Liberals need to fill policy vacuum
THREE months into the job, and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should
feel pleased with himself. He’s made a good start at constructing
his own monuments of symbolism: ratifying Kyoto, apologising to the
stolen generations, and getting Cate Blanchett to chair a session
at the talkfest of the country’s 1000 cleverest people.
Rudd’s done an even better job at demolishing John Howard’s
legacy. What’s more, he’s got federal Liberal MPs to help him. Take
the “3 Rs” of Australian politics %26#151; refugees, reconciliation
and the republic. Howard was steadfast on each of these issues, and
he spent a decade campaigning on them. With Howard gone, the
Liberals have decided to agree with Labor on two of these three
issues. At the weekend the Liberals announced that they accepted
the shutting down of the Pacific Solution for refugees, while a
fortnight ago they ultimately supported the stolen generations
apology.
To this can be added a further three matters: Iraq, Kyoto and
industrial relations. Rather than opposing Labor’s withdrawal of
combat troops from Iraq, the Liberals now claim that had they won
the election they would have scaled down Australia’s commitment
anyway. After spending years arguing against the Kyoto Protocol,
and after Howard overruled Malcolm Turnbull’s suggestion that the
Liberals ratify it, the party has decided that ratification is a
good idea. And last week Brendan Nelson announced that his party no
longer supported WorkChoices.
It’s no wonder that the Liberals are doing some soul-searching.
In the space of a few months the federal Liberal Party has reversed
or abandoned its position on five out of six of the central policy
issues of the Howard era. Whether such dramatic policy changes are
justified is not the point. In some cases changes were justified
and in others they weren’t. The Pacific Solution had outlived its
purpose, if indeed it ever had one. On the other hand, ratifying
Kyoto is merely gesture politics.
Political parties are more than just their policies. A political
party is as much a product of its history, its membership and its
ideology. But the problem for the federal Liberals is that in the
last few years of Howard’s prime ministership, as the party moved
away from its core principles, it was defined by its policies
rather than its philosophy.
Over the past few years, sometimes the Liberals’ policies were
derived from their philosophy, and sometimes they weren’t. For
example, it often seemed as though the party paid only lip-service
to federalism, and the notion that decisions should be made by the
level of government closest to the people affected by those
decisions. Similarly, notwithstanding the Liberals’ very capable
management of the economy, they didn’t often enough put into
practice the principles of small government, lower taxation and
less regulation.
Good policy doesn’t turn into bad policy overnight. If key
policies can be ditched so quickly after what, in the end, proved
to be a relatively narrow election loss, voters will inevitably ask
whether Liberal MPs ever believed in those policies in the first
place. There’s also the problem of what replaces the old policies.
Although the Liberals might be finished with WorkChoices, there
remains the question of the party’s position on further
deregulation of the labour market.
None of this is to say that policies cannot ever be changed.
When circumstances alter, policies should be altered. What’s
notable about each of the Liberals’ recent policy changes is that
each was done in a hurry and each was done in reaction to something
that Labor did. The Liberals can’t afford to be put into such a
position again. But at the moment there’s every chance that the
Liberals will respond to Labor’s moves on the republic in the same
way as they responded to Labor’s initiatives on the apology and the
Pacific Solution.
Many Liberals would say that the very last thing they need is a
divisive internal debate about the republic. But if you can’t have
a divisive internal debate when the party is in opposition,
federally and in every state and territory, then it’s legitimate to
ask when would be a better time. It’s a near certainty that renewed
calls for a republic will come out of Labor’s Canberra talkfest,
even if Rudd waits until a potential second term to hold another
referendum on it. The issue will not go away.
It will probably take three years for the Liberals to arrive at
some sort of position on the republic. The advantage of starting
the debate now is that they’ll have the time to engage in analysis
and reflection. It’s something the party hasn’t done enough of
since November 24.
John Roskam is executive director of the Institute of Public
Affairs.
