source : the age
Mark Kenny is a former national affairs editor for the Herald and The Age. He’s now a professor at the Australian Studies Institute at the Australian National University. He is also director of Canberra’s National Press Club and a regular commentator on the ABC’s Insiders program. I spoke to Professor Kenny on Thursday evening.
Fitz: Professor, you look at this last seismic election with a unique perspective, as one who was a heavyweight political journalist for 30 years before becoming an academic for the better part of a decade. With that in mind, I want you to look at the Coalition campaign first from a granular level, then from on high, OK?
MK: Go ahead.
The Liberal Party “was a political operation that was operating on the fumes of the past”. Credit: Marija Ercegovac
Fitz: Right now, the press is filled with columnists who the day before the election were singing Peter Dutton’s praises – and are now saying he was a shambolic mess as leader. I am guessing you picked the latter, earlier?
MK: It was certainly obvious to me that the Coalition campaign had major problems, starting with a mystifyingly bare policy cupboard. I mean, despite the Albanese government going to full term, the election still somehow caught the opposition off guard! The Coalition had no method or order to their election campaign, and very little by way of substance. The Coalition hadn’t worked out that they were going to have to win the election, not just simply criticise the government out of office.
Fitz: You will have known Peter Dutton personally through your time in the parliamentary gallery. I find Dutton, in person, quite personable. But I never saw any of that “personability”, if I can make up a word, on screen. Was that a huge problem for his quest to be PM?
MK: Yes. There is a warmth and a humour to him. I didn’t find that with Scott Morrison, and even those of his Liberal colleagues who voted for Morrison ahead of Dutton in 2019 said to me they preferred the company of Dutton over Morrison. On Sunday morning, I wrote a piece saying that if the Dutton we saw so graciously conceding defeat the night before had shown up for the whole election, then he might well be prime minister. Anthony Albanese was very smart in having four debates because he reasoned that every time he had the opposition leader in an argument, he could not resist being endlessly negative, and people didn’t like it. Voters wanted to see something positive and constructive.
Professor Mark Kenny.Credit:
Fitz: What, though, is the explanation for the lack of serious policy? It was either: non-existent, like economic reform; ridiculous, like nuclear; suicidal, in getting rid of working from home; or bat shit crazy, in sacking 41,000 public servants. Was this laziness or something else?
MK: Yes, I’ve never seen anyone win an election by promising to cut jobs, not create jobs. So there was some pretty weird political judgments that went on. But as to the question of was he lazy, I think they made an assessment that the government was going to essentially fall out of office, and they didn’t have to do much else but ride them down. So I think it was, perhaps, a combination of laziness and arrogance which saw them without any trousers when the show started and the spotlight came on.
Fitz: [Laughing.] That is quite the turn of phrase.
MK: But it really was pretty odd to have hubris when you’re not even starting from the winner’s circle. And the other factor was inexperience. Before the campaign, Dutton was very successful at making his team look like it was ready, but he purchased that appearance of readiness by not having any fights on policy or personnel – so he stuck with a weak frontbench team and a thin policy offering, which meant that there was very little friction within his side. But it was a political operation that was operating on the fumes of the past. All these references to John Howard and so forth … It will soon be 20 years since John Howard left, and his is a name that only really resonates with Boomers. And as Tony Barry from Redbridge said on election night, on the ABC coverage, that’s a declining demographic, that’s not where an election is won any more.
Fitz: Which brings us to my structural question to you, if you can take off your pork-pie journalist hat and put on your mortarboard as an academic. Structurally, what ails the Liberal Party?
The Labor caucus meeting in Canberra on Friday. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
MK: Well, some of it is ideology, but a lot of it is the structure of the party itself. Its refusal to adopt quotas is, to me, stubborn and bizarre. If you think about where the Labor Party was in the late ’90s, it adopted affirmative action to ensure there was minimum representation of women, and we see the fruits of that transformation now with more than 50 per cent women as ALP MPs and senators. And, after all, if you’re going to call something the House of Representatives, it’s got to be a good thing to make sure you have candidates who actually represent the community. But on the Liberal side, we see a dogged refusal to do this on the grounds of “liberal values”, “we don’t have quotas”, “we don’t do social engineering” and “we believe in the merit principle”.
Fitz: Hang on, do you mean “capital-l” Liberal values, or “lower-l” liberal values because there’s a hell of a difference?
MK: Well, I guess that’s a question you probably should ask them because I think they mean “small-l” liberal values, but they’re in fact applying them as “big-l” Liberal values, in the sense that it’s really a party tradition not to interfere in this process – and it’s killing them. They say they’re for the merit principle. But if you look at the frontbench, if you look at the party room, merit doesn’t have that much to do with it. The ALP, on the other hand, has been doing it for nearly 30 years, and the result was there for all to see on Saturday night.
