Opposition parties are a disaster. Here’s why

The Liberal Party has suffered back-to-back drubbings at the federal level, while opposition parties in Victoria and Western Australia endured wipeouts at three consecutive state election. Meanwhile Tasmanian Labor will have lost five times in a row if July goes badly for them.

At the territory level, the Liberals haven’t held government in the Australian Capital Territory for just shy of a quarter of a century, while last year in the NT Labor was obliterated by the Country Liberal Party.

Here is Crikey‘s step-by-step guide to how Australia’s flailing opposition parties have thrown themselves into a death spiral. We’ll get to the impact this has in part two. But firstly — how does it happen?

Step 1: Electoral wipeout(s)

Labor had a modest but solid majority after the Victorian state election of 2014. But it was in 2018, in the shadow of Liberal chaos at a federal level and state leader Matthew Guy’s disastrous law and order campaign, that we saw an unexpected “Dan-slide”.

The “it’s time” factor may have delivered a WA Labor victory over a tired three-term Liberal government in 2017, but it ended up being an unprecedented thumping after the Liberals burnt through a great deal of credibility by preferencing an electorally resurgent but even more dysfunctional than usual One Nation.

In 2021, in the midst of COVID-19, WA delivered Labor a victory that made the world “landslide” seem insufficient. Under cultishly adored state daddy Mark McGowan, Labor took 53 lower house seats and reduced the Libs to a lower house presence of two.

This leads to…

Step 2: Public recriminations

Who could forget the aftermath of the 2022 federal election, which featured an anonymous MP saying of departing leader Scott Morrison’s support for Warringah candidate Katherine Deves: “The transphobe thing was an absolute disaster … [Morrison] fucked us and his fingerprints are absolutely fuckin’ everywhere on that. The bloke thinks he is a master strategist. He is a fuckwit.”

To go back a little further, between its wipeout in 2011 and its eventual return in 2023, NSW Labor was the gold standard for terrible standards, one of the most purely unelectable parties this country has ever had to honour to claim. In the years that followed NSW Labor’s expulsion from office, it had a relationship with scandal much like medieval Europe had with the black death. In 2013, then Labor PM Kevin Rudd launched a federal intervention into the branch, by which time the party had already expelled former members Ian MacDonald and Eddie Obeid on account of the NSW ICAC investigations into their property dealings. The whole saga would continue to play out, in public, for an impressive length of time.

The 2021 WA election result necessitated an internal review so scathing that one of its subjects threatened to sue his own party for defamation, causing sections to be removed. The shellacking also made clearer the powerful behind-the-scenes role of the ominously-named “Clan”, centred on the party’s right wing and described by one prominent conservative as an “offbeat religious group” that was to blame for the Liberals’ woes in WA.

Which illustrates…

Step 3: A higher proportion of weirdos or shonks

Another outcome of an electoral hammering is that a fading appeal to mainstream candidates then leads to more extreme elements having a disproportionate impact on the party’s platform and thus its image with voters.

In the Victorian Liberals, wrote Bernard Keane, it was “initially Christian fundamentalists who effortlessly signalled how badly out of touch the party was with ordinary Victorians”, followed in recent years by “Trump-inspired elements prone to peddling conspiracy theories about Andrews, threatening violence, abusing LGBTQIA+ people and Indigenous peoples, and attacking abortion rights”.

Which results in…

Step four: Public disunity

John Pesutto had pledged that the Victorian Liberals under his leadership would look to “reach the broadest possible audience of Victorians” when he took over the leadership. On March 18, 2023, neo-Nazis showed up as uninvited but supportive attendees of the “Let Women Speak” rally organised by anti-trans-rights campaigners Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull and Angela Jones, as well as first-term Liberal MP Moira Deeming. Pesutto moved to expel Deeming. It led to protracted wrangling, messy compromises and eventually a defamation case against Pesutto with Deeming alleging he falsely portrayed her as a Nazi sympathiser. The case, inevitably, made even more disunity and dysfunction public.

Deeming won the case and Pesutto lost the leadership; he’s now facing bankruptcy and maybe expulsion from parliament altogether. And even that wasn’t the end of it. It came to light that Deeming had offered to delay the bankruptcy proceedings against Pesutto if the Liberals were to (bypassing its own rules) guarantee her preselection for next year’s state election. Cue reams more coverage of Liberal dysfunction and ultimately a referral to the state’s anti-corruption body for Deeming.

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Stay tuned for part two, on how the above impacts party leadership, policy formulation and campaign infrastructure.