ALP - the natural party of government

After the Liberal Party lost the Victorian election last year, Peter Costello reflected on the fact the Party had lost 20 state-level elections in a row. He said:

We have got to make sure we are recruiting good people, we have got to get our organisation together, we have got to work on policy. You can't leave an election to the last four months. An election is a four-year proposition and right around Australia the Liberal Party has got to come to grips with this and we have got to lift our game.

And lift their game they must.

*These results are as of 9.00am EST on November 27, 2007.

This table indicates the number of seats the Liberals hold in Australian parliaments, the length of time it has held government since 1980, and the time from which the ALP assumed government.

It clearly shows that the Liberal’s loss on Saturday was hardly a turn of the “election cycle”, but rather final confirmation that the ALP is Australia’s natural party of government.

There are two reasons for this dominance.

The first is that social democracy - the implementation of policies (including policies involving the redistribution of income) to maximise social cohesion - has been the dominant political philosophy since World War II.

The ALP is the natural Australian home of this world view. Absent a flirtation of a political extreme - such as socialism - and given party unity, the post 1980 domination of Labor is hardly a surprise.

The second issue is the professionalism of the ALP.

As Bruce Hawker observed in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on September 14, 2006, the ALP's run of electoral losses during the 1990's meant it had to fundamentally rethink its attitude to intervention in the economy and reject the notion that states could manipulate the market.

Since then, a line of Labor Premiers have rolled out an identikit agenda - sound economic management illustrated by striving to attain (or keeping) AAA credit ratings, relatively strong rhetoric on law and order, and broad sympathy towards development while showing sufficient concern about the environment so as to gain (even if through preferences) the support of green inclined voters.

The federal ALP has now wheeled out the federal equivalent - a whitebread politician who is a self identified pro-American economic conservative, who wants to save the environment by signing the Kyoto treaty and start an education revolution.

The Liberals problem is an absence of direction. Once upon a time, you knew what the broad direction of the Liberal Party was. During the days of Askin, Bolte and Court the perennial tirades against "Canberra" meant that state Liberals stood for what would now be called subsidiarity - where decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen, with the centre only taking action where absolutely necessary.

Reflecting this tradition, federal Liberal governments typically acted with restraint when dealing with issues usually regarded as being the province of the states. By the end of the Howard era, you had a Liberal Party that was perhaps the greatest centraliser in the history of the Australian federation.

During the 1980s and 1990s the Liberals clearly stood for limited government. At the end of the Howard era, you had a party that spent $9.2 billion in new promises in one election launch.

When added to the spending on households with children throughout the life of the Howard Government, the party notionally standing for individual responsibility has turned into the party of government dependence.

It begs the question: why vote for Labor lite?

Much Liberal Party policy was driven from the Prime Minister’s office. That resource has now disappeared.

The quality of MPs at state level is quite poor. Not one state parliamentary party has a narrative as to how a modern Liberal Party would provide services to voters.

The lack of parliamentary strength throughout Australia now requires the Party - and not merely its politicians - to determine what it stands for in the 21st century.

Does it still believe in a federal system of government, in which there is genuine “competitive federalism”: the idea that different jurisdictions will make different rules and regulations and have different levels of taxation, with each jurisdiction ultimately picking up what is “best practice” or face the loss of people and investment. Or should it be the first to argue that in a globalised world, having three tiers of government is one too many.

Should government action be tested against the effect it has on what Edmund Burke called "the little platoons" of civil society: families, neighbourhood associations, private enterprises, charities and churches, or should the current size and role of the state in creating and maintaining “rights” be maintained, with the only question being how competent Leviathan is being managed.

These are the challenges the Liberal Party must face immediately, or accept decades in the wilderness.