Fitz: What I saw when they crossed from the Dutton concession speech to the Albanese victory speech was a cross from a room of grieving old white men and their good lady wives with twin pearls and a fresh hairdo, to a cheering mob of all ages, colours, sexualities and no doubt – let’s say it – even genders that actually looked like Australia.
MK: Precisely. Because the Liberal Party has not adapted to the changes going on in the rest of society, it has no idea how to connect with, how to be representative of the very electorate it wants to represent. The ALP, though, has a philosophical yearning to embrace everyone. It is a party that likes to see itself as a party of equality of opportunity, of making sure no one is left behind. And so it is consciously embracing all those minorities … and the sum of those minorities voted for them last Saturday.
Fitz: OK, I get it. When I do your course, Professor, I’ve decided upon my PhD thesis: “By being ‘woke’, the ALP has made itself stronger. By rejecting it, the LNP are circling oblivion”. I shall make the case that when organisations go “woke”, they inevitably become more powerful, more connected and reactive to the world they’re in, and ultimately more successful. And then I’ll apply the same lesson to media, but don’t get me started.
MK: Exactly. What was the slogan for the Coalition attack ad on the ALP? “Weak, woke and broke”? Well, the voters didn’t buy it, and the proof of it is in the electoral outcome. And bear in mind that Labor’s adoption of these policies is well before anyone ever used the term “woke”, and it has worked – while the overall presentation of the LNP is the “old, pale, male, fail”. Now, there have been some really good Liberals who have wanted to change, but they have not been listened to, and that has resulted in a party that is risking terminal contraction unless it is prepared to make some serious changes.
Fitz: “Terminal contraction”? This is where I must ask you to remove both your pork-pie hat and mortarboard, and put on a black hood if necessary? You’re saying they face an existential threat if they don’t change immediately?
MK: I think they do. Look at the result. In the midst of a grinding cost-of-living crisis, an outcry about the cost and lack of housing, the Coalition is 50 seats behind the government! They had no real plan, they refused to embrace the sort of hard work and substance that they needed to win, and the result exposed the demographic narrowness of their appeal. The lesson of 2025 is you cannot divide your way to a parliamentary majority.
Fitz: So in the face of this threat, who should they pick as their next leader? Sussan Ley or Angus Taylor?
MK: That’s a pretty obvious answer. Sussan Ley is clearly the more sensible choice at this moment. That very gesture – the first time they would actually select a woman to be leader – would be a dramatic message that they are intent on mirroring modern Australia. One of the first tasks will be to lift female participation representation in the parliamentary Liberal Party. How can Angus Taylor project that when he’s used factional numbers to defeat a credible, competent woman? How does he credibly argue that he is the answer to the party’s women problem?
Sussan Ley and Angus Taylor are potential replacements for Peter Dutton.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
Fitz: The other big debating point is whether the Coalition needs to overall steer to the centre or further to the right. To me, the answer is so bleedingly obvious that it’s ludicrous to even ask, but over to you.
MK: They obviously have to go towards the centre, where the people are. But they have been paranoid for a long time about being attacked from their right flank by One Nation and by Clive Palmer’s eponymous outfit, whatever it was called – “Armpit of Apricots”, I think? Perhaps that is a long-term concern for the Coalition, but they’re no longer the party of Menzies; they seem to eschew the liberalism that Bob Menzies talked about in his famous “Forgotten People” speech. So the challenge for them is to rediscover their progressive urban liberalism and to own it very strongly. And I think that involves being much broader in their approach, dropping this obsession with party discipline and actually having some genuine policy debates so they’re sure of their positions come election time and don’t go into it proposing cutting things like work from home, which appalled many people, particularly women.
Fitz: My father was the local Liberal Party president up at Mangrove Mountain in the 1960s, and Mum would bake pumpkin scones for the meetings. Am I right in saying the Liberal Party needs to start smelling like pumpkin scones again, rather than sulphur, bromide and hellfire?
MK: [Laughing.] I certainly think it’s a good idea. One of the things that defeated them was their move away from kitchen-table politics, of being involved with community organisations. The Liberal Party used to do that kind of thing very well, and it needs to get back to it, advancing a positive agenda for Australia, not one that’s based on fear of changing social attitudes, but which reflects those changing social attitudes. They need to reconnect with the people, be of the people.
Fitz: Thank you for your time, Professor. My thesis will be ready by late 2027, in time for the next election.
Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist.
