Small-l liberal voters have been abandoned in the race to the right – The Sydney Morning Herald

So far in 2017, so conservative. Cory Bernardi, Pauline Hanson, Tony Abbott, all dominating political coverage, despite one being Australia's worst former prime minister since Kevin Rudd.

Why should conservatives get all the notice? Granted it's far easier for someone on the hard right to provoke his way to an easy headline, with an attack on Islam here, a backbencher dig at the "current" prime minister there.

Throwing bombs, even those you don't believe in, is the straightforward route to national headlines. No strategy for winning attention beats inciting anger. There's a reason the tabloids prefer shouty upper-case font on their front pages.

But the news devoted to Bernardi, the delusional hard-right deserter, won for swindling those voters of South Australia who thought they were electing a Liberal rather than a rat, perfectly illustrates why political bomb-throwers do what they do.

The ultimate in ego-driven attention-seeking is to leave the party that gave you a political career to set up your own "movement" with scant regard for the damage done in the process.

And scant regard for reality. Bernardi uttered this sentence in the Senate, apparently without shame: "It is not in the interests of our nation to yield to the temptation of personality politics, which shrink the debate to the opinion of the few whilst compromising the good sense and values of the many."

How remarkable to utter those words and have the self-regard to think they apply to you.

It must be so liberating to claim to speak for the majority when your fearful, hard-hearted constituency is both small and already well served both by One Nation and the right fringe of the coalition Bernardi just deserted. That reality is likely to strike him hard in the face at the end of his term, five-and-half years and $1.1 million in parliamentary salary payments from now.

In the meantime, the race to the right within the government or at least the fear of doing anything to antagonise the internal haters from Eric Abetz in the south to George Christensen in the north puts the small-l liberal voter in an ever-more difficult position.

Where to turn if you're liberal on both social and economic issues? Which party to pick if you both favour marriage equality, and want attention devoted to attacking the return of the anti-trade brigade, the rise of a disturbing neo-protectionism?

Labor? The Coalition? The Greens?

No option is even merely adequate, let alone perfect. The Liberals are in permanent thrall to the protectionist Nationals who make up the coalition numbers, some of whom have social positions which to describe as antiquated is insulting to antiques.

Labor might have progressive social policies, and a far more sensible position on climate change, but Bill Shorten's rhetoric on trade is appalling.

The leader of the Greens is charismatic, many of its social policies are attractively pragmatic, but its protectionist outlook and secondary consideration for matters economic put many small-l liberal voters entirely off. As does its internal war between the hard left and those devoted environmentalists who live in the real economic world.

No political home for the centrist liberal is comfortable in Australia right now. It's tempting to suggest a break-away party for the centre. Not the pragmatic centre of the deal-making, compromising Nick Xenophon Team, but a principled liberal party, one that is actually liberal free in trade and life rather than the one held hostage by conservatives but still masquerading under the name. One that is reasonable in the exercise of its principles, one that doesn't suffer from delusions that the market is never wrong, or that income tax is theft. A reasonable liberal party in the centre of Australian politics.

What do we want? Reasonable middle-of-the-road policies. When do we want them? Introduced at an incremental pace.

The obvious problem with that idea is few people pay attention to the reasonable person in public debate, even if they agree with the reasonable position espoused. And even if they did, break-away parties usually decline to be mere flotsam on the political sea.

The depressing likelihood is that the turmoil of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd-Abbott-Turnbull era will end only as soon as one of the major parties lives by the cardinal rule of stable political dominance. Keep the middle.

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Small-l liberal voters have been abandoned in the race to the right - The Sydney Morning Herald