Address to Sydney Institute

Does anyone still doubt the need to modernise the Liberal Party of Australia?

Out of office in every state, territory and the commonwealth, our membership base is at an all time low, we have been out campaigned and out fundraised by our rival for public office. 

In 1996, in every state, territory and the commonwealth the Liberal Party held 256 lower house seats. In 2008, we hold 155. In twelve years our firepower has diminished by forty per cent!

We have lost the last twenty two state and territory elections.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, I have to tell you it can.

While it’s true that the last five times government changed in Australia at the subsequent election there was a swing against the new government, that has not been the pattern at the state and territory level since 1999.

At the federal level, in 1951 the opposition gained point three per cent at the election of that year, in 1974 one per cent, in 1977 one point one per cent, in 1984 one point five per cent, and in 1998 four point six per cent. I will be expending every energy to ensure this pattern is repeated and that we break the cycle and win the next federal election – I fervently believe that we can. But we would be naive to assume that business as usual will deliver that victory. 

Since 1999, state and territory oppositions have found that their perceived shortcomings have led to a second dose of the public’s medicine in six cases (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Northern Territory and Tasmania) and virtually no change in two (Western Australia and the ACT).

The Party is perilously close to the edge of the waterfall.

But we can do something about it. We can modernise every facet of our Party, other than our reason for existence, which has never changed, to avoid going over.

The Federal Opposition, led by Brendan Nelson, is showing that we are not broken or bowed. We are taking the fight to Labor in Canberra. We are confounding the critics and naysayers.

But Brendan Nelson can’t bear responsibility for the counter offensive on his own. The Liberal Party itself must change. There is tremendous scope for fresh ideas, for new thinking, for being prepared to use 2008 and as a year of modernisation of our organisation. It would be a tragedy to waste this opportunity.

Tonight, I would like to highlight where I believe change will bring about electoral success and allow the Liberal Party to govern for the better throughout the country in the future.

My Party needs to embrace a change that will replenish our membership.

A strong membership base is a strong resource – for developing policy, in campaigning, in fundraising, in spreading the word, in providing the candidates, staff and personnel that every political party needs.

I believe the Liberal Party should implement a practice that has been initiated by right of centre political parties around the world to their benefit – allowing all Party members to select the Parliamentary Leader.

With one stroke, we would give Australians a reason to join and become active in the Party.

As Michael Kroger pointed out in his column in The Australian on February 18:

“the Coalition parties need to do the same amount of work they did 50 years ago with 25 per cent of the resources.”

The influx of new members that would accompany empowering the grass roots membership in this way would revitalise the membership of the Party - bringing us new ideas, destroying rotten boroughs, creating a phalanx of new campaign workers, fundraisers and potential candidates.

For many, this will seem like a radical idea. But it is not too radical for the practice to be the case in the UK Conservative Party, the French Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), the Canadian Conservative Party, or the Likud in Israel. The Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the US have raised grassroots participation to unprecedented heights.

Barry Cohen in writing about the US primary system in The Australian on February 14 wrote:

“A long time ago, Americans realised that no system was truly democratic unless voters not only elected their president and congressmen but also participated in choosing the different parties’ candidates. No system of democracy is perfect but the primary process is one that Australia should at least be considering.”

I would envisage that the Liberal Party adopt a similar model to our sister party in the UK.

In essence, the Conservative Party in the UK allows the Parliamentary Party to choose the candidates that will be offered to the membership from amongst their number. The broader membership of the Party then chooses between the two candidates who emerged from the Parliamentary Party ballot. 

Leadership ballots are only held when a spill of the leadership is initiated and carried by the Parliamentary Party or when the Leader resigns or retires. A person whose leadership is overturned in a spill cannot nominate as a candidate for leader in the subsequent ballot.

Critically, the membership itself cannot spill the Party’s leadership.

Such a model would ensure there is no possibility of seeing a repeat of the shambles that was the process adopted by the Australian Democrats.

The UK model ensures that the Parliamentary Party puts forward two candidates who they believe have the capacity to lead the Party to victory, fulfil the role of Prime Minister and have a largely united Party behind them. But it also means that the candidate who is selected by the Conservative Party members has shown their appeal to a wider audience than the few hundred members of the Parliamentary Party. To win, they would likely have demonstrated their ability to conquer the media, to articulate a message and to have an agenda that a wider audience wishes to support.

David Cameron’s modern campaign to win the Conservative Party leadership in October 2005 – through the internet, television, radio and public appearances across the UK generated a following both within the Party and amongst the general public that gave him a springboard, once successful, to portray his Party as having a newness that it had lacked since the defeat of John Major’s government in May 1997. This was obvious in the polls, the reaction to David Cameron by Tony Blair and by the increase in interest in the Conservative Party after years of seeming listlessness following their almost two decades of rule.

There can be little argument that in the US where the Republicans have involved their membership in this way since the middle of the nineteenth century the Republican Party itself is a healthier specimen because of it.

This is the case too for the Likud in Israel. In 1993 the Likud held their first membership wide election for their candidate for Prime Minister. This was repeated in 1999. Both times, the candidates the Likud chose went on to win elections for their Party. More than that, the consequent media attention lifted the profile of the Likud and demonstrated that the Party was vibrant and open.

Finally, in Canada, I will quote you one brief statistic. In 2006, 144 289 Alberta Progressive Conservative Party members turned out to vote at polling booths in their leadership election in 2006. Alberta has a population of 3.4 million people.

If the same proportion was to be repeated just in South Australia, it would be the equivalent of the South Australian Liberal Party having 60 000 members. Imagine how such a number would transform politics in my state!

If our sister right of centre parties around the world have been able to manage this, I can’t think of why a sophisticated political party such as the Liberal Party can’t conceive of such a change.

