Speech to Blueprint on the future of the Liberal Party

Thank you to all of you for coming to listen to what I have to say.  I am not sure that such effort was worth it, but I will do my best to convince you otherwise.

The scriptures tell us that the Lord God created heaven and earth in seven days.  David Cross has given me seven minutes in which to recreate the Liberal Party of NSW.  Given God’s superior resources and the fact that I suspect creating the Universe may be an easier conceptual task than recreating the Liberal Party, not to mention that it is an open questions as to , certainly conceptually.  God has more resources than I do such as his son and the holy spirit, and I am not sure where more devils are located – Hell or the NSW Liberal Party.  Let me assure you unlike God, I will not have the time to use my seventh minute as a minute of rest.  

Like all great thinkers, I have borrowed from even greater thinkers.  I commend the following books for those of you who are interested.  I recognise that all of us in this room are either Liberals or journalists and therefore do not like reading, unless it is something we wrote or leaked, so probably just go to YouTube and search the title, inevitably there will be someone who has given a lecture summarising the critical points.  

Daniel Kahneman. Thinking Fast and Slow

Jonathon Haidt’s The Righteous Mind

Greg Lukianoff Coddling of the American Mind

Drew Weinstein’s The Political Brain

Jesse Issenberg’s The Victory Lab

Robert Cialdini Persuasion: Psychology of Influence

Sabri Suby’s Sell Like Crazy

Jack Schafer The Like Switch

Frank Luntz Words that Work

Tim Wilson’s The New Social Contract

Aaron Patrick’s Ego

And anything from the greats: David Hume, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Fredrick von Hayek, David Ricardo, Joseph Schumpter, Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Popper  

Joe Klein’s Politics Lost

I mention Klein’s book last because it is the first one you should read.  There are too many in politics because they want to be involved in a competitive sport but lack the talent to be an athlete.  The best I can understand Plato’s central point in Gorgias is that the greatest weapon invented by humanity is rhetoric and that it can be used for great wisdom and great evil.  From this came his admonishment that “it is a shame you are not interested in politics [as somehow you believe it to be beneath you] because politics is interested in you.”  

Klein reminds us that there is a nobility and artistry to political action that when exercised for good makes us more than a quintessence of dust.  In his introduction he tells the story of the night that Martin Luther King is assassinated.  Robert Kennedy has just landed in Indianapolis to do a campaign rally at 10pm. Riots have already broken out across America and he was going into a predominantly African American neighbourhood.  His aides wanted to cancel, but Kennedy who by this stage had a complex relation with living, like swimming in piranha infested waters in South America, insisted that he go.  

When he arrived he asked the camera crews to turn off the lights and for people to put down campaign signs.  He told the crowd that earlier that evening Martin Luther King had been shot and died.  He said that he too had lost a family member to an assassination (this was the first time Kennedy had spoken of his brother’s assassination publicly and he did not do so by name).  He said that he too had been killed by a white man and he knew the anger, hurt and pain that that causes, but what America needed now was not more anger, not more hate, but more love and understanding.  

He then did something incredible by modern standards.  Standing in front of a crowd of people who had not been offered the same educational opportunities he had, he quoted Aeschylus:

He who learns, must suffer

And even in our sleep, a pain that will not forget

Falls drop by drop upon the heart

Until, in our despair, against our will

Wisdom comes through the awful grace of God.

The point here is that Kennedy’s instinct as a liberal was not to dumb it done, nor speak over the heads of those with him or speak to a broader audience.  He understood that he was part of the crowd and needed to make sense of it for them and himself.  

Our first step to a new beginning is in that realisation: that we must want the best for everyone, must listen to everyone, and in doing so we will see what all of us most want is to be empowered to make our own choices about life.  We must tell stories that help everyone understand that they have a singularly unique and important role in our nation’s journey.  

If this very day the NSW Liberal Party were to disappear, probably into some internal passageway, never to be seen again, and those of us in this room had gathered to create a political movement that embodied the ideals of Robert Kennedy and Adam Smith and David Hume and all the others, how would we do that?

My suggestion as a self-appointed project manager would be to start with philosophy, then work out our political strategy and finally some policies.  The most important thing for us to do, to choose our governing philosophy, is the easiest.  

We have three broad choices: the socialist left, conservatism or liberalism.  The Left believes that the rights of the many supplant those of the few or even the one.  Who decides what the rights of the many are?  It is usually left to a group of technicians who are members of a kind of politburo, whose guiding principles are a totem pole of intersectionality.  The history of this governing philosophy is, shall we say, mixed… as in millions of people being interned or dying from starvation mixed, but it usually works out well for the cadres.

Second is conservatism, which has many noble and meritorious elements, best highlighted by Edmund Burke.  The problem with conservatism is that it lacks a mechanism for change; Burke suggested that a good mechanism was effectively liberalism.  Hayek’s essay on why he is not a conservative is also instructive.  

