The Liberal Party is supposed to be the party of individual freedom, free enterprise and growing opportunity for all. These values make for a good society for all Australians, maximising their opportunity to flourish whatever their background or identity.
But we must face up to the fact that the Liberal Party has been rejected by many Australians who would have a natural affinity with our values. The evidence shows that the fruit of a decade of conviction-light government has been a significant erosion in steady support and sympathy for the party.
Some believe the way back from the wilderness is to double down on divisive culture wars: to govern for sectional conservative interests rather than the traditional Liberal aspiration to govern for broad, mainstream Australia.
In this chapter, I address the view that the Liberal Party needs to be fighting a culture war to win elections again. Alternatively, I suggest that we must be seen as the party of the common good, not the party of sectional interest and division. I conclude that the Liberal Party, grounded in fundamental liberal values, can be the party of religious freedom, economic opportunity and social inclusion without contradiction if we are willing to do the hard work of cultivating unity and budling community.
Who does the Liberal Party govern for?
Who are the people the Liberal Party needs to win back to be a party of government? Who does the Liberal Party govern for? This philosophical problem facing the Liberal Party in the wilderness of opposition is fundamental.
There have been strident and loud responses from the right-wing commentariat, with a narrow view of the party’s base. It is argued that the true base of the Liberal Party is socially conservative on issues around religious discrimination, gender identity and sexuality, and passionate about climate change scepticism and coal-fired power. Thus, the reason the Liberal Party lost was that it did not take definitive enough stances on these issues. This was put starkly by the Australian Christian Lobby;
The ‘broad church’ Liberal Party cannot survive long-term because it cannot be all things to all people. It cannot appeal to left and right at the same time…As the federal Liberal Party assesses the way forward from tonight’s result, the Liberals need to pick their lane and reboot their natural base, which is socially conservative.
While social conservatives are certainly a key part of the Liberal Party’s base, and without them, we cannot win back government, the Liberal Party has never historically sought to govern for defined sectional interest groups alone. The problem is that some commentators conceive middle Australia as a narrow subset of Australia.
The two greatest Liberal Prime Ministers, Sir Robert Menzies and John Howard believed that the Liberal Party exists to govern for a broadly defined middle Australia – the ‘forgotten people’ as Menzies put it or the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘battlers’ for Howard. In short, the majority of Australians simply seeking and striving to build a good life for themselves and their families.
Middle Australia is not just conservative mean aged over-55 who live in outer suburbs. Middle Australia is broader. It includes the swathes of younger socially tolerant professionals and women who turned away from the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party cannot win them and win government back by only being a conservative culture war protest party.
The facts are these. The Liberal Party lost many of its formerly safe seats which were held when Howard was Prime Minister and whose government was socially conservative, but whose government had an attractive vision for broad, mainstream Australia through significant economic reform. By contrast, the Morrison Government went to the election supporting a religious discrimination bill (watered down, but approved by mainstream religious groups) and the Prime Minister even signalled support for the controversial Katherine Deves. Yet in the more socially conservative Western Sydney, the party experienced large swings against it and toward a Labor Party that had stronger climate policies and a more qualified view toward anti-discrimination legislation exemptions for religious schools. The Sky News/conservative commentariat thesis is further undermined by so called conservative minor ‘freedom parties’ not experiencing a huge uplift in their vote; the bleeding of votes from the Coalition to them was minimal.
Where the Liberal Party experienced the most damaging leakage to the new independent ‘Teal’ movement. The issues the ‘Teals’ campaigned on; climate policy, integrity in politics, and gender equity, are hardly fringe ‘woke’ issues. The majority of Australians agree with these. Yet loud parts of the Party have treated these as if they were ideological issues in a culture war.
The arguments of the conservative commentariat reveal a mistaken false dichotomy: the Liberal Party must pick between two different bases. To put it starkly, they reject that the Liberal Party can be both the party of the LGBT climate concerned professional in Woollahra, and the socially conservative church-going working-class migrant family in Blacktown. In 2022, we won the support of neither of these groups. Yet the Liberal Party under Howard was able to hold a broad range of seats across a broad range of social demographics.