The Australian public are more actively interested in politics today than at any time in our nation’s history. They have more ways to be involved. The Internet has transformed politics. The interaction between people through Facebook, email, YouTube and all the other methods of sharing and accessing information mean that people want to be more involved and they expect to be given a real role. 

If we need any more evidence of our need to embrace grassroots democracy, we need look no further than the phenomenal success of GetUp! While the centre right of politics might not agree with most of their policy positions they have proven that there is a new way – they have used the Internet to create a political movement in which every registered person feels they have a real say in the direction that organisation is headed and what they do.

Just in case you do wish to look further than the success of GetUp!, I’ll give you another insight into where voters are getting their information from – there are 1.8 million members of the Australia Network on Facebook – the vast majority would be voters. The Australia Network (which wouldn’t include all Australians as plenty of Facebook users don’t join a Network) equates to fourteen per cent of the people who voted on November 24 last year. That number will only grow.

Voters today want to be involved, to be taken seriously. With all the choices they can make they are not going to be part of an organisation that takes from them and gives little in return. 

Allowing our members a real say in selecting the person who leads the Party and represents the Party in Parliament will give people a reason to join the Liberal Party. 

We need to add to our membership. To build on what we have. To give those in the Party now the support they need.

There is another area I want to touch on tonight – an idea to end the ‘winner takes all’ outcomes in organisational elections that sap our energies and strength because of the disappointment they inevitably stoke and the disunity they engender.

Almost all the internal elections that occur across the Liberal Party at the moment are preferential or ‘first past the post’. We need to move to a system of voting that ensures all modes of thought in our broad church are genuinely represented. That they all have a place at the table. The method of voting that will bring about this outcome is proportional representation.

Currently, if a group of like minded individuals can garner enough support at a Party conference or annual general meeting they can generally win all the positions (or as close to it) as are available.

This leads inevitably to any other group of like minded individuals being shut out of the political process.

When politically active and interested people are denied a voice in their own Party they have few options available to them to influence events. We have seen the result of this across every State Division of the Party – leaking, undermining, the traducing of reputation and disunity.

The winners from this have been the Labor Party.

How can we expect to win, when rather than focussing on building an agenda, campaigning, fundraising or finding and training the best candidates for seats we instead are focussed internally?

To break out of this frustrating loop we have to find a way to ‘cut the Gordian knot’.

The answer is proportional representation.

This is a system of voting similar to the system used to elect most Upper Houses in Australia. Where there is more than one candidate to be elected to a position, a quota is established and preferences distributed until each successful candidate reaches the quota.

It would not be able to be used in every situation – for example, there can only be one President. But for Vice Presidents and Executives, Upper House tickets and in other ways, proportional representation would ensure that everyone in the Liberal Party had a fair chance to have their opinion represented in the Party forums.

There are some who will argue that this conceives of ‘factions’ existing in the Liberal Party. 

Tom Playford, our twenty eight year Premier of South Australia in the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties, once said:

“In politics, you have different friends, on different days, for different reasons.”

In the Liberal Party, factions will never take serious hold as they have in the Labor Party. When it comes to issues, we Liberals are too individualistic to be told how to think by our peers. The alliances that form and re-form in the Liberal Party have porous boundaries.

Take me as a case in point. I believe as Robert Menzies did that the state’s role is more than as a “mere keeper of the ring”. Yet I am an advocate of a small footprint for government and low taxes, recognising that the individual is better placed than the state to decide on what they wish to spend their hard earned resources. I believe in social justice and abhor discrimination. When presented with choices that are loosely termed “life issues”, my voting record on euthanasia, RU 486, embryonic stem cell research and cloning would place me as a conservative. Yet I am a republican. The media and much of the Liberal Party characterise me a ‘moderate’. I am a classic example of why formal factions will never take root in the Liberal Party.

The Liberal Party has always, since our founding, embraced what some call ‘institutionalised diversity of opinion’. There exists in every Party Division, guaranteed representation for young people, for women and for people outside the major capital cities.

Our Party founders, to varying degrees, recognised that to be a broadly based Party we had to build in special rules that gave Young Liberals genuine representation on State Executives and State Councils. The Party in South Australia has a Rural Council and Women’s Council with delegates to the governing bodies of the Party. Our constitution requires (wherever there are two or more delegates to be elected from Party bodies) that at least one be a man and one be a woman.

So, proportional representation would sit well with a structure we have had in place in the Party since 1944! Far from institutionalising factions it would ensure that the need to congregate around groups of like minded individuals would be less important. It would also mean that the Party would be better served by the ‘best and brightest’ of all our available personnel rather than those who in the current ‘winner takes all’ atmosphere have prevailed.

The Liberal Party’s new Federal President, Alan Stockdale, said in an interview with The Australian on February 23, 2008:

“We need to provide incentives to new members, and the more diverse their backgrounds the better. We need to recast the Party’s constitutional structure so we broaden our base and bring more people into the Party and draw on the community’s resources.”

In two sentences he has encapsulated the message of my speech today.

What better way to “provide incentives to new members” and “draw on the community’s resources” than to engage them in the political process? We need to show the public that we value their opinions, that we aren’t preaching to them, that we are instead, responding to them. Providing for their involvement in a meaningful way by giving Party members a vote for the Party’s leadership would harness their skills and energy in a way that we are not doing as well as we should now.

To attract new members and keep those we have, we need to present them with a Party where every member is expending their energy on constructive pursuits – policy development, fundraising, campaigning and supporting candidates. The introduction of proportional representation in internal Party elections will help bring that about.

These two reforms would transform the Liberal Party of Australia. Placing us again in the first rank of centre right parties around the world and give us the foundation to begin the journey back to government around the country.