The defeated Liberal-National Coalition government must reconnect with its conservative roots—and middle to lower class voters—if it hopes to regain power at the next election, according to former Queensland Premier Campbell Newman.
Newman, who quit the party last year over its support of heavy pandemic restrictions, said there was fertile electoral ground in the suburbs surrounding the major inner-city electorates across the country.
“You can’t out-green the Greens,” he told The Epoch Times. “I subscribe to the ‘doughnut theory,’ you have to imagine the cities and a five kilometre radius from the General Post Office.”
“The Liberal Party should focus on those families concerned about individual freedom, getting the kids to school, and making ends meet.”
He also said that despite the left-wing Australian Greens performing so well in inner-city electorates, it was actually eating into the Labor Party’s votes.
The sentiment has been shared by Alan Tudge, the federal member for Aston, and one of the few Coalition MPs to retain a seat in the city of Melbourne after Labor, Greens and “teal” candidates swept the incumbents from power.
Tudge told Sky News Australia on May 23, that it would always be difficult for the Coalition given it was running for a fourth term (it won power in 2013) and it was blamed for the lockdowns implemented by state Premier Daniel Andrews.
But he noted there was not enough “policy differentiation” from the then-opposition Labor Party, and that it was unfeasible to compete with left-wing parties and candidates on the same policy ground like climate change or gender equality. He said going forward the party needed to re-align with the values of outer suburban electorates.
“You look at the seat of McEwen, which we only put resources into at the last minute and we still had a swing towards us—it’s now down to a three and a half percent [margin]—that’s just across the north, on the edge of the city,” he said.
Seats like Gorton, northwest of Melbourne, actually saw the Labor Party lose 10 percent of its primary vote, and a preferential swing to the Liberal Party of 4.5 percent.
“That went across to One Nation and the [United Australia Party]. So we should be picking up seats like that as well,” he said. “This is going to be the new area we must focus on and provide policies to—it doesn’t mean we forget the inner city though.”
Other traditionally safe Labor seats in the outer suburbs saw small swings to Liberal on the back of preference votes, including Calwell, Fraser, and Hawke. While in western Sydney, the seats of Lindsay and Paterson saw swings to the Liberals as well.
“It’s literally 80 years to the day almost that ... [Liberal Party founder] Sir Robert Menzies made that famous speech about the ‘forgotten people’ and I think we need to go back to that speech, talk about what Bob Menzies was talking about and who we represent—and that is those aspirational voters.”
The outgoing Coalition government lost a host of inner-city seats to the left-wing Australian Greens party and the so-called “teal” independents—whose namesake reflects the combination of the traditional blue colours of the Coalition with Green ideology.
The former government saw six traditionally liberal voting seats switch to Climate 200-backed teals, with three in Sydney, two in Melbourne (most notably that of the former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg), and one in Perth.
In Brisbane, where no teal candidates were fielded, the Coalition lost three inner-city seats to both the Greens and the opposition Labor Party.
The loss of the election has resulted in much soul-searching from within the ranks of the party and the future direction of the party.
While moderate MPs like Simon Birmingham and Darren Chester have called for more policy action on climate change, others from the Right flank of the party, like James Paterson, Matt Canavan, and Tudge, have pushed for the party to adopt more conservative principles.
