To remark that the Liberal Party hasn't had a great six days would be to state the blindingly obvious. On Saturday it lost a federal election, and its most successful prime minister of recent times lost his seat. On Sunday it lost its best parliamentary performer. Yesterday it elected as its federal parliamentary leader someone whose first political decision was to join the ALP and who has had more image changes than Madonna.
The result of the Liberals' leadership ballot reveals the chasm that exists between rank-and-file branch members and Liberal MPs. Rank-and-file members still cling to the old-fashioned notion that their parliamentary leader should stand for something and believe in something. Given what happened yesterday in Canberra, it is debatable whether federal Liberal MPS share this view.
An important task for an opposition leader is to cast a recognisable identity for their party. Either Malcolm Turnbull or Tony Abbott would have done that. Both have great strengths, and not a few flaws. Each would define their commitment to liberalism differently, but at least both would know what they were talking about. While much has been made of their differences, particularly on social issues, their personalities are not dissimilar. They are both risk-takers. Within months of entering parliament Turnbull took his political life in his own hands by advocating a radical simplification of the tax system, much to the ire of Treasurer Peter Costello. Abbott takes his political life in his own hands every time he opens his mouth.
It would be not a small problem if the Liberal Party thought it could regain government being as bland and as riskless as was Kevin Rudd's campaign. The tactic worked for Labor this time under circumstances that were unique. Rudd was against someone perceived as tired and who pursued an industrial relations policy that proved to be poison. In 1998 and 2001 the bland and riskless strategy of Kim Beazley failed.
Those Liberals who are concerned by what occurred yesterday can console themselves by recalling what Rudd said about yesterday's leadership ballot. Rudd was right when he said the result doesn't matter. If the Liberals operate as they usually do there will be two or three leadership challenges between now and the 2010 election.
It might be that Brendan Nelson will prove the naysayers wrong. His approach -- whatever he decides it to be -- might work. It's political lore in Australia that governments get at least two terms, but both Hawke and Howard came close to losing at their first election after they won office.
Nelson faces a few immediate problems. He was right to make Turnbull shadow treasurer, but he's given the person whom he narrowly defeated the platform and the profile that can be used to mount a challenge.
Nelson will need Turnbull and Abbott to work together, but Nelson knows that if ever Turnbull and Abbott agreed between themselves on who should be leader, Nelson's period as leader of the opposition would be as brief as was Simon Crean's. And meanwhile Peter Costello remains in parliament.
If in the next few months Nelson gets the time to lift his head above the brawling that will envelop the federal parliamentary Liberal Party, he'll confront a government that -- at least in the short term -- might prove to be quite competent.
Wayne Swan and Lindsay Tanner could make a formidable economic team, and they will need to be. Even if a "perfect storm" does not engulf the world economy, at the very least international financial conditions will become more, rather than less, difficult. On election night, more than one Liberal commented that "this might have been a good election to lose". Domestically Labor will need to manage upward wage pressures and huge expectations from the union movement that it will now be payback time against the bosses.
As the new education minister, once Julia Gillard finishes buying Taiwan's entire stock of notebook computers, hopefully she'll be able to get past the gimmicks and start a real "education revolution". Rudd sending all of his MPs into schools was not as stupid as it sounds.
If more politicians spent more time in classrooms they would witness first-hand the frustration of principals struggling against the dead hand of state government bureaucracy and they would be appalled by how many students finish primary school unable to read.
So while Rudd and his ministers get down to work, federal Liberal MPs will have the luxury of opposition to ponder what they believe in and why they're there.
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