The conservative commentariat’s purported solutions would have the Liberal Party lean into social polarisation, following trends overseas, where debates about national identity, personal identity (race, sexuality, gender, religion) and environmental issues are regularly fought in the public arena, often in a bruising and divisive manner.
The problem with the culture war
The robust debate over issues like religious freedom and climate change does not need to lead to ugly polarisation – different sides can disagree yet accept when the political process resolves the (ideally respectful) debate through the process of election, compromise and parliamentary vote.
Yet now these issues feature the catastrophising of the stakes by commentators and politicians. This has been a feature of both ends of the political spectrum. On the left, we witnessed the appalling treatment of Andrew Thorburn, hounded to resign by an intolerant mob because of mainstream Christian beliefs his Anglican parish holds about traditional sexual ethics, and out of an irrational fear that he had secret hateful beliefs that would undermine his ability to run an inclusive club. This is despite his actions and words which demonstrated that his commitment to his church did not contradict his commitment to inclusivity for LGBT people at NAB and Essendon. On the right, we see commentators leaning into wild conspiracy theories about a secret cabal of ‘globalists’ from the World Economic Forum, and stoking fear that anyone trying to achieve a balance on climate and energy policy is in the pocket of ‘globalists’ working against Australia’s national interest. They whip up anxiety around the Uluru Statement from the Heart, ramping up the stakes by saying it will create ‘apartheid’ and special rights based on race, warning that Australia will become perpetually divided on race while ironically contributing to that division by refusing to constructively work to find an acceptable model and unifying way forward that allows Indigenous people to feel in control of their destiny - surely a liberal aim!
Rather than respectful debate and seeking common ground, it is easier for each side to paint the other as mean-spirited, oppressive, bigoted and hateful. Victory over the other side must be won at all costs otherwise partisan champions warn that complete disaster will occur. Issues like religious freedom, dignity for previously marginalised groups, and climate change should be discussed with the aim of democratic consensus and securing liberty and opportunity for all. Yet when treated as culture war issues, positions are taken as emotional totemic identity markers of ‘my side’ against the ‘enemy’.
But the loud and anxious voices of passionate activists on the extremes of either side are not reflective of the everyday concerns and anxieties of middle Australia – the true quiet Australians.
By contrast to loud activists on the fringe, Australians generally believe in a live-and-let-live attitude when it comes to social issues. Their votes do not shift based on these culture war issues. I suspect it is true that most Australians would be uncomfortable with the aggressive and intolerant nature of some radical gender advocates, but Australians also want LGBT Australians to be free to live lives of dignity. And so they feel unsettled by divisive debates about personal identity. I suspect Australians also want religious institutions to be free to conduct their affairs according to their own beliefs, but they do not want an ugly culture war played out in social and mainstream media that tears the country apart and leaves vulnerable individuals feeling alienated. Liberals need to support religious freedom and the rights of parents in schools as a matter of principle but framing these as culture war issues fought in opposition to an ‘enemy’ is a recipe for becoming a party of 20%, not 51%.
A majority-winning coalition of voters cannot be formed on centring social and climate war issues. To believe that it can is to be deluded that Australia remains a conservative majority Christian country, or that a Trump-like homogenous disaffected majority in non-urban areas exists on the same scale as the United States. Australians by a majority voted ‘Yes’ in the same-sex marriage postal survey. More and more people are identifying as ‘non-religious’. Australia has a high proportion of migrants from all over the world, has a more equal distribution of wealth, and is highly urbanised with an increasing proportion of tertiary educated people.
While I share concerns about the disintegration of a shared Judeo-Christian framework, culture war commentators must face squarely that you cannot do politics as if a culturally elite progressive minority have hijacked society against a socially conservative majority. The majority mainstream is not who culture war commentators think it is. The reality is what Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor expounds in A Secular Age, where the social imaginary is one that no longer assumes fixed transcendent meaning – belief and unbelief, and as a result, many values, are contested individual by individual. The question for a major political party is what to do with these contested social values. Do we copy the left and lean into a sense of victimhood and identity grievance for social conservatives? Or do we seek to build bridges across different groups and work out what is in our common interest? Do we, in short, seek to truly love our neighbour as ourselves despite our differences and disagreements?
