Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Let us not over state it.  The Liberal Party has faced difficult times in the past and will do so again in the future.  Further, the current position the party finds itself in occurs after a long period of sustained economic growth that has defied fundamentals and a once in a century pandemic that brought about unusual economic circumstances.  

At the beginning of the pandemic, it was difficult to know exactly how Australians would respond to various policy changes.  With the benefit of hindsight, it is quite clear two things happened: firstly older Australians in particular, but not exclusively, responded positively to lockdowns and border closures; secondly the unprecedented level of fiscal stimulus pushed many voters from being concerned with issues of aspiration towards ‘luxury issues’.  

It is tempting to believe that if the Liberal Party waits long enough those voters will return.  This would be a mistake and ignores a number of structural issues that the cause of liberty is facing in English speaking western democracies.  The following chapter is a short discussion of those challenges and what parties on the liberal side can do to once again retake the commanding heights of philosophical and moral authority.  

Universities in English speaking countries have been promoting a virulent philosophical strain of post modernism that posits society is constructed to maintain power structures.  These power structures are identified according to how someone looks rather than position.  Further, there are power imbalances that are explained by historical wrongs that mean retribution in the present for immutable characteristics is not only justifiable but necessary.  

For anyone under 40, this has been accepted wisdom in our education system.  The dangers and absurdities of this philosophical framework is not allowed to be presented.  Indeed, speech has gone from being an indispensable and critical element of a free society to a dangerous and triggering weapon that needs to be highly regulated and often cancelled.  

This characterisation has the benefit for the Left that it allows them to shut down any alternatives as not just being wrong but being unhealthy.  It is evil.  

How did the Left become so dominant?  Fundamentally, they have had a much better understanding of how opinions are formed and how to convert those opinions into action.  For liberals to compete they need to recapture the arguments that made it the preeminent philosophy for more than a millennia, and on which so much of our progress is based.

The first thing that the Australian Liberal Party needs to get into its head is that it is not just a political party, but the torch bearer of the first and only successful political philosophy in the history of humanity: liberalism.  The Liberal Party does not just fight an occasional election, it is the protector of a critical political artefact.  Its priority should be building and sustaining a movement.  This shift in perspective will have a fundamental shift in how it directs resources and what it cares about.

Secondly, it needs to accept that politics is downstream from culture therefore battles over culture are not indulgences but are critical.  For more than a generation, conservatives have failed to engage and when they did it was with the worst sort of reactionary ideas.  At least they did turn up.  Liberals have been timid and absent. Assuring themselves that people will intuit that evil ideas are bad and turn back toward the light.  If there is a better example of political arrogance, it is difficult to identify.  

The idea that liberals should not engage in the “culture war” has given the Left free rein.  Has given legitimacy to the idea that solutions to things such as racism was more, but different, racism.  Made some people believe that it was liberals engaging in a war, when in actual fact they were the only ones not engaging.  One by one our institutions have been corrupted, and liberals, starting with the Liberal Party, has sought to suffer the sling and arrows of outrageous fortune, rather than oppose it and end its dangerous rein.

Orwell was sort of wrong, it is not the person who controls the past, that controls the present, it is the person, or people, who control the institutions that control the past that control the present. For more than a generation that has been the Left.

If liberals believe that they are the best path towards a fairer and freer future with less division not more than they are going to have to fight for it starting with arguing for unpopular positions that over time will become received wisdom.  In doing so liberals need to understand how people form opinions and what activates them to argue for them.  

This is a complex area of psychology and there are many variants.  However, the best place to start is with people’s moral foundations.  In Jonathon Haidt’s The Righteous Mind he describes the seven moral foundations on which people largely base their preferences.  The good news for liberals is that a clear majority of people stress foundations strongly associated with liberals, namely freedom and fairness.  The Left’s cultural project embedded in post-modern politics, most commonly known as woke, seeks to explain why fundamentally unfair policies, such as (anti) racism, are in fact fair.  

The moral foundations associated with the Left are compassion and equality, for Conservatives it is order and sanctity.  All philosophical bents have a claim to our need to feel part of a group that is bigger than ourselves, for conservatives it is the nation, for liberals it is community, for the Left it is tribal identity.

Sometimes this framework is misinterpreted that people on the Left only care about outcomes that are associated with compassion and equality, or liberals only respond to initiatives that produce more freedom or fairness.  This is not the case, it is a matter of stress.  A person with a conservative bent is naturally more attuned to issues of sanctity but is also moved by compassion.  It is one of the reasons that conservatives are the largest donors to charity.

