WHY THE COALITION SPLIT MIGHTN’T BE SO BAD.
The Liberal Party of Australia was formed out of the ruins of the United Australia Party, in 1944, by the man who would go on to be Australia’s longest-serving Prime Minister, Robert Menzies. Menzies had already served as Prime Minister from April 1939 until August 1941 in the United Australia Party. The focus of the Liberal Party was on free enterprise. The National Party, previously the Country Party, has had farming communities as its basis, and in every state but Queensland, has been the junior Coalition party.
The Liberal Party claims to be a broad church but is actually an uneasy loose grouping of liberals and conservatives, and in the latter group, both wet and dry conservatives and reactionary and to a lesser extent intellectual conservatives. The National Party has, in recent times, sold itself to appease mining interests.
One such interest, which has seen an unholy alliance between the National Party and the Greens Party has been coal-seam gas exploration. Liberal Governments have wanted to deny farmers the right to not allow for its exploration on their property.
Under the extreme elements of the National Party, there has been an anti-intellectual bias. In Queensland, former National Party Premier, who Trump makes look like a choirboy, Joh Bjielke-Petersen, was anti-intellectual and devised preposterous arguments against daylight saving, such as the curtains would fade and the cows wouldn’t give milk. The second argument can be rationally explained as, “If a farmer usually milks their cows at 2am and 2pm, under daylight saving, if they tried to milk their cows at 2am, it would be 1am, so they would have to milk the cows at 3am and 3pm instead.” The argument about the curtains fading is false in that under daylight saving, you still get 14 hours of daylight in summer, but instead of sunrise being at 4:45am, it’s at 5:45am and sunset is at 7:45pm instead of 6:45pm. For people living out west, I can understand it, as they can be trying to put their kids to bed at 7:30pm, but the sun doesn’t set until 9pm.
Furthermore, the Coalition Party Room has been the source of abuse of procedure. For example, during the time when Tone the Botty was in Kirribilli, there was to be a party vote on same-sex marriage, but he brought the National Party in, because there were more Nationals opposed to it, and therefore, the idea was voted down. And during the time of Joh Bjielke-Petersen, homosexuality was illegal in Queensland, and this was overturned by a Labor Government.
Not only has the Liberal Party drifted further to the Right, but it has seen moderates within the party lose seats to candidates who may have joined the Liberal Party but who were unhappy with the party’s direction on climate change and social issues. It has also lost seats in capital cities and outer metropolitan areas.
Some say that it will make Labor the only party that can form government, but the Liberal Party has not been able to form government in its own right since its inception and the Deputy PM when the Coalition is in Government is always from the National Party. The newly elected leader of the Liberal Party is not from a capital city, either.
Hopefully, the division of the Coalition will allow both parties to take a more sensible course into the future.