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TRANSCRIPT - ABC RN WITH SARAH DINGLE
PAUL FLETCHER: MP
Shadow Minister for Science and the Arts
Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy
Manager of Opposition Business in the House
TRANSCRIPT
ABC RADIO NATIONAL WITH SARAH DINGLE
23 December
E&OE
Subject/s: Liberal Party Election Review
SARAH DINGLE:
For many businesses, branding is everything and the business of politics is no different. The Liberal Party learned that the hard way at the federal election in May, an internal post mortem of the party's loss found that by the time voters went to the ballot box, the Coalition had lost control of its brand. Now, a review is urging an overhaul of the party organisation to end infighting and improve preselections. We're joined now by Liberal frontbencher and Shadow Minister for Government Services, Paul Fletcher, welcome back to breakfast.
PAUL FLETCHER:
Good to be with you,
DINGLE:
Paul Fletcher, how did the coalition lose control of its brands and who is to blame for that?
FLETCHER:
Well, this review is about having an honest look at what went wrong and what went right for the Liberal Party in the May 2022 election, and certainly identified some things where the party performed well, but it also identified some serious issues. It pointed at the challenge of COVID the fact that that was a huge distraction for the government, or perhaps should I say a huge area of focus for the Morrison government, and what that meant was that time which might otherwise have been spent on political management was spent on dealing with very pressing issues facing the nation. It also pointed to - correctly, in my view - a remarkable confluence of green left political forces coming together. The teals and various other activist groups are all combining in their messaging that was being pumped into particularly liberal seats but around the country so. You know, if we're to have a prospect of returning to government and serving the aspirations of many Australians who share Liberal values, and if we're to have the prospect to providing good government in the future, we have to have an honest assessment of what went right and what went wrong. And this review seeks to do that, obviously. Brian Loughnane, former Federal Director, Jane Hume, Senator, both very senior organisational and political members of the party and they've had a huge amount of input from Liberal Party members and others around the country.
DINGLE:
Well, if your voters to recover, you're going to need to recover the votes of women. Just 32% of women voted for the Coalition. This review recommends a 50% target of women in your parliamentary ranks. Do you support that?
FLETCHER:
I think that all of the recommendations need to be considered very carefully and that is one that absolutely needs to be considered very carefully, it's certainly true from my own experience in my electorate of Bradfield and many of my colleagues experienced a similar result that amongst women, in the electorate of Bradfield there's a large number of managerial and professional women, and many of them who'd been traditionally Liberal voters chose to vote a different way. In this election, and that was a story that was replicated in different parts of the country. Now, as Liberals, we're great believers in competition, we're great believers in the marketplace, and we need to respond to what the marketplace is telling us. And Australian women are telling us that they want to see a greater focus from the Liberal Party on their needs and concerns. And part of that clearly is we need to have more women candidates and more women parliamentarians. That's what the electorate is telling us very clearly. That's what this review has accurately highlighted. This recommendation of the 50% target. It's a matter for the organisation, and for each of our individual state divisions, but I certainly hope they will consider it very carefully and I'll certainly be arguing that it ought to be supported.
DINGLE:
Sure, but if it's so important, why not make it a quota?
FLETCHER:
Well, these are matters for the divisions, each individual division. But again, I come back to the point as liberals.
DINGLE:
I do you personally support a quota, though I know you can't speak for everyone, but do you?
FLETCHER:
As liberals, we are believers in the market, believers in competition, and the electoral marketplace has given us some very clear messages and if we are to return to government if we are to regain the extent of support that we need to regain, then it's very important that we have more women candidates and more women parliamentarians. That is absolutely self-evident.
DINGLE:
But the difference is between a target and a quota is that you don't have to hit a target. Charlotte Mortlock, the founder of Helma's Network which aims to get more women into the Liberal Party, told this show this week that some in the Liberal Party are allergic to the Q word. Are you one of them?