However, research is emerging that people who identify with the Left are now overly reliant on compassion or equality.  This is probably because these two moral foundations are the two frames through which most reporters present the news.  It is creating an opportunity for liberals and conservatives in the culture war, and political campaigns.  

Most people are moved by moral foundations outside those on which the Left now focus.  It presents an opportunity to make arguments on new and untested terrain, which its opponents are unfamiliar and uncomfortable.  This would be dangerous for liberals and conservatives if a majority of people were more concerned with foundations associated with the Left, however this is not even close to being the case.  Which is why the Left spend so much time claiming their arguments are based in moral foundations not in their column.  

This means reversing Liberal campaigns of the last 30 years.  The Liberal Party has been badly advised for much of its recent past.  Leaders were advised to focus on economic management, a core equity, and minimise other policy issues.  This was a strategy designed to bring about a slow defeat, like building your own mausoleum while you are inside.   If liberals accept that they are part of a movement and the moral foundations theory of political preference, then they must also begin engaging in policy areas across the board from education and health to the broken justice system and the environment.  

No longer can liberals be happy with ceding huge parts of the public policy debate to its opponents because they fear the entrenched high priests of public policy that now occupy our corrupted institutions, or unions or industry super or other vested interests.  If the argument is based in a moral foundation, it will resonate and over time become the preferred policy option of the majority of Australians.  

The key to presenting an argument is story.  Human beings are hardwired to understand and remember events in the form of a story.  Data without a story giving it context is soon forgotten mostly because it is deemed irrelevant.  

What people most want out of information is to be entertained, after that to know whether it is relevant to them so they can know whether to ignore it.  There are a number of ways in which this assessment is made, most politically active and even some politically inactive people, outsource what to think about something to people they trust, a media personality or political leader or someone in their family or circle of friends.  If a trusted person tells them that a piece of information is not important or not true or good, that short circuits the process of information assessment.  What some people would call word of mouth is a critical part of the permission structure that allows people to change their mind; and the best way to get people spreading the word is through story telling.  

In order to promote liberal arguments, liberals need to advance policy arguments through a story that is based in two or three moral foundations.  A story has some key elements to it: there is a hero, who meets a guide who explains that they must go on a quest to overcome a challenge.  However, there are villains determined to stop the hero from making it to the end of their quest.  It is only by facing their fears, believing in themselves that they are transformed and become the sorts of people who can overcome villainy that leads to success.

Explaining policy positions as a story only has upside. The Liberal Party continues to make policy announcements untied to a broader narrative, people find it difficult to place the policy into a meaningful part of their lives so it gets ignored, misunderstood or most likely as another example of how our political leaders don’t understand them.  Stories used well give people context, help them understand the problem, make it easier to remember what is going on, but most importantly, provides a framework in which people can arrange facts meaningfully.  

The Left have used this powerfully.  They use every example of racism as justification for their policy of racism, or anti-racism as they have rebranded it.  Whereas liberals used to have a story that explained the importance of judging someone not by the colour of their skin (an immutable characteristic) but by the content of their character (merit or competence), and every act of racism was seen as an example of why policies that stress merit matter, such as equality before the law.  

Liberals believe in empowering people; the Left believe in imprisoning them within a power structure designed by them.  There is nothing economic about these competing stories, it is all cultural.  The difference between the Left and liberals here is that only one side is telling their story.

The policy announcement version of a story is simpler but no less compelling, especially if it is part of    a broader narrative.  There has to be a problem, there are victims and villains – and this policy is going to help you fix it.  

Most critically though the story needs to be part of the future.  Any journey is not about going back but rather forward.  People want to know how you are going to make their lives better in the future.  For too long the Liberal Party and Australian liberals have conceded the future to its opponents while they argued for taking our nation further into the dark.  Let us be clear the best defense is a good offence.  This is not about arguing against an opponent’s proposals it is about arguing for your vision of a better future.  

There has been a great deal of analysis of how the Liberal Party’s vote amongst people under 40 has collapsed.  Some like Kos Samaras have argued, yet again, that this represents the death spiral of the liberalism in Australia.  Spare us yet another round of barracking.  

The fact is that for more than three decades, often enabled by the National and Liberal Party governments, our educational and cultural institutions have been allowed to disseminate propaganda to young Australians without presenting the more powerful alternative case.  Without a shard of irony, they argue because it would be triggering and unsafe to do so.  In the Left’s version vulnerable people are vulnerable because existing power structures persecute them.  Note the problem, victim, villain structure.  

