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.

Supporters of traditional morality have to understand that society has moved on. It does not believe what it used to believe. The commonplaces of the majority of 50, 60 or 70 years ago are now regarded as quaint if not dangerous and requiring suppression. In 1973, the move to legalise abortion in the ACT was defeated 98 votes to 23, with 39 Labor MPs voting against it and no Liberals or Country Party MPs voting for it. That bill was more restrictive of abortion than the bills that sail through state parliaments with significant Liberal support today.

Society's values change. Both the Labor Party's and the Liberal Party's values change with it. The only difference is that Labor leads while the Liberals follow.

The reasons for these changes are complex. Education plays a role. So does the media. However, to ascribe responsibility to the education system and the media is not really to answer the question. It is really the persons in those fields: to put it bluntly, those on the right choose well-paid positions as they can't be bothered enduring the poor working conditions that teachers have.

Nor has this process stopped. The most Woke of today will find themselves left behind as new bandwagons develop. Given so many of the current changes were not predicted 10 or 20 years ago, it is impossible to be certain about what will happen 10, 20 or 50 years from now. Ten years ago, no one thought transgender issues would be a thing. In the near term, we are seeing the campaign to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility to 14 or 16 and the introduction of pill-testing at music events, both of which will inevitably succeed. You can look at the recommendations discussed at the recent Victorian Youth Parliament too: the banning of all gendered signage on public bathrooms, compulsory LGBTQIA+ education in primary schools, designated spaces for recreational "hooning".

In the longer term, there's list of possibilities: legalisation of all recreational drugs, recognition of the human rights of the great apes, lowering of the age of consent to fifteen, expansion of marriage to encompass the committed union of any three people. In the very long term, you cannot predict just as no one in 1901 predicted that the marriage power in the federal Constitution meant SSM and no one in 1931 predicted that birth certificates would say whatever you wanted them to say and no one in 1961 predicted that the F word would appear regularly, or at all, on TV dramas in the early evening.

So, if the Liberal Party does not stand for traditional morality, what does it stand for? It is tempting to answer "Nothing!"

The Victorian Liberals have been deceived by their "jewel in the Liberal crown" era when they held government for 27 years straight. They still haven't worked out that their victories were due to a split in Labor, not their own magnificence. In every election from 1958 to 1973, the total Labor vote (ALP and DLP) exceeded the total Liberal Party and Country Party vote. The Liberals, who were not in coalition with the Country Party then, did not even reach 40 per cent of the vote in any election from 1955 to 1970. In summary, by the time we reach the next election, in 2022, the state will have had only 20 years of Liberal government with a majority and 50 years of Labor government or a combined Labor electoral majority in a 70-year period.

Victoria has been a Labor state since 1952. The presence of the DLP in this state after the Split actually kept hundreds of thousands of Labor voters out of the clutches of the Liberals, and these voters went in large measure back to the ALP when the DLP disbanded in 1978. The DLP was committed to social justice, which is not a recent creation of Woke warriors, but a Catholic concept devised byFather Luigi Taparelli D'Azeglio in 1840.

The problem with the Liberals is that they do not stand for anything. Gone are the days of the Hamer government and green wedges and environmental protection. Gone too are the days of the Bolte government that built stuff and ran government enterprises like the SEC and the Gas and Fuel Corporation and spent 50 per cent of the state budget on education. Since then, we have had the "slash and burn" Kennett government and the do-nothing Ballieu/Napthine government – hardly inspirational.

The core ideology that holds Liberals together today is not commitment to democracy, civilisation or freedom. What really holds it together is the belief in people's right to make as much money as possible and to spend it as they wish. This belief is moderated by national interest considerations, but it remains the fundamental difference between it and the Labor parties, both the ALP and the original DLP. It is the thread that runs throughout the Liberal Party's history. Indeed, a comparison of the Menzies government with the Howard government suggests that the thread is a lot thicker today. Work Choices anyone?

Some may suggest that, given the Liberals' slow but inevitable adaption to modernity, there is room for a morally traditional party. The evidence is clear that there is not.

The party most committed to traditional morality was the Democratic Labor Party. It was in a long-term decline from 1958, though deceived by victories in Senate elections of 1964, 1967 and 1970. When two years later, it went from concentrating on support for members of the public who enrolled their children in non-government schools, advocating for family welfare and fighting for democracy in the world and the union movement against communism to an all-out assault on the permissive society, its vote halved. Two years later it lost all its Senate seats by losing itself in the opposition and forcing a double dissolution. Four years later, it had ceased to exist.

Cory Bernardi left the Liberals to establish the Conservative Party. It got nowhere and disbanded. It did achieve two things, however: the disbandment of Family First, a morally conservative party that had parliamentary representation in South Australia and had had it the Senate, in the latter on Labor preferences; and the removal of the new DLP from the Victorian Legislative Council, when it got Rachel Carling-Jenkins to join it before abandoning her.

Those who still believe in traditional morality are entitled to do so and to argue their case, but they are deluded if they think the Liberal Party has the slightest relevance to them or that society will take the slightest notice of them.