The Liberal Party As The “Workers’ Party”

When I joined the Labor Party, it contained the cream of the working class.  But as I look about me now, all I see are the dregs of the middle class.

That’s what Kim Beazley Snr famously told the Western Australian ALP state conference in 1970. Beazley was renowned for his honesty. He was one of nine children, his father was a storeman, his mother a teacher, and the family were poor. When Beazley died in 2007 at age 90, Brendan Nelson spoke on the condolence motion in parliament on behalf of the Liberal Party. He said this:

[Beazley once] recounted the time when the Duke and Duchess of York visited his school where he and others without shoes were consigned to the back of the flag waving. 

But Kim Beazley Snr did not miss out on the love of learning and he would later say, ‘If you can read and write, your future is in your own hands.’

Beazley won a scholarship to Perth Modern School, topped the state in English and history, and became a teacher and vice president of the teachers’ union. On the death of John Curtin in 1945, Beazley took Curtin’s seat of Fremantle and was a federal MP at 27. He was a committed Christian, a fervent anti-communist, and a strong supporter of the Australia/US alliance. All of these factors explain why he never became ALP party leader. Beazley was the father of Kim Beazley Jnr, former federal Labor leader and a former Governor of Western Australia. 

It’s interesting to speculate if Beazley Snr was alive today in which political party he would feel most at home.

I was thinking about this as I wrote my Australian Financial Review column last Friday. The topic was Peter Dutton’s comment that, ‘the modern Liberal Party is the friend of the worker… We’re not the party of big business, and I don’t pretend that we are.’  I was contemplating what it would take for the Liberals to really become ‘The Workers’ Party’.

It would be a huge cultural change. A not insignificant segment of the party’s membership and MPs would be distinctly uncomfortable with the idea that Liberals should deliberately appeal to ‘workers’ – and to their values of ‘workers’.

Paul Sakkal, the federal politics reporter for The SMH and The Age, wrote something last year that captured this potential cultural clash. He talked about the division between those Liberals who believe the party should move to the left to regain seats lost to the Teals and those who argue ‘the party’s future lies in the outer suburbs and regions’. (Those ‘leftward Liberals’ ignore the fact that even if the Liberals won back all seven Teal electorates, that would still only get the Coalition to 62 seats – fourteen seats short of a majority.)  Sakkal said this:

In February, Dutton declared the Liberals and Nationals were the ‘parties of the Australian working class’, a jarring statement for those wishing for a more progressive Liberal Party.

Sakkal is not wrong. For leftward Liberals, ‘the working class’ and ‘Liberal Party’ in the same sentence is indeed jarring. It’s an acknowledgment from those Liberals their ‘progressive’ values are not the values of the working class. In Australia in 2024, it’s not economics that defines class – it’s values. 

One of the best descriptions of the concerns of the voters Dutton is talking about was written by a Labor Party member, Nick Dyrenfurth. In the wake of the ALP’s 2019 election loss, he wrote ‘Getting the Blues – The Future of Australian Labor’ from Connor Court Publishing. He talked of the dominance of the ‘political staff class’ that ‘like many MPs, is more middle-class, and more post-material in values and outlook than the rest of the electorate… Most political staffers are aged in their mid-20s and early 30s and are free of the demands placed on them by young families and long-term relationships… by definition, younger staffers have not acquired the life experiences and perspective that come with age – the achievements but also the disappointments we accumulate over the course of our working lives.’

Dyrenfurth’s advice to the ALP could also be given to the Liberals.

The first thing Labor MPs and activists – many of whom live in inner cities and have post-tertiary degree careers – ought to do in the election’s aftermath and every day until the next election is strike up a conversation with a stranger, preferably outside a 10-km radius of the CBD of one of our major cities.

Don’t ask them about policy or personalities or what they want from government.  Don’t ask them about the election or politics or whether they are ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’ or ‘left’ or ‘right’.  Ask them what they care about.  They’ll almost certainly come back with the same answers.

First, they care about their families, and I’m not just talking about nuclear families, but the full spectrum of relationships.  How is the marriage?  Are the kids OK?  What about their ageing parents?  Do they have enough to make ends meet?  Are they indebted?

Second, they care about work: having a job, a job providing enough wages, hours and security, and whether it is meaningful, dignified work.

Third, they care about place: community and country.  Most Australians – ‘quiet Australians’ as prime minister Scott Morrison put it on election night – love their country, they don’t want it radically changed unless for good reason.

These are not the primary concerns of ‘progressive’ voters and leftward Liberals. Their concerns are those of the affluent and comfortable. The two central policies of the spokespeople for the affluent and comfortable, the Teals, are climate change and ‘integrity’. (Until the Teals call for an investigation by the National Anti-Corruption Commission into things like the payment to Brittany Higgins of $2.3 million by the federal government, the Teals’ talk of accountability and transparency is just politicking.) 

