Verity Barton is a former member of the Queensland Legislative Assembly and is President of the Australian Liberals Abroad in the UK. She works as a strategic communications advisor in the City.
Losing an election is hard. Good people lose their seat not through any fault of their own, but by dint of being taken out with the tide. It’s the price for playing the game; you win some, you lose some. The Conservative Party is facing what could be an existential crisis – what kind of right of centre party does it want to be?
In the days and weeks that follow a brutal election loss, it’s easy to think about what could’ve been, what should’ve been and how you would’ve done it differently. Yes, it’s important to learn from your mistakes, but to borrow some wisdom from Noel Gallagher: don’t look bank in anger.
While the Conservative Party has traditionally turned to Australians for guidance on how to win an election, it can also learn from its antipodean colleagues on how to rebuild following the devastation of an election loss.
In 2022, Scott Morrison led the Liberal Party to defeat, losing 25 per cent of their MPs. That election saw the party lose seats not just to Labour, but to the moderate and urbane ‘teal’ independents and the Greens.
For many, it seemed hard to imagine the Liberal Party being able to bounce back quickly. But Peter Dutton, Opposition Leader, overtook Labour in primary vote opinion polling 18 months after the election and has brought the party within the margin of error on two-party preferred polling, closing a gap of greater than ten per cent in just two years.
How? Three reasons: they’ve embraced the strength that comes from being a broad church; policy development isn’t a closed shop; and they’re endorsing credible, local champions early.
Like the Conservative Party in recent years, the Liberal Party faced years of turmoil, including a revolving door to the Prime Minister’s Office. Since the 2022 election, the party has been disciplined and kept its debates and its battles inside the party room. Divided parties don’t win elections.
John Howard, Australia’s second-longest serving prime minister, famously said that the Australian Liberal Party – as the custodian of both the conservative and liberal traditions – was at its best when it was a broad church. Not only does the Liberal Party embrace different opinions and voices around the Shadow Cabinet table, it does so in the Parliamentary Party Room too.
But it’s not just party management, discipline and showing support for their leader. They’re putting the hard years into policy work, and going back to the fundamentals that make people vote Liberal – low taxes, small government, home ownership and entrepreneurship.
As they adjust to being in Opposition for the first time since 2010, the Conservatives need a forum in which backbench MPs can not only be heard on policy, but can help shape it too. Whilst the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties give their members a formal policy role in developing and influencing policy, the Conservative Party doesn’t.
That should change, at the very least in Opposition. The Party doesn’t have access to policy experts in Whitehall anymore, but it does have a party membership of broad expertise and talent.
In Queensland, shadow ministers are supported by a policy committee, led by experts in their fields. Policies implemented by the Newman Government that was elected in 2012 could have their roots traced back to these policy committees. Not only did the membership buy in to what the party was offering, it guarded against unintended consequences.
The Conservative Party should learn from this, and the National Convention should formalise the role of the Conservative Policy Forum.
However, party discipline and a credible policy platform will mean nothing if the party doesn’t have credible candidates who are champions not only of their local area, but the Conservative Party. Local connections as a candidate matter much more in Australia than they do here, and one of the things the Liberals have done well is endorse candidates in target seats early – whether that be a local small business owner, a local mum, or a local community volunteer who wants to help people.
This is something the Liberal Democrats do well: they pick someone local, they use local campaigns to leverage their incumbency and brand themselves as a local voice.
Going into the 2029, the Tories doesn’t need an A-list, it needs a local champion list. Ahead of the 2024 election, the Conservative Party had an 80:20 strategy: retain 80, win 20. That needs to be flipped on its head, with the party adopting a 20:80 strategy, and they must endorse local candidates in those target seats. This shouldn’t be about identifying future superstars or creating an A-list, but identifying local champions who will be of the community, for the community.
This would not need to be a complete shift away from the existing Parliamentary Assessment Board process, rather it can complement it in these target seats. Within the next 12 months, the Party must identify its 80 target seats and prioritise them for selection of local Conservative champions.
Opposition isn’t fun, but as John Howard and Tony Abbott, both former Liberal prime ,inisters, both showed, it is an opportunity get back to basics, remember why you’re a Liberal (or a Conservative) in the first place, and focus on the change you want to deliver. In fact, a period in opposition can be good for political parties. Governments are like children’s nappies: they eventually end up full of the proverbial and need changing.
If the Conservative Party doesn’t change and refocus like the Liberal Party did under both Howard and Abbott, and maintain discipline and work together going forward, not only will it cede more ground to their challengers on all flanks, they will let their opponents define them.
And if you can’t even define your own raison d’être as a party, how can you credibly ask voters to support you?