The Liberal Party always talks about restructure when it loses an election. This generally has little to do with actual reform, but rather tipping the field so that your enemies are at a disadvantage.
When John Moore took control of the Queensland Liberals after the 1983 losses he set about radically changing the structure, merging “areas” which were constituted on the basis of one per federal electorate, into “zones”, which generally consisted of three areas. There were also changes to the state executive, which if I recall rightly included institution of a formal management committee.
These changes didn’t make much structural sense, but they allowed Moore to radically reshape the personnel on the state executive by abolishing positions and creating new ones that had to be elected by totally new constituencies. There was a veneer of management speak to justify this, but the real motivation was political assassination.
The effectiveness of the reforms can be measured by the fact that a few years later they had to be almost entirely reversed – the zonal system was just too centralised and top-heavy.
Ironically, one of Moore’s lieutenants was Santo Santoro. Not surprisingly, just a few years later, those of us who had been demoted by Moore’s reforms were busy defending him from Santoro who had his own political assissinations in mind.
Now the federal party is talking about the need to reform and make a more “modern” party. The principle reform appears to be to give the federal executive even more power on the pretext that this will allow it to deal with the factions.
The federal executive had enough power to intervene in Queensland after the 1998 election debacle, but as I have chronicled, this was bungled because of John Howard’s preference for people who belonged to the wrecking faction. People like John Herron, Warwick Parer and Santo Santoro. Rather than dealing with factionalism it entrenched it even more deeply. I can’t see how greater powers to intervene would make any difference.
There is also an idea that the federal executive should have more power over the federal leader. The federal executive has always been weak, particularly when the party is in power – that’s the way that Menzies designed it. I sat on the federal executive when Malcolm Fraser was Prime Minister, and he didn’t pay much attention to us. I always thought it was a long way to travel for a nice meal at the Press Club (always a great seafood buffet).
It’s hard to see how you could make the federal executive any stronger. The party’s executives are generally consumed with management issues, and these are dealt with at a state level. Trying to do them any other way would involve enourmous travel expenses. And campaigning and policy, which is where the feds mostly failed, is carried out by the state director and convention and policy committees, respectively, not the state executives.
There is some possibility of using the federal executive to overturn preselections, but if that is deemed necessary, can anyone tell me what preselections during the term of the last parliament would have met criteria which would have justified that decision who weren’t dealt with adequately by their state divisions? I thought not.
Andrew Robb appears to be the chief proponent of change. He has been a consistent proponent of “reform”, and with the failure of every additional tightening of federal control to bring any benefits, he calls for more.
Anyone who thinks reform of the Liberal Party’s constitution will bring it back from the wilderness ought to check their ticket – they’re on the wrong tram.