FLETCHER:
The particular tools that we use are a matter for the Liberal Party organisation, but what I very strongly believe is we need more women candidates. We need more women parliamentarians, the review argues for a target of 50% and that is certainly something I believe we should support. Now, the particular mechanisms to give effect to that target are matters that need to be decided by each of the divisions. We are a federation as a party and it's one of the matters that the review spends quite a bit of time dealing with. That a lot of the campaign responsibilities and party organisational responsibilities are carried out by our individual state divisions. We need to do a better job of sharing campaign expertise and experience across our divisions. And the review has a number of mechanisms which it recommends to support that. For example, when it comes to our digital campaigning, the honest reality is that we were out campaigned by the TEALS in a number of the seats that the teals won that had traditionally been Liberal seats, now there was a huge amount of money being spent in individual teal seats. You know on the seat of Kooyong, Monique Ryan's campaign spent over $2,000,000 in North Sydney...
DINGLE:
Sure, but we're talking about we're not talking about Monique Ryan's campaign, though. We're talking about your party and...
FLETCHER:
No. Well, what we're talking about is why it is that we lost the election and then what happened in individual seats.
DINGLE:
Yeah, we're talking about this review and you mentioned state divisions just before we're seeing quarrels over gender equality and the NSW State Liberals at the moment months out from a state election, this week the Transport Minister warned the party was putting "testosterone before talent.” Then the Premier Dominic Perrottet himself had to intervene not once but twice to get more women on pre-selection. The fact that we're seeing the Premier have to intervene with only you know, partial success. Doesn't this suggest that this system of competition is failing? You need concrete quotas for women.
FLETCHER:
The review identifies a range of factors which cause the Liberal Party to lose this election and perform unsatisfactorily. Now the point I'm making is that amongst those factors includes the unprecedented amount of money being spent in individual electorates in teal campaigns over $2,000,000 in Kooyong, for example, 1.38 million in North Sydney. So one of the many factors that the review looks at is the very large amount of money being spent by those we're competing against politically, of course, there's a whole range of factors here and absolutely one of those is our selection of candidates. Making sure that we have an appropriate representation of women, also making sure that we have an appropriate representation of candidates who are Australian - Indian, Australian - Chinese, all of the different diverse ethnic groups which make modern Australia now in Britain as the review points out, the Conservative Party there has done very well in having representatives of many diverse ethnic communities. In the British Parliament, and indeed, you know, even the Prime Minister of Britain is a British citizen of Indian background, so there's no reason at all why centre right parties cannot be fully representative of the diversity of a modern nation whether it comes to gender or whether it comes to ethnicity, but clearly we need to do much better than that.
DINGLE:
Oh yeah. Well I was gonna ask you about that because looking at your MPs, the Coalition and the House of Reps and the Senate out of both those two groups, I'm very happy to be corrected on this. But it appears that just one of your MP's in the Coalition is an Asian Australian. That's Ian Goodenough in WA. Chinese Australians alone. When you look at the general population they are 5% of the population and yet you have one MP in 90 apparently who is Asian-Australian. I mean this is near total failure isn’t it?
FLETCHER:
Well, we at the at the last election. Of course, in the 2019 election Gladys Liu came into the parliament in the seat of Chisholm. Sadly, as she did not retain that seat, although she did excellent work in her time in the Parliament, and of course when you see as we did, the total number of Coalition seats in the House of Representatives dropped from 77 to 58. Then of course, that means that it has an impact on or it has, as a factual matter had an impact on the extent of diversity. So yes, we have. We clearly have more work to do on that front. That's what the review correctly identifies, and the review also correctly identifies that one of the ways to do that is that we need to improve our, the number of people who are members of the party who are grassroots members of the party, and we need to make sure that that includes significant numbers of people of all kinds of backgrounds in my own electorate of Bradfield, for example. The most recent census, tells us that 24% of the residents of Bradfield report being of Chinese background, 4% Indian, 3% Korean and these numbers are reflected in many metropolitan seats around Australia. And the report also highlights that we had a significant loss in the number of metropolitan seats that we hold. We need to win those seats back, and as part of that we need to make sure that our party membership is more reflective of the diverse communities we represent. Certainly for me, that's a priority in Bradfield. And I know that for many of my colleagues, and indeed for many of the party organisations and seats that we presently don't hold improving party membership and attracting people from a diverse range of backgrounds is absolutely a priority.
