted will go down as one of the great political mysteries in Australian politics.
The rest of the Freedom Coalition is a group of random, small-sized splinter parties that most people would never have heard of before and won’t register in any vote count. The first instance of awareness for these parties is when people collect their ballot papers of the polling booth.
The problem with all the centre-right minor parties is that they all have zero ambition for government, they all have the same strategy of winning senate seats while praying for a hung parliament, the very worst of outcome for good governance, as we discovered under the Gillard government.
A hung parliament will, in all likelihood, deliver a minority ALP government beholden to the Greens or, even worse, a Jacquie Lambie type. If you think things are bad now, give that scenario three years to work its magic.
The other factor in all of this is that, despite their public disagreements, behind closed doors, the parties of the left are more organised, more efficient and simply smarter with their preferences and voting strategy. There is no way politically that the centre-right minor parties will outmanoeuvre their left-leaning counterparts.
The minor parties on the right also have significant differences within their policy platforms, making any effort to work together problematic. This has been starkly revealed itself this week with all of the disagreements and arguments surrounding the ToP preference strategy.
What has also worked against any unity has been the hubris displayed by the Libertarian Party. Any close inspection of some of their higher-profile individuals and candidates would make you think that they are the preferred party of government, as opposed to a political party that has existed for nearly three decades with barely a seat in parliament to show for it.
That close inspection of their various feeds will expose a continued diatribe of criticism of political parties situated in the same demographic on the political landscape. Instead of attacking their common enemy in the ALP, the Greens and the Teals, they have seemed obsessed with fighting each other for the same seats. How this inspires a unified effort to end this incompetent ALP government is beyond me.
The right in this country more generally is a rabble, not one party on the right of centre, whether they are a major or minor party, has taken the opportunity, first presented by COVID-19 and then through what is the worst government I’ve seen in my lifetime, to put itself in a position to win government. If Peter Dutton fails to win this election, it will be a worse result than when John Hewson lost to Paul Keating. At least Keating was a formidable political opponent, the same cannot be said of Albanese.
Dutton will be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory like nothing we’ve seen before.
The Liberals only have themselves to blame, embracing moderate stances on Net Zero, Climate Change, Immigration, restrictions on free speech, woke social issues and a complete abandonment of common sense. Had they adopted strategies employed by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement or Nigel Farage and his Reform party in the UK, then there would be no need for this plethora of minor party madness that will not only deny Dutton’s Liberals the government benches, but entrench the Greens and Teals as the most important participants in the next Albanese ALP government.
When that eventuates, the minor parties should acknowledge their roles in such a disastrous result, but we know they won’t, all of which will simply demonstrate how little difference there is between the minors and their Major Party cousins.
All of this is quite depressing for a conservative like myself. There is simply no party I can support that has a legitimate chance of winning government and changing the direction of this country for the better. We as a nation are in quite a lot of trouble.
My only hope is that after this election, from the desolation of defeat, and make no mistake, whether the ALP or LNP win this election, for conservative voters, either result is a defeat, it will provide an opportunity for a new conservative movement to rise from those ashes to emerge as a major political force that can win government.
This will require a concerted effort from all of us. I will be doing what I can to change the political mood and environment in my home town of Melbourne. To see how I am planning to go about that go to this article