The greatest achievement of the Left must be how they maintain their victimhood while they control all the cultural institutions, consume the vast majority of public resources for their favoured causes, all while being the biggest bullies in Australian public life.  In a fair-minded society with genuine diversity and equality in its news coverage such hypocrisy would be called out daily if not hourly.

The problem for the Liberal Party is that too often conservatives give credence to this narrative, especially those members of the National Party in Queensland.  The ABC gives those individuals an outsized share of voice because it suits its political outlook.  

Young Australians have never been more likely to vote for liberal policies then now.  This is not just going to happen though, it will require work, thought and consistent application, but it can be done for at no other time in the history of western democracy has an ideology promised so much and delivered so little as “the woke”.  From freedom of though and expression to home ownership and meaningful work, the Left have failed young Australians.  

Liberals more generally need to be producing and arguing for difficult reforms for intractable problems.  The very act of making these arguments gives liberals the mantle of change through reform and modernisation.  If liberals want to win over the next generation and free them from the censorious and fear mongering philosophy they currently suffer under, then make the argument for reform.  

And this is another benefit of story, it compels you to think about who your audience is, and when the Liberal Party does this, it will realise that there are large swathes of the Australian community that they have not been bothered with for a very long time.  No wonder people thought the Liberal Party had stopped listening.

In this framework the personal narrative becomes even more important.  There are few examples better than Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic Convention in 2004.  His personal story became part of the broader American story.  It is an indication of how far the Liberal Party has fallen that it needs to be said, but leadership matters.  

People have been looking for the same sort of characteristics of their leaders since we started forming tribes on the plains of the Savanah.  Frist and foremost our leaders must be competent, they need to have good values, and finally be willing to have a fight.  Barack Obama in that speech demonstrated all three characteristics.  He tied his story to the broader American story.  

Every liberal needs to examine how their story fits with the future of this nation.  It is the one clear advantage the Liberal Party has.  Its candidates are generally not former union or party officials, or class action lawyers.  Nor are they part of a movement that only accepts privileged white women as candidates most of whom were either not working or hardly working before becoming members of parliament.  True diversity exists not in identity but in character, background, experience and thought.  None of the Liberal Party’s opponents have any such advantage.  

All of these measures are the part of the iceberg below the waves.  This enables, and makes the work of campaigning, easier.  There are a number of modern tools available whose desired outcome has not changed since the Greeks invented democracy: how to get people spreading the word about you and your policies.  

Heuristics are devices that human beings use to make decisions in complex environments.  The most common in a political context is social proof.  We look to see what our neighbours are doing to determine what we should do.  If the majority appear to be going one way, we will tend to go that way.  

Similarly, we are influenced by what people who are like us think.  If we are standing at a BBQ and one of our friends says that they like or dislike a particular proposal or person we are likely to take our lead from that interaction.  If it is not someone we know, but someone who looks like us then that is going to be more persuasive than someone who we do not identify with.  

There are a number of other heuristics which people rely on, but permission structure is probably the most used.  It generally is designed to give people a pathway to change their minds which allows them to continue to be consistent with their values.  It usually starts with the concept of integrity, which is being consistent with ones values, it then moves to the values (which are actually moral foundations) at play, and finally lands with so a person with integrity would change their behaviour to be more consistent with their values.  Playing on people’s dislike of cognitive dissonance is a very powerful campaigning tool.  

All the micro-targeting, big data and voter analytics are designed to do one thing, get someone, somewhere at a BBQ to feel comfortable standing out and saying “you know, I kind of like that idea”.  

The last election showed that the Liberal Party as a campaigning outfit is way out of its league.  It continues to campaign like it is 2004.  It focusses on historical voting patterns rather than demographic and psychographic metrics that drove much of the Climate 200 campaign.  

This makes it sound like the Liberal Party is a generation behind and will have to wait a generation to catch up.  Both ideas are untrue.  The Liberal Party structure exists in a place that no longer exists; its campaign structure seems to be designed for the commercial interests of some powerful elders rather than collecting votes; its campaign techniques are no longer relevant and in this new environment probably do harm; and finally, but equally all of this can be fixed in about six months with virtually no disruption to operations – indeed quite the opposite.  

None of the above is revolutionary, or indeed a revelation.  And it will not done well from the first time, there will be setbacks along the way, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, so let us begin.  

Jason Falinski is the president of the NSW Liberal Party and the former federal member for Mackellar.