Much can be said about the underlying causes of the aggressive and ugly polarisation we’ve seen, including the role of social media. But at its root is fragmentation caused by a lack of common unity bound together by a common civic friendship or love. Polarisation may feed off some truth; there is truly ugly racism, sexism and homophobia that exists in some quarters, and there is ugly bigotry against people of faith by radicals who wish to aggressively ram down relatively novel ideas about identity. But often these debates are amplified beyond proportion both concerning incidence, and the time everyday Australians spend thinking about these issues. They assume falsely that politics is fundamentally warfare: people with different views are enemies to be defeated.
People in outer suburbs still vote on bread-and-butter issues. They want a strong economy that keeps the cost of living low, where they and their families can find work, build a home and enjoy life in a secure country. They struggle to see how centring contentious social issues helps them with their daily concerns.
Liberalism for the common good
Just as Menzies rejected the class war as false, the Liberal Party must not fall into the trap of fighting this false culture war as the central reason for its existence. Liberalism in the Australian tradition has always defined itself as the tradition for the common good against sectional and special interests, whether rent-seeking big business or coercive closed-shop unions. Today, we must not be the party of sectional and special interests whether they be religious interests, progressive identity political interests, or rent-seeking industries seeking protection.
As Liberals, we are concerned to preserve the freedom of the individual to flourish and to freely associate with others in communities that give shape and meaning to their lives. The goal of a good society are the things that matter: friendship, family, enjoyment, contemplation of meaning, learning, and a sense of place. These are goods in and of themselves that can be enjoyed by all and should be secured for every Australian; whether you think gender is fixed or fluid, whether you hold a traditional or more liberal sexual ethic, whether you are a tradie or a professional.
We can only secure these goods with liberty that allows people to pursue them according to their conscience, with prosperity only a free economy brings, and in association with others. It is liberty, grounded in a common sense of belonging to one another as Australians, that must be our guiding creed as Liberals. As these goods can only be pursued in community, securing the freedom of associative communities through which as Tocqueville argues the citizen learns democratic mores of deliberation and solidarity must be Liberals’ social priority. We must be the party that seeks to strengthen those communities, though these communities may hold diverse views and be composed of diverse people.
We must create an environment within which communities with disagreements (such as traditional religious communities and the LGBT community) are not asked to let go of what makes them who they are, but are encouraged to come together to find a common purpose. This is the only way we can be a majority party of government, but more importantly, be a truly Liberal Government that governs in the interest of all.
We must resist participating in a culture war that says that Australians with different social values are the ‘enemy’. This may be a recipe for strengthening support with people on the right who agree with particular totemic issues. But it is not a recipe for a party that governs with the support of most Australians and seeks to govern for the common good. A culture war on divisive issues will have no winners – and the debris it leaves behind is a culture wracked by division. The only resolution is winner-takes-all – a battle for power at the cost of the other. If Saint Augustine was right that a polity is united by common objects of love, the culture war can only bring unity through common objects of hate. Unity around opposition to a group. That is not the sort of society most Australians want.
If the Liberal Party is to be truly a party of government for all Australians, it must reject the politics of resentment and division. The goal cannot be to win power for one group to defeat another. This is antithetical to liberalism. A party truly worthy of government will govern in the interests of the common good. It will avoid the extremes and thereby avoid becoming a minority party. It will seek policy solutions that are for the benefit of all Australians, whatever their identity or beliefs. It does not lean into these cultural conflicts, pitting LGBT Australians against people of faith, or mining towns against clean energy.
While we have long criticised the left for its politics of class and racial resentment, the right has produced its versions of identity-based resentment. It should go against the grain of a liberal party to stoke bitter conflict and suspicion in society. It’s easy to draw battle lines and fight and divide, condemning fellow Australians who disagree. But we must not be afraid to engage in the difficult work of community building.
