Sharma says Liberals face ‘existential crisis’
The Liberal party is facing “an existential crisis”, Liberal senator Dave Sharma said on ABC radio this morning.
He told RN:
There is no way we can ever hope to be the party of government unless we rebuild our appeal and our offering to those populations in the big cities, and then that will have to be our mission and will have to be, I think, probably our overwhelming focus as a party.
While the Liberals have a coalition agreement with the Nationals, Sharma said he believed they understood – “and we need to be clear on this” – that they appeal to “different parts of Australia with different priorities and different values at times as well”.
The membership of the party was “less representative of how Australia stands today”, Sharma said, and the new leader and candidates would need to better represent more of the country.
Sharma refused to be drawn on the merits of any of the mooted candidates for replacement leader after Peter Dutton lost his seat on Saturday, but said the candidate:
… would be expected to demonstrate and understanding of the reasons why we lost, quite a comprehensive diagnosis of that, and offer not just a viewpoint but a set of mechanisms and structures that will help us address those challenges. And I don’t pretend that that will be an easy or indeed an appealing task for many people.
Key events
Bragg opposes Libs preferencing One Nation
The Liberal party ought to avoid making preference deals with One Nation, Andrew Bragg said.
At the end of that interview on RN just now, following from his comments about how the Liberal party ought to avoid culture war, Bragg said:
I don’t think preferencing One Nation is a good idea for the Liberal party. John Howard was right about that … It’s a very bad optical position for our party … We need to recapture the centre. Elections in Australia are won in the centre.
Liberals ‘fundamentally misread’ Australian society – Bragg
We’ve now heard from Senator Andrew Bragg, as the post-mortem on the Liberal party’s catastrophic loss in the election on Saturday continues.
Bragg’s perspective, as he has described it to RN just now, is that the party did not sufficiently focus on the economy:
Ultimately you’ve got to give people something to vote for … and I don’t think we had enough strong economic policies to win the day.
It would be wrong to blame the campaign itself, Bragg said, when “the substantial point of a political party is to develop policies that help people’s lives”. He offers some examples of what those policies could have been:
We could have done more to help households decarbonise, we could have done more to help households with mortgages, we could have done more on deregulation – and I think the deregulation piece is potentially very big for small and large businesses to help them to invest … There’s a lot of things we could have done better.
Another fundamental problem, he said, was that the Liberal party didn’t really understand what Australians wanted.
You’ve also got to understand the society in which you want to lead … I think the work from home is a good example of fundamentally misreading Australian society or picking issues that are focused on one minority group … [Australians] don’t want to see division. It’s important that we focus on economic issues and avoid these culture war issues at all costs.
Sharma says Liberals face ‘existential crisis’
The Liberal party is facing “an existential crisis”, Liberal senator Dave Sharma said on ABC radio this morning.
He told RN:
There is no way we can ever hope to be the party of government unless we rebuild our appeal and our offering to those populations in the big cities, and then that will have to be our mission and will have to be, I think, probably our overwhelming focus as a party.
While the Liberals have a coalition agreement with the Nationals, Sharma said he believed they understood – “and we need to be clear on this” – that they appeal to “different parts of Australia with different priorities and different values at times as well”.
The membership of the party was “less representative of how Australia stands today”, Sharma said, and the new leader and candidates would need to better represent more of the country.
Sharma refused to be drawn on the merits of any of the mooted candidates for replacement leader after Peter Dutton lost his seat on Saturday, but said the candidate:
… would be expected to demonstrate and understanding of the reasons why we lost, quite a comprehensive diagnosis of that, and offer not just a viewpoint but a set of mechanisms and structures that will help us address those challenges. And I don’t pretend that that will be an easy or indeed an appealing task for many people.
Welcome
Good morning.
It’s day two of the post-election wash-up, with counting set to resume and the Labor party looking to extend its majority. There are still some seats in the lower house to be determined, including the Melbourne electorate of Goldstein, where Zoe Daniel is facing off against a resurgent Tim Wilson. We’ll have more on that soon.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of soul-searching being done in the Liberal party, with senior figures warning that it must urgently reconnect with traditional supporters, women and younger Australians if it is to find a pathway back to relevance, describing John Howard’s broad church as “broken” after Saturday’s election drubbing.
We’ll bring you all the news, analysis and updates as they come in today, so grab a coffee and let’s get stuck in.
