Even Conservatives Hate Conservative Politicians in Australia

The only route to power for opposition leader Peter Dutton’s beleaguered Coalition is via the fringes of his right flank, conservatives suggest, while climate change isn’t real, and an Indigenous Voice to parliament would be “racial separatism”. 

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Australia at the weekend, a grab-bag of current and former Australian senators, Trump associates, and former UKIP party leader and Brexit campaigner, Nigel Farage, each leveraged these themes to rouse their audience into a war footing. And every time they did, it was matters of race that would emerge as the prevailing theme.

It was newly-elected Country Liberal party senator for the Northern Territory, Jacinta Price, who would set the tone for the days that followed. 

“We live in a society filled with many who claim to fight for equality through inclusion and diversity, but in actual fact champion the very opposite,” Price said, to a round of cheers and applause. 

“We live in a time when we are encouraged to love the bodies we are in and are accused of fat shaming if we express concern for another's potentially life-threatening bad health. Ironically, the principle of loving the bodies we are in doesn't apply if our children decide they feel like they're trapped in a body belonging to the opposite gender.”

At the centre of Price’s opening remarks at the conference were claims that an Indigenous Voice to parliament would create “racial separatism”. The suggestion became a baton that would pass through the hands of each speaker, both from Australia and abroad.

Former Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, was no exception. Walking out to the lectern on stage, Abbott was received with a thunderous applause. He had a number of concerns about a potential Indigenous Voice to parliament. 

As a body, he suggested, a Voice would “offend” the “sacred” principles of equality, and create a chamber of parliament accountable to nobody. He later stood in opposition to a National Anti-Corruption Commission, arguing that MPs should only be held accountable by voters at elections.

After a couple of hours of free-wheeling libertarianism on Saturday, Abbott tried to steer things closer to the more buttoned-up religious right of his former government. He committed sweeping segments of his speech to the importance of Australia’s institutions, to tradition, and to the nuclear family. It was an unsurprising change of tone, given the Oxford man’s lifelong commitment to the Liberal Party, and his own, very public, love of God. 

Abbott, like Price before him, came to represent the polar opposite of what it would appear the recently-defeated Coalition wants to be known for. On both a two-party preferred vote, and preferred prime minister, the Coalition’s polling has sunk to savage lows.

The broad thinking among political observers is that Dutton is trying to rebrand himself (again) as someone who can be liked; who can play nice in parliament, and do “what’s best” for the country, in an effort to wind back the clock on a decade of playing hard man. 

Some of his best known missteps include boycotting the apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008, and describing Malcolm Fraser’s decision to welcome Lebanese Muslim refugees to Australia as a mistake, and played a pivotal role in the campaign against marriage equality, among various others.

It’s difficult to conceive, then, how the advice of Abbott and Price plays into any workable re-election strategy. Australians just don’t seem to like it.

Even still, speakers blamed the Coalition’s soft touch on mainstay conservative values for its defeat at the federal election earlier this year. Why bother with the middle, they suggested, when those votes are already tied up. It was a line of thinking Farage drove hard—even if it might take some time. 

“And that's why, frankly, the only conservative leader in the Western world that I respect at the moment, the only conservative leader that doesn't buckle, doesn't bend, doesn't bow down, who's prepared to take the stick of the criticism, but fights for Western values, is Donald Trump,” Farage said, in a speech that left attendees swooning.

“But it's up to you here in Australia, what you do on your current course. You are not going to get conservatives back in power for a very, very long time. And given the gutlessness and cowardice, and frankly letdown that Scott Morrison was, to so many people in this country, they don't deserve to be back in power,” he said.  

“But if you get this right, you will be able to win the next election.”

One of the weekend’s last panel talks revealed that win could still be a way off. Over the course of the two-day conference, Dutton’s name was uttered only a handful of times. Each time it was heard, the cheers of the conference’s loud audience reliably cooled to a hum.

The crowd’s Coalition-fuelled indignation eventually rose to a boil late on Sunday afternoon, when Liberal Party vice president, Teena McQueen, former Liberal Party politician, Nick Minchin, and former senator Amanda Stoker, came together to host a discussion called “The Road Back for the Coalition”. 

Even viewers watching the stream from home could hear the audience heckling the panel, after Minchin suggested the Coalition didn’t need to change, before trading insults with them and accusing them of being “worse than a socialist audience”—an epithet of the tallest order.

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