Finding a unifying Liberal story
We need to find a story to which we all belong. But we don’t have to look far. That story is about freedom. David Kemp argues convincingly in his multi-volume political history of Australia that the story of Australia is fundamentally that of a remarkable experiment in liberal democracy. Australia’s prosperity is the result of its institutions and arrangements that reflect the philosophy of liberalism, allowing individuals to flourish in a land that values and protects fundamental freedoms.
The only way freedom can be cultivated and made to work for all can be done is through the preservation of a united community. This cannot be achieved through stoking division, but through the building of community through the hard work of emphasising what binds us together as Australians and working out how we, through our diversity and differences of opinion, can flourish together. Indeed, national unity, more important than ever given the significant geopolitical threats we face, is only possible when people within the country believe they hold things in common.
Cultivating unity is a big challenge in the age of expressive individualism, where the alienated modern individual is so inwardly focused that they can no longer feel solidarity with those who are different. This is the danger of liberalism which does not also emphasise the importance of community building. Alienated individuals who do not practice living in a community with others who are different from them will more easily reach for suspicion and characterise those who hold a different ethic and who may disagree with them as evil.
Yet liberalism also provides the resources necessary for community building, because it provides key reasons why we should even want to put aside conflict and winning power simply for ‘our group’, and rather seek the good of others. Ultimately, liberals believe that freedom and dignity are owed to everyone by virtue of their humanity, no matter their sexuality, race, gender identity etc. A statesperson who takes seriously their duty to bring the country together, particularly a liberal committed to liberal democracy, must strengthen rather than weaken norms of respect during a disagreement because everyone is worthy of respect. With today’s fragmentation, we must be the party that cultivates a shared sense of community, committed to the freedom of one another. A shared sense that all can belong to this free country, even during a disagreement.
To provide a historical example, Liberals committed to the common good did not let the prejudice of their Protestant base in the early 20th century prevent them from providing aid to Catholic schools. It’s hard to believe now, but historically there existed deep prejudice and suspicion between both groups. Today, Catholics and Protestants still have serious theological disagreements; ones that go to the heart of personal salvation. Yet these serious disagreements do not now prevent civic friendship and cooperation between those groups. The real disagreements are not denied, but they are relativised when Protestants and Catholics meet in the public space to advocate for a policy that they believe is good for all. Now both groups easily find a home within the Liberal Party, because a good economy and freedom to exercise faith are good for both the Protestants and Catholics. They no longer see each other as enemies, and denominational conflict is mostly confined to civil town hall debates, not in the grab for political power.
There is no reason the change from hostility to civic friendship that occurred between Protestants and Catholics, helped by Liberal community building, cannot be the same for people of faith and people who have serious disagreements with them about sexual ethics and gender. Liberalism provides a way forward: to live and let live. To create space for one another. To live respectfully with differences while seeking ways to cooperate for the common good, with a fundamental commitment to the liberty and good of others.
How then do we handle deeply held disagreements? We must always start from the assumption until proven otherwise, that people hold differing views for good reasons rather than animus. A stance of charity and grace in our civic relationships, grounded in the love of neighbour as an individual with fundamental dignity, must be our creed. As an economic liberal, I do not think those who want more social spending are evil socialists trying to trample on my freedom. As a social conservative, I do not think all those who have concerns about religious freedom legislation hate people of faith.
The example of Howard in government is also instructive. Arguably he fought a ‘culture war’ of sorts. But in context, Howard saw himself as fighting a war against division Keating’s Labor had encouraged. Howard sought mainstream unity, rejecting the more extreme views about the nation’s past, and saying constantly that the things that unite Australians are more important than the things that divide us. With this focus on unity, Howard managed to hold both socially progressive affluent seats and conservative aspirational marginal seats.
If we’re going to learn lessons from this election, we need to reject the ideological nonsense of those trying to pit legitimate concerns about religious freedom, energy security and rural and regional jobs against action on climate change and concern for gender respect and equity. The Liberal Party at its best should be the party of religious freedom, low energy prices, economic growth, climate action and gender equity. To do this, we must undertake the hard work of building solidarity across the wide range of Australian society, offering policies that improve the lives of a broad range of Australians. While solutions are not easy, conflict cannot be our starting point.