‘Progressive’ values are not the values of mainstream Australia. I know of Liberals who still recoil when they hear the words that helped John Howard win four successive elections – ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’ Most Australians still agree with what Howard said.

The values of most Australians are grounded in the egalitarianism and the ‘mateship’ of the working class – they’re not the product of progressivism. Successive epitomes of modern Australian progressivism, first the Republic and then the Voice, have been rejected by Australians – most decisively by working class voters. With the exception of same-sex marriage (and, arguably it’s not a ‘progressive’ cause anyway), it’s almost impossible to name a single ‘progressive’ issue that has majority support in Australia. ‘Net zero’ certainly doesn’t. This is from a piece last year in The Daily Telegraph.  

Support for net zero falls away if it means eating less meat and paying $20 a month extra in energy bills… The figure was calculated by pollster Freshwater Strategy, which asked respondents to choose between two scenarios.

In the first, Australia achieves net zero carbon emission by 2050, but energy bills rise each month; in the second, Australia does not achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and energy bills stay about the same.  The pollster then tested at what price point a majority of voters switch from between meeting the target and not meeting the target.

Overall, the tipping point at which support for net zero turns negative is a jump of $10 and $20 in monthly energy bills [and] restrictions on the consumption of meat led to the largest drop in support for net zero from Coalition and Labor voters.

Electricity prices are increasing by much more than $10 to $20 a month. AGL customers in New South Wales will be paying at least $500 a year more for their electricity over the next twelve months – on top of power prices already close to the most expensive in the world. According to a report last year from ‘Net Zero Australia’, a group of universities and consultants to get to net zero will cost $1.5 trillion in the next six years alone. That’s about the value of Australia’s annual GDP. If net zero were ever put to a popular vote it would lose by even more than the Voice.

Whether the Liberals of Vaucluse and Toorak would ever tolerate their party seeking the vote of the ‘deplorables’ remains to be seen. And it might not matter anyway. Vaucluse in Sydney is in Wentworth, now a Teal seat, and Toorak in Melbourne is in Higgins, now held by Labor.

There’s much more to be said about the Liberals and working class which I’m looking forward to doing into the future. The Dunkley by-election in Victoria in March will be an important test for both Dutton and Albanese. Seats like Dunkley with large working and middle class populations are ‘must wins’ for the Liberals.

I ended my AFR column last week by contrasting the Labor and Liberal leaders.

Albanese is at risk of doing a reverse Donald Trump.  Trump was a billionaire property developer who appointed himself the champion of the working class.

Albanese grew up in public housing, the child of a single mother.  Yet, the signature policy of his first term in government was a referendum proposal endorsed by the same big businesses accused of profiteering from the cost-of-living crisis and most likely to be supported by the rich and university-educated.

Meanwhile, his image with the electorate is almost cemented as a politician who likes to travel overseas and wear a black tie outfit at red carpet events.  Up against Albanese is Dutton, a cop from Brisbane.

Recommended Reading

The ABC makes melodramas and verges on being one itself. The latest instalment is the saga of Antoinette Lattouf, who, before Christmas, was sacked as a stand-in presenter on ABC radio in Sydney after three days when she shared a social media post saying, ‘The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a weapon in Gaza.’  The ABC said Lattouf breached its social media guidelines while she claims she was fired because of external pressure and because of racism. Lattouf has Lebanese heritage and claims that ‘white’ ABC journalists who had done the same thing as she had were not disciplined by management. 

All of this led today to ABC union members, on a vote of 125 to three, passing a motion of no-confidence in the ABC’s managing director. While this is par for the ABC course, what’s interesting is the ‘moral yoga’ of Lattouf and so many like her.

Parnell McGuiness, in The Age yesterday, ‘The problem with moral yoga is that it’s almost impossible to hold the pose’, pointed out that once upon a time, Lattouf had a position the opposite of what she now espouses.

And so I’ve had a good chuckle out of a new cause championed by commentator Antoinette Lattouf…  I’m not the first to observe that she had some quite different opinions regarding another famous social media-inspired sacking.

When Israel Folau was dismissed by Rugby Australia in 2019 for posting that, unless they ‘repent’, hell awaits ‘Drunks, Homosexuals, Adulterers, Liars, Fornicators, Thieves, Atheists, Idolaters’, Lattouf was all for it.

She defended the dismissal on the ABC’s Q&A.  ‘If we look at why Israel Folau was stood down, it was because he breached social media protocols,’ she said.  ‘And he was asked not to post those sorts of things.  So it wasn’t about…what he said.  It was about his professional conduct and what was expected of him.’  She made sure to let us know she agreed with the decision, too, adding, ‘I personally think he should have been stood down.’

Lattouf brought the free-speech-has-consequences crowd along on her conversion journey when she tweeted opinions they agreed with and then got fired by the ABC for doing it.  And lo, the sun rose on the tender faces of a new batch of freedom fighters.