Which brings us to liberalism as a preferred methodology of governing.  It has a number of advantages best expressed by Jesus Christ when he said: we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us.  Few phrases better encapsulate why government must be constrained than this one.  Kant’s version is more easily conceived: the purpose of government is to maximise the freedom of individuals, wholly consistent with the freedom of others.  

A liberal approach to governing has resulted in untold advancement for humanity from reducing poverty and inequality to providing immeasurable opportunities especially for sections of our community that had been traditionally marginalised.  If you really want to spread prosperity, defined as the most excellent life that you can live, then there is simply no better approach than liberalism.  

Understanding this is one thing, carrying the torch of liberty is entirely another.  Our first step in redemption is to understand that politics is about winning people’s heart more than persuading their minds.  Afterall, politics is downstream from culture, and as we found out over the last nine years you can be in government but not in power.  We must once more engage in the cultural debate over our shared national values.

We find ourselves, or shortly will, where the Republicans were in 1976.  Out of power everywhere, facing institutional antipathy from universities to courts.  The Republicans had just lost the presidency after Richard Nixon had implemented price controls and bargained dangerously with the Soviets accepting their moral equivalency.  

Into this morass of liberty’s darkest moment came Ronald Reagan.  He intuitively understood the need to appeal to something deeper than people’s attitudes and to reach out to their moral foundations and most cherished desire for a better life for themselves, their families, communities and nation.  Haidt identifies the seven moral foundations as being compassion, equality, freedom, fairness, tradition, sanctity and a need to belong.  

Prior to Reagan’s emergence, liberals had been talking in policy dot points expecting people to make the leap from these dots to their underlying values.  We became the political movement of the better manager, while the Left became the movement of values and vision.  And we wonder why younger people have drifted towards them even though they actually promise a lesser life.  

Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler’s work have shown how people in complex environments use heuristics to reach answers.  The most significant cultural heuristic is narrative, it is not a spreadsheet, analytics or an algorithm.  We evolved to empower people who can make sense of complexity and give us a path to a better place.  

Election campaigns are competing narratives, or they were, until we ceased somewhere in the 1990s to tell our stories.  We consistently lose elections today because we have no story to tell the electorate and so we adopt the story telling of our opponents.

You are either in favour of quotas or opposed to women.  You are either in favour of progress as defined by Michel Foucault or want to oppress minorities.  You are either in favour of the Voice to Parliament or a racist.  This is equivalent to saying the choice is either the darkness or a candle, while we hold in our political arsenal the equivalent of the light bulb.  

Take quotas – the answer is not either quotas or nothing, but rather quotas versus merit.  History tells us that merit has a civilising, diversifying, inclusiveness to it.  It incentivises and rewards effort, empowers individuals to change their circumstances and does so fairly. It demands that we remove barriers to opportunity and judge people on the content of their character not the colour of their skin.  

It has worked in the UK through the Conservatives’ candidate list and school – identifying, developing and promoting talented people with a diverse set of skills and experiences.  

We must never forget that justice without mercy has always ended in brutality.  I note that the Left continue to demand justice, but never mercy.  

I used to tell my team that a good policy announcement looks like Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.  People want to know what their journey is to a better and more prosperous future, and to the best extent possible what challenges they will face and what values they will need to destroy the Death Star.  

In the decade ahead we should focus on every area of policy that creates opportunities for our nation’s people.  Any policy that empowers individuals, communities and families should be advocated.  Anything that frees our nation from the administrative state embodied most often in interest groups and the cultural blob should be adopted.  From tax to workplace laws, from education to housing and much, much more, we need to tell the story of how change will bring about more hope and prosperity in a way that resonates with peoples’ values.  

We should focus on the people who do not have a voice like the children suffering in the most well-funded school systems in the world delivering some of the worst education outcomes of any wealthy nation.  The indigenous children in remote communities who will no longer be protected from alcohol fuelled violence or have welfare payments preserved for fresh food and clothes.  Just because tax payer funded welfare advocates are more interested in vulnerable people having unfettered access to drink than their children have to food.  

Or not spending $240 million to put guard compartments back in train carriages because we cannot be bothered standing up the thugs at the RTBU and would rather the travelling public and taxpayers suffer than taking up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.  

We need to bear the torch of liberty because if we do not there is no one left who will.  

In the Roman Empire there were two great orators Cato and Cicero.  Patriarch’s rediscovery of Cicero in 1400s is believed to be what sparked the Renaissance such is the depth of his thinking and the breadth of his moral universe.  Cato demanded that the Republic protect its citizens and liberty.  He most famously ended every speech in the Senate with the words Carthage must be destroyed.  It is said that when Cicero spoke people were struck with the profundity of his words; but when Cato spoke people were struck by the desire to march.  

We need to stop using our opponent’s stories and their words.  We need to be more like Cato now than ever.  

Ronald Reagan’s concluding words at the 1976 Republican Convention speak to us more now than then:  

This is our challenge and this is why we are here in this hall tonight. Better than we've ever done before, we've got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we've ever been but we carry the message they're waiting for. We must go forth from here united, determined and what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory.