National Post (National Edition)
It’s Scheer’s party, for better or worse
I’ve never been to Australia, though I’ve always felt Canada shared a connection born of similar backgrounds.
A large country with a small population and a wealth of resources, it was raised to adolescence (if not full maturity) under the hand of a distant monarchy, with which it continues to share emotional and sentimental ties.
Australians have a certain independence of spirit that may come from geographical isolation: a large Westernized country on the edge of Asia, unlike Canada it doesn’t have to deal with an economic and cultural behemoth directly across the border, pouring its influence across the frontier whether it’s welcome or not.
One thing we don’t seem to share is our politics: although issues are similar, Australia has lately become a Wild West show that threatens to tumble into farce, if it hasn’t already. On Friday it gained its sixth prime minister in 10 years, after yet another internal party coup ousted the incumbent in favour of a colleague. There have been four such putsches since 2007, interspersed with three federal elections in which voters got a chance to pass judgment on the mayhem. It may say something that the National Museum of Australia, under “Australian Prime Ministers” only features photos up to 2007. Perhaps the changes since then have been too frequent and dizzying to deal with.
That voters are increasingly unimpressed with the shenanigans is evident in the motive behind the latest leadership change: Malcolm Turnbull, who was replaced by Scott Morrison on Friday, got the heave-ho precisely because polls suggest his government was doomed to defeat in next year’s federal vote.
Turnbull’s fall came on the same day his conservative counterpart in Ottawa was struggling with a loyalty challenge of his own. Maxime Bernier’s charge against Andrew Scheer is the same one that brought down Turnbull: that he isn’t conservative enough, and wasn’t doing enough to champion “real” conservative values. It would be difficult to say that about his replacement: Morrison is an evangelical Christian who voted against legalizing same-sex marriage and made his reputation pushing a tough approach to refugees. He will be expected to take a tighter stance on emissions policy, which under Turnbull favoured the Paris climate accord and subsidies for alternative energy producers, despite the painful electricity prices they produced. Like Canada, Australia ranks well down the list in total emissions, though is even higher per capita.
You’d have to be pretty hardline to consider Australia soft on refugees. The country has come under fire for intercepting and turning back boats of asylum seekers, and for establishing detention camps that have been criticized for squalid conditions and violence. Some detainees have refused to leave the camps for fear they will be attacked once outside. Canberra reached an agreement to ship some of the claimants to the U.S., but the deal ran aground after Donald Trump became president and reportedly hung up on Turnbull during a testy phone call.
Yet for many Australians, the government still isn’t doing enough. Morrison was a lead champion of the existing measures, which he promoted despite opposition from church groups and human rights agencies, arguing that people-smuggling was an evil trade that preyed on the vulnerable and had to be crushed. It was Morrison who appeared in a video warning detainees in camps in Papua New Guinea and Nauru that they should either go home or be prepared to spend a “very very long time” in detention. Incentives, some as high as A$10,000, were dangled to asylum-seekers willing to change their minds and head back where they came from.
Now Morrison will have the chance to take the party farther to the right. It is an oddity of Australian politics that the Liberal party is actually the one championing conservative views, and Morrison was chosen in a close vote of caucus to lead it because he was seen as less extreme than a rival viewed as even further to the right.
It all must strike Maxime Bernier as an opportunity missed. If he’d been born on the opposite end of the planet, he wouldn’t have had to quit in a fit of pique to challenge his leader, but could have sought to organize an internal revolt of the kind that has so unsettled Australia. Though Conservatives under Stephen Harper introduced new limits on the overwhelming powers of the leader, they still lack anything like Australians’ ability to oust a sitting prime minister and try a new one out for size.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Canada’s members of Parliament are often mocked as trained seals expected to leap to their feet and bark appropriately whenever signalled by the party bosses. One of the goals of Preston Manning’s Reform party was to increase grassroots powers to recall elected politicians. His supporters considered it important to keep MPS on a short leash, the better to ensure they paid close attention to the people who elected them.
But recall votes, caucus revolts and the like also engender frightened electees willing to swerve from position to position, and leader to leader, in search of whoever can placate voters enough to save their jobs. The result is a party that careens around in search of its beliefs, grasping at whatever sells well in the latest polls.
Canada has the benefit of parties in which leaders have the ability to set policies in expectation that members will unite behind them until they can be tested in a general election. Disunity in a party is the surest route to defeat, a fact the Tories became well aware of during the decade of division that handed Jean Chrétien three consecutive majorities. It’s the reason very few conservatives who remember those days are likely to welcome Bernier’s attempt to revive them.
Scheer may wish Bernier had kept his mouth shut, but he’s better off without him off in a corner, stewing and conspiring to usurp the leadership. It’s Scheer’s party, to do with what he can. If he fails, it’s on his head. But at least he won’t have to keep looking over his shoulder in fear of being knifed by his colleagues.