Peter Dutton led Liberals off a cliff. What next?

The Liberals were comprehensively repudiated by the Australian electorate yesterday, in a way unseen before in the party’s 75 year history. But what, precisely, was repudiated?

Was it the party’s traditional values of smaller government, lower taxes and free markets? Or Peter Dutton’s values of higher taxes, bigger government and more intervention? Was it the Liberal response to the cost of living, via temporary fixes like a petrol excise cut, or Peter Dutton’s obsession with culture wars? Was it the comparisons between Dutton and Trump, or the efforts to distance Dutton from Trump?

It’s hard to know, because all of these were on offer during the election campaign. Moreover, many of them have been on offer over the past three years. Peter Dutton steered the Liberals a long way away from the familiar ground of fiscal discipline, economic management and tax cuts. Under Dutton, suddenly the Liberals were the party of vast government-owned power industries, tax increases and breaking up large companies. Industrial relations was effectively ceded to Labor, to the fury of business. Every health dollar announced by Labor was matched by Dutton. The Coalition’s bold election-eve boast was that the deficit would be worse over the next two years under it than under Labor.

For some traditional Liberals, a return to those values centring on fiscal discipline and free markets is the only sensible path out of the blasted wilderness the party now finds itself lost in — especially if they are to regain the votes of affluent urban electorates that after last night look owned by independents. Others, particularly among the far-right ultras of News Corp, will want to go even further off the map in search of a mythical “quiet Australian” ready to embrace wars on woke and identity politics — issues that apparently lie at the heart of all of the country’s problems.

This tension within what is now the scattered ruins of the once-celebrated “broad church” — on display in the inability of the Liberals to reclaim “teal” seats, and perhaps even the loss of another one, while losing seats elsewhere as well — is going to dog what’s left of the party in the coming parliamentary term.

Perhaps the one thing both sides can agree on is that the party under Dutton was neither one thing nor the other — part-Trump, part-Howard, part economic disciplinarian, part profligate, part free market, part massive interventionism. The lack of ideological direction manifested in the lack of a campaign strategy, and in repeated instances of confusion over key policies. It also means that the recovery process is going to require a hard internal debate over policy, something the party hasn’t had for over a decade. The Liberal tradition is to leave policy to the leader. That failed miserably this time around. At least, in facing what may well be two more terms in opposition, they’ve got time to have a proper policy process.

Perhaps they might agree that the Liberals have to communicate better. This means spending far less time talking to out-of-touch far-right elites like Sharri Markson, Ben Fordham and Peta Credlin and more time with actual journalists who might dare to scrutinise their policy offerings — something Dutton and his lieutenants clearly struggled with during the campaign. Explaining and advocating for policy is a skill that can be learnt — but it won’t be acquired talking to your mates at Faux News. The fact that shadow ministers, up to Dutton himself, kept running back to the protection of News Corp even during the campaign was a staggering indictment of whatever communications strategy they had — if they had one at all.

But the first task is to pick a leader. Luckily, Dutton is gone, removing him at a stroke from consideration. Angus Taylor will think himself the favourite, but the bloke who was the architect of the shambles that passed for the Liberals’ economic and fiscal policy can’t be a credible leader at this point (then shadow treasurer Chris Bowen, after Labor’s 2019 loss, took a lower profile portfolio and hunkered down, reflecting his responsibility for the big-target Labor policy offering).

Who else? Dan Tehan keeps being touted as leadership material, for reasons that aren’t clear on watching him. Still, each to their own; he might Bradbury his way into the leadership. Andrew Hastie escapes most of the blame for the catastrophe and would represent a clean jump in political generations, but hailing from Western Australia is a genuine impediment for an opposition leader, as Kim Beazley found.

The unifying candidate might be Sussan Ley, who was also excluded from Dutton’s campaign and thus bears little responsibility. She’s experienced and served Dutton loyally and would offer a more user-friendly face to voters than Dr Evil. She could get on with the job of holding a rampant Albanese government to account while leading a process of reestablishing what exactly it is that the Liberals believe in.

Where to now for the Liberal Party?

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