A party for all of us
In 2022, the Liberal Party wasn’t decimated in our heartland because of being too ‘woke’. The Liberal Party lost because of a lack of conviction from the very top about anything at all. But all is not lost if we can find our way back again to conviction, believing, as Menzies said, in “the individual, his rights, and his enterprise, and rejecting the Socialist panacea”, and reflecting these liberal values in concrete policies that speak to the aspirations of all Australians.
Can the Liberal Party be the natural political home of LGBT professionals and conservative religious migrants in Western Sydney? We have been before, and we can be again. Can the Eastern Suburbs female lawyer and the South West Sydney male tradie both feel that their interests are represented by the Liberals? I believe strongly the answer is yes.
Common good liberalism seeks to secure those fundamental liberties for all - individual liberty, free enterprise, free speech, and freedom of association. It recognises that securing these freedoms is vital to allow people to flourish and pursue the things that make for a good life. It also recognises that the things that make for a good life require communities within which individuals find identity and flourishing.
Yet while recognising the need for communities with real differences, it also seeks to cultivate a shared commitment and loyalty to the nation. It sees a place for communities with differences of belief to come together and seek ways of cooperation for the common good, without asking each group to relinquish their beliefs. This is a better way to the corrosiveness of identity politics, promoted on the airwaves of right-wing media just as much as the left. Identity politics seeks to stir grievance. Ultimately, it is antithetical to the common good.
In closing, I offer some brief principles for a Liberal Party seeking to navigate tricky issues yet govern for the interests of broad, middle Australia.
On religious freedom, we must not be seen to be the party protecting the special interests of some. As the party of liberalism, we must be seen to stand for the freedom of all, this doesn’t mean there are easy answers. There are deeply felt tensions in the community. Yet our role is not to stoke division and play off each side. Free associations and communities necessarily make moral claims on individuals that are felt more closely, and even above, the State. There will be inevitable disagreement between groups about ethics (including sexual ethics). True liberalism should make room for individuals to follow their conscience about these moral claims, but also cultivate a society where people with differences can accept each other’s differences respectfully and cooperate under a shared sense of solidarity as Australians.
On climate policy, the change that economic transition brings must be concerned with ensuring that communities are not left behind. Policies from both sides of politics from the 1980s-2000s were concerned with equity as they also sought to transition Australia from a closed economy to an open liberal economy. We can learn lessons from that era and apply them to a market-led transition from a high-emissions economy to a greener economy.
On indigenous reconciliation, symbolism and practical solutions need not conflict. We should grab hold of the opportunity to walk together with Indigenous Australians and embrace the invitation given by the Uluru Statement from the Heart to put behind us the conflict of the past. We should work toward a reconciled nation where Indigenous Australians finally feel they have a stake in the Australian project and a say in laws that especially affect them (particularly given the race power in our Constitution). While we must legitimately debate the detail of a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament, we must not start from a position of suspicion, but one that accepts the generous offer of Indigenous Australians to Makarrata – coming together after a struggle.
Finally, we need to address the aspirations of young Australians. Liberals concerned about equality of opportunity and the Australian promise of reward for hard work should think it a scandal that young people who work hard will not be assured the same security that home ownership brings compared with someone who has access to family inheritance. Inherited wealth, not effort, is fast becoming the best predictor of economic security and wealth. Conservatives concerned about affinity and attachment to home, community and country should think it a scandal that more and more young people without home ownership will not feel they have a place where they and their family can withdraw securely and will not feel a stake in their local communities. We need to have the courage to tackle the necessary economic reform so that young Australians will have the same if not greater opportunities than the generation before.
There is a way through the perpetual cultural conflict, where we can learn to live with differences and share a common space. Not just as a truce. But where even with deep disagreements, there can be real civic friendship, love for neighbours, and affinity for one another as fellow Australians. It will take a Liberal Party willing to reject divisive culture wars and determined to be a party of the common good to bring this about.
Chaneg Torres is a past president of the New South Wales Young Liberals and works for the financial services industry advising on regulatory reform.
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