Do I celebrate the defeat of Katherine Deves?

Just about anyone who has had to endure Australia’s recent six-week national election campaign will have heard of Katherine Deves. Hand-picked by the Prime Minister as his preferred candidate for the seat of Warringah, she quickly became the Coalition government’s most spectacular own-goal. Morrison’s choice of candidate, and defence of her, turned out to epitomise his poor judgement. The broader community had no time for it. Deves’ repulsively transphobic messages were not so much a lightning rod, as a bolt of electricity that supercharged existing disaffection with the Morrison government.

Shortly after she was chosen, there was discussion about whether Deves’ selection was part of some deeper strategy. Had she not really been picked to try and win Warringah, but to try and attract socially conservative voters in other regions?

We can now safely conclude there was no cleverness at all, and the selection was a failure.

Given that Deves’ views turned out to be even weirder than those of her predecessor Mr Abbott, Zali Stegall easily saw off this new challenger. However, that result in itself didn’t change the Parliamentary Liberal Party.

Still, I have been thinking about how this election will change that party and what that might mean for the LGBTIQ+ community.

Barnaby Joyce, of all people, posed the question concisely when he said “in attacking the Liberal candidates they’ve removed our Indigenous affairs minister, three openly gay people and one Asian member of parliament. Is that what they wanted to achieve? Is that success for them, is it?”

Of course, in some respects Joyce is talking nonsense – none of those defeated people were from his party, which as far as I know has no openly gay or lesbian members and, until new Senator Jacinta Price arrives, is as white as white can be. And who on earth is he referring to as these attacking hordes? It can’t be a political party, because the defeats came from all different directions. One can only conclude he means the electorate. That’s right: voters, or as politicians fondly call them, though only when it suits them, ‘ordinary Australians’. So, Joyce is attacking Australian citizens.

But back to the topic: what is the effect of this election result on the internal ideological direction of the Liberal Party?

The results are likely to change next week as the counting continues, but today it looks like Labor is winning nine seats from the Liberals, independents are going to take six, and the Greens will take one. How can we describe the politics of these defeated Liberals? Mostly, I relied upon James Massola’s listing of Liberal factional allegiances in his article last year, ‘Who’s who in the Liberals’ left, right and centre factions?’ But I also did research using online news sources and voting histories.

The one Coalition MP that the Greens look set to replace, Trevor Evans, is a moderate, and one of those to whom Joyce referred as openly gay.

Four of the six independents are winning victories over moderates, all high-profile MPs: Trent Zimmerman, Dave Sharma, Tim Wilson, and Jason Falinski. A fifth, and most high-profile casualty, is outgoing Treasurer, Josh Freydenberg. While not reported as a formal member of the moderate faction, Freydenberg was generally viewed as the moderate’s preferred leadership aspirant. The only truly conservative Coalition MP likely to be defeated by an independent is Celia Hammond in Western Australia. Ironically, her preselection was somewhat controversial because outgoing Coalition Minister Julie Bishop had suggested it would be wise to preselect someone reflective of the seat’s progressive urban population. It is probably small comfort to Bishop to now have been proven right.

What of the nine likely to be removed by Labor? One of Labor’s most celebrated victories was in Boothby in SA, where Rachel Swift, a Liberal moderate, had hoped to succeed conservative Nicolle Flint, but has instead been replaced by Labor newcomer Louise Miller-Frost. Other casualties include Indigenous Affairs minister, Ken Wyatt, as well as prominent progressive Liberals Katie Allen and Fiona Martin.

These results mean that, of the five Liberals who crossed the floor to vote against their government because they wanted human rights legislation to endorse protections for LGBTIQ+ and transgender people, only one has survived this election – Bridget Archer in Tasmania – while the others have all fallen to Labor or independents.

