The Liberals: what are they really?

Many believe in an essential Liberal Party that is different from the one we see every day. There is no such party and never has been. The Liberal Party is simply a decade or more behind the Labor Party in adjusting to social change, as can be seen from an examination of several once contentious issues.

When the Brumby government introduced a bill to legalise abortion, six Labor MLCs crossed the floor, which would have been enough to defeat it, except six Liberal and National MLCs went the other way.

The campaign for same-sex marriage is the most brilliant I have ever seen. To succeed, it had to start from the claim of discrimination, which required it to redefine marriage in the public mind as already being the union of two people not the union of one man and one woman, for if marriage were by definition the union of one man and one woman there could be no discrimination in the union of one man and another man or of one woman and another woman not being called a marriage. Thus, once marriage was seen by the public as the union of any two persons, the denial of the word to two men or two women became discrimination and thus unacceptable.

SSM was an inevitability. The Liberal Party just took longer to accept it.

The accepted wisdom is that the Liberal Party was opposed to SSM, even devising a postal survey to stop it. Yet it is clear from the wording of the question that the survey was intended to increase what everyone who could count knew would already be a solid majority for it. The question was designed to get a solid yes vote. It said, "Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?" The implication is that there was something that same-sex couples were not allowed to do. Obviously, this was discrimination.

If the Liberal Party had really been opposed to SSM, it would have had a question designed to elicit a larger no vote; e,g., "Should the committed union of one man and one woman no longer have a word to name it?" Such a question would have produced a storm of protest, an effective boycott and the issue back in parliament, which would eventually have created SSM though with a smaller majority.

If the Liberal Party had wanted to allow the public to express its own view, it would have had a neutral question.

Its choice of question suggests the whole purpose was not to stop SSM but to shift responsibility for its creation from itself to the public so that it could say to its declining conservative base, "It weren't us what dun it – it were them!" The survey results meant that parliamentary resistance was futile and it sailed through with a far greater majority than it would have had had there never been a survey. Parliament would have created it in any case, but more MPs would have represented the opposed minority by voting against it.

The SSM issue produced the bizarre media labelling of pro-SSM Liberal MPs as progressive, yet two prominent advocates were Tim Wilson and James Paterson, both of the definitely not progressive Institute for Public Affairs.

The Liberal Party is not the bastion of moral conservatism. It is simply the tag-along party, a decade behind Labor in accepting social change. For more than 200 years, the left has proposed change and the right has fought it bitterly before accepting it.

The Labor Party itself was not created to replace traditional moral stances with modern thought. The Watson government did not legalise abortion. The Fisher government did not advocate SSM. The Hughes government did not support euthanasia. The Scullin government did not ban demonstrations against abortion. The Curtin government did not rig the Senate voting system to make it far easier for the "Woke" Greens to win the balance of power by shutting out the micro-parties after the manufactured hysteria that followed the election of Ricky Muir. The Forde government did not create "change your gender every 12 months" birth certificates. The Chifley government did not pass legislation to imprison parents who insisted that their daughters were girls for ten years when those daughters said they were not. The Whitlam government did not make debate on transgender issues illegal, as Fiona Patten, of the once-Sex-now-Reason Party, wants. The Hawke government did not adopt a school funding policy designed to stop poor children attending non-government, mostly Catholic, schools. The Keating government did not open up drug using centres.

All but two of the changes listed above were initially advocated by Labor. Most have been or will eventually be accepted by Liberals. The one total exception, the rigging of the Senate voting system, was the work of the Turnbull government and opposed by Labor. The school funding issue is very complex and almost universally misreported, but in essence the Howard government abandoned needs-based funding in 2001 and subsequent Labor and Liberal governments have fiddled around at the edges but never re-adopted the principle.