Taylor’s path back to the future

 

To consolidate their new roles as leader and deputy of the battered and bruised Liberal Party, Angus Taylor has talked core values and Jane Hume has talked about lowering taxes.

What do they mean?

Taylor’s core values are apparently the rule of law, democracy, and ‘basic’ freedoms. Fine rhetoric. But it doesn’t really reflect the realities most Australians deal with.

Highly visible, continuous, and unpunished corruption at the senior levels of private and public sectors, including especially by CEOs, corporate boards, and politicians, teach people that corruption is the way to get ahead. And that the law doesn’t really apply to the rich. An observation strengthened by the astronomical cost of accessing a legal system shutting out ordinary Australians because it is clearly designed to serve only the rich, mostly to evade accountability under law itself.

If by democracy Taylor meant the perpetuation of an oligopoly party political system, he seems to have ignored the backlash his own party has faced as a consequence for taking voters for granted in such an arrangement. The rise of independents and the peculiar boost in One Nation popularity should give him pause to reconsider.

And if he conceives of ‘basic’ rights as the surrender by millions of Australians to be treated merely as economic factors of ever greater wealth concentration in a rigidly class-based society in which everyone knows their place, Taylor has failed to understand that most Australians want to be more than subjects of an economy rather than citizens and partners in a society and culture.

So, Taylor appears to assume most Australians cannot see the reality of Australian self-serving rich and powerful robbing lesser Australians blind while feeding them platitudes about the rule of law, democracy, and basic freedoms.

Jane Hume speaks glibly of Liberals having always understood that lower taxes mean greater freedoms for self-determination, as if the Liberal Party had not actually done the complete opposite since the Howard years: given tax breaks mainly to the rich, and increased taxes and other costs for everyone else.

Hume also carefully avoided the consequence of lower taxes: cuts in services.  Meaning reducing the services needed predominantly by Australians not already wealthy.  Is this a continuation of Tony Abbott's and Scott Morrison's war on the poor?  

Hume’s strategy here seems to be to talk like voters had not recognized empty rhetoric untethered from a longitudinal record of hypocrisy and outright lies in making their decisions at the last two federal elections.  Almost as if those last two elections hadn't thrown a born-to-rule party into chaos.

Her rhetoric also seems to completely ignore the appeal of One Nation to a broad swathe of Australians who feel they have been betrayed by politicians who promised to look after their interests and then actually undermined those.  Lower income Australians make up a substantial percentage of that demographic.

It is true One Nation is mostly just talk and grievances with zero credible policies, or even the intellect to understand the economic and social impacts of the simple-minded prescriptions preached about by Pauline Hanson. But the discontents she addresses are real.

To capitalize on these discontents, Taylor and Hume would first have to recognize them as real, and then they would need to refactor their focus on actually addressing the concerns of those ‘forgotten people’, not as rhetorical platitudes, but in hard-nosed policy departures from their dated and discredited ideological comfort zones.

Limiting immigration as a means to do that seems to be worse than useless, and potentially harmful to economic growth overall. No one is saying we should invite terrorists into our midst, nor that there shouldn’t be a well crafted immigration policy. But to suggest that limiting immigration will resolve cost or living pressures, or housing affordability, or employment pressure, is just deliberately chosen stupidity.

The real solutions to the mentioned problems are about addressing wealth inequality. And wealth inequality is addressed with wealth redistribution, not business as usual or tax cuts for the already wealthy.

Based on current performance, it doesn’t look like the Liberals are willing to even entertain such realities, much less address them. Does Angus Taylor’s background in management consultancy so hamstring him to old MBA models and methods he cannot conceive of new ones? Is Jane Hume so wedded to an imaginary past she cannot comprehend how today’s voters want much more than yesterday’s slogans?

We’ll find out. But in the meantime they both betray Australian voters by failing one fundamental test of anyone calling themselves an opposition: holding to account a government that has moved to the right to capture all the territory once claimed for Liberal ‘moderates’. Why would that government not be contemptuous of a Coalition so self-obsessed and backward looking it fails to act like an opposition?