Of the remaining four Liberals that Labor has so far defeated, I could not find information about the ideological views of the two candidates who were seeking to replace retiring MPs: Kristy McSweeney (in the electorate of Swan, replacing Irons) or Linda Aitken (in the electorate of Pearce, replacing Porter). That leaves only three casualties of Labor’s success who were not moderates: Lucy Wicks in Robertson, Gladys Liu in Chisholm, and Ben Morton in Tangney. But none of these were prominent or influential conservatives, either. None were members of the parliamentary right faction, instead belonging to the Prime Minister’s centre-right grouping.

Thus, as I write this the day after the election, ten of the defeated sixteen Liberals were moderates, three were centre-right, one was factionally non-aligned but fairly conservative (Celia Hammond), and two were untested newcomers who never made it as far as Parliament for us to find out.

The moderates were already the smallest of the three factions in the party, however the imbalance in size was not huge. But it is now. This result has effectively halved the number of Liberal progressives and, even given the Coalition party room will shrink, their influence within the Coalition will be massively reduced.

The question then is: can the organisational wing of the party, and its grassroots membership, overcome this change?

LGBTIQ+ people like myself should care, because there are two scenarios from here. One scenario is that the party has the self-reflective capacity to undertake a course correction. This would include encouraging some of its longer-standing conservative members to retire at the next election and preselecting some moderates to try and bring the party back into the balance of the broad church it supposedly once was.

The other sees a party, dominated by fringe Christian religious adherents and hard right conservatives, continue to drift away from the views of the Australian community. While some may take comfort in this making them even less electable in the short term, at some future contest they will be returned to government if only because the community decides it is time for a change, holds its nose and (perhaps rightly) kicks out a stumbling or sclerotic government. At that point, we could end up with an extremist right-wing leadership that could seek to rapidly dismantle rights and tolerance for people whose views are not aligned with their own.

Unfortunately, the first course seems less likely than the second. This is because, firstly, numbers within the party will work against it. It would necessitate conservatives to deliberately not use their increased dominance in the ranks to further their own ideological agendas. But hard-line politicians (of whatever colour) are not known for self-restraint. Take today’s comments, for instance, from right-wing Liberal Senator Alex Antic, who:

stressed that the “Liberal Party’s experiment with the poison of leftism and progressivism must be over. It’s as simple as that.”

“I mean, all of the people who have lost their seats were, in many cases, people who were trying to appease the climate crowd. And see what happens”.

Secondly, the Liberal Party will face enormous difficulties in trying to win back the seats where their progressive voters are most concentrated. The independents in particular are sophisticated professional women with backgrounds of real-life achievement and genuine roots in their communities. As Ted Mack showed in the 1990s in North Sydney, and as Zali Stegall is showing in Warringah today, they are not easily dislodged. As long as the Liberals don’t hold those seats or cannot get them back, they will genuinely have less reason to be a moderate party.

Of the words I heard spoken by politicians last night, the standout performer was Simon Birmingham. He was gracious and wise when speaking of the incoming Labor government, and clearly articulated the issues facing his party.

Katherine Deves, in contrast, spoke today as though she was the future leader of some people’s revolution. Here’s how her views were reported:

“I think with me getting out there and pointing out that there are issues with this modern feminism where they can’t even identify what a woman is – I think the ordinary Australian people resonated with that, and that is why I had so much support around the country,” she said.

“I think the Liberal Party needs to get back to its Liberal values, and I think maybe this is the start of that.”

She also took her time in the spotlight to compare herself to a storm and slam Twitter users and ‘lefties’ for her embarrassing loss.

“I would like to say to my detractors that when they thought I could not withstand the storm, that I am the storm. And I am not going anywhere,” she said.

“What I am saying is common sense, but they are afraid of the lefty, lovey press.

“They are afraid of the Twitterati but ordinary Australians back me in that position.

“It seems our leaders are afraid of the left press and the Twitterati.”

I have been following Australian politics for forty years now. Reading Deves’ comments was chilling for me, not for their content, but the tone, the pattern, the style. I recognised it from a political newcomer a quarter of a century ago, called Pauline Hanson. Today, two wings of the Liberal Party seem to occupy separate universes. Can Simon Birmingham persuade any of his Liberal colleagues to listen?