DINGLE:
This review also found that former Prime Minister Scott Morrison was a big factor in the loss, in particular his personal unpopularity amongst voters. The Australian Financial Review reported yesterday that Scott Morrison does not intend to remain in Parliament for the long term and he is thinking about starting a business career in the new year few days away. Don't people in his electorate of Cook, having only recently gone to the polls, deserve some clarity?
FLETCHER:
Well, I think that what matters about Scott Morrison's future are best addressed to him. The review did find that Scott was personally unpopular and that he'd been very, very effectively demonised in an intense, aggressive and continuing campaign by the Labor Party and by the broader green left campaigning apparatus. Now Scott put a huge amount of time as did all of his ministers into dealing with the challenges of COVID, and of course the many other responsibilities and delivering outcomes such as the AUKUS agreement between Australia, the UK and the US in terms of defence. But there was… the historical evidence is clear that that demonisation campaign against Scott personally was effective and the review certainly finds that. And again, if we're to be a high performing organisation as a party we have to be honest in our understanding of what happened so we can get on and fix it.
DINGLE:
The NSW State government, the only state government which is liberal on the mainland at the moment, has just announced a 70% emissions reduction target by 2030. Federally, what is your emissions reduction target by 2030 now?
FLETCHER:
Well, we have been clear that we will lay out before the next election. What our approach will be of course, we've been. We're clear that we are committed to a net zero emissions by 2050, and we'll be using this term of Parliament to do a lot of detailed policy work in terms of how that outcome is to be delivered, so we're focused on what our policies will be and the approach we’ll take in in government federally. And of course, we'll leave it to the Liberal government in NSW to deal with their responsibilities at state level. Of course, it's an excellent Government, the Perrottet government, and they very much deserve to be returned at the next election.
DINGLE:
Sure, but the decades slipping away, we're talking about 20-30 targets in a few days. It will be 2023 and this review of your last federal election loss mentions climate change just once. Are you worried that the big priorities are still not being addressed federally?
FLETCHER:
What I am concerned to make sure that we do as the parliamentary Liberal Party and working with our National Coalition counterparts is that we do the detailed policy work so that what we take to the next election is based on that work. That's a process which is well underway under the leadership of Peter Dutton. And I make the point that in the lead up to the 2022 election we only saw a clear statement by the Labor Party in terms of their emissions reductions targets just a few months before the election. So it is appropriate that we are using this time in opposition. To do the detailed work of policy development in relation to not just climate change and emissions reduction, but the full suite of areas where we need to develop our policies and have them ready for the next election.
DINGLE:
PAUL FLETCHER: , we know that 2023 is going to be a very busy time. We've got a massive cost of living crisis, an ongoing war in Ukraine, a referendum coming up. What will your party be focusing on?
FLETCHER:
Well, we will certainly be focusing on the cost of living crisis. We'll also be focusing on keeping the Albanese government up to the mark in terms of what they promised. You know, they promised Australians a $275 reduction in their power prices. That's what Australians were told 97 times before the last election. We've asked Mr Albanese repeatedly in the Parliament to maintain to repeat that commitment. He's refused to do that. We're all called back to Parliament just a few days ago for a bill which supposedly addresses this issue. But the reality is it’ll take very high increases in power prices, which are now projected by Labor's own budget, 56% increase in electricity prices over the next two years, 44% increase in gas prices, and the measures that have been proposed might reduce that slightly so far from the reduction in power bills that Australians were promised by the Labor Party. In fact what Australians will be experiencing is sharp increases in their power prices. So we'll certainly be holding the Labor Party to account on that and on all the other matters that that is the responsibility of an opposition and of course, we will be continuing our detailed policy development work, and we'll have a full suite of policies well in advance to the next election.
DINGLE:
Well, clearly a lot on your plate. Paul Fletcher. Thank you for joining us. We hope you have a Merry Christmas and a big break before the next year gears up.
FLETCHER:
And to all your listeners too.
DINGLE:
That was Liberal frontbencher Paul Fletcher.
Further information: Jack Abadee 0403 440 099
