Make no mistake, the Liberals are already history – and Labor should be worried

Some people just always try to focus on the bright side of life. Jane Hume must be one of them.

The Victorian Liberal senator presented a cheery face on Wednesday when speaking of the Coalition’s future, arguing the reunification of the two parties was what Australia needed.

“I am a committed Coalitionist, but I am a Liberal first,” she told journalists in the press gallery hallway.

“We want to make sure that the Coalition not only agrees on the way that it’s going to operate internally but focuses externally too because this government, this terrible Labor government, is getting away with murder while the Coalition is in flux.

“We want to make sure that we bring the Coalition back together, but we do so in a way that it’s sustainable and that it’s going to work in the future to make sure that we can hold this Labor government to account every single day.”

There is a lot of heroic, toxic positivity in there. One, that the Coalition will be able to reunite and agree on a way forward when it hasn’t agreed on a policy direction, values or even what it stands for in the modern age, in years.

Hume would be familiar with these issues more than most – not only has she largely been shoved to the side within the Liberals, she was also tasked with the 2022 Coalition election review, which laid out a lot of the issues it faced. The parties not only didn’t change course, they sped up their bolt to the cliff. Hume was part of that.

Second, the idea the Coalition needs to come together because Labor is “getting away with murder while the Coalition is in flux” seems like a pretty leaky life raft to hold onto. Because, again, the Coalition does not have policies. And those it does would do absolutely nothing to address the very real issues that have sent people looking to One Nation as a refuge.

And on the things Labor does need pushing on – addressing inequality, its lockstep march with the United States (which now includes, as Crikey reported, handing over biometric data to an administration cheering on the murder of civilians), housing, its slavish devotion to fossil fuels, and crackdowns on liberties and speech, the Liberals are either right alongside it, or cheering it on.

The difference between the parties, as seen in recent years, has been over the finances. The Liberals would like to spend less on poor people, make housing even harder to get into if you don’t have money and further entrench tax breaks for those who don’t need it – the upper 10 per cent both individually and in business, compared to Labor. Oh, and they are also not so crash hot on any sort of industrial relations reform. But that’s pretty much it.

On fossil fuels, on making Australia a top-10 arms dealer (a Turnbull government project that never went away, it just quietly ticks along), on pretending there is nothing the government can do to build homes or make life cheaper and easier for people, on not taking proper action on climate (just varying degrees of inaction), on acting powerless in the face of a shifting world order – the Coalition isn’t holding Labor to account, it’s skipping alongside it.

Asked why Liberal and National voters are flocking to One Nation, Hume said “we haven’t been saying things people want to hear”. The response then, is to out-One Nation, One Nation and then act surprised when it doesn’t work.

Commentators who talk about One Nation and other protest parties becoming a long-term problem for Labor are not wrong. UK Labour has felt the wrath of not offering anything beyond platitudes and a Conservative-lite program to voters, just as the Democrats were hit by the same apathy wave in response to their “more of the same, but maybe a little worse!” offering against Donald Trump.

“Centrism” works only if the people you serve find themselves in “the centre”. Most people flirting with One Nation find themselves increasingly in the margins. The Overton window has shifted so much that the “centre” is firmly entrenched on the conservative side of the ledger anyway. Labor, supposedly a centre-left party, continues to fill the centre-right and, sometimes, just flat-out conservative areas – and whatever the Liberal and National parties are still claim that it’s not conservative enough.

And what is happening? As warned by anyone with pattern recognition, people will look to disruptors if they can’t find anyone willing to disrupt the status quo they are enduring.

Again, disruption isn’t inherently negative – Zohran Mamdani is a disruptor who is having a positive impact. But they can also be Trump. Or Pauline Hanson. Or Nigel Farage. All are very wealthy politicians telling the people they’ve helped to keep down that they deserve to be angry. In these conditions, that resonates.

So Hume might need to take off her rose-coloured glasses. The government isn’t getting away with murder because the Coalition is in flux. It’s happening because the two major parties pretty much agree on the things that actually do need to change.

At the moment, the only party that actually matters here is Labor, as the government. The Liberals are already history. It truly doesn’t matter if, when or why the Coalition comes back together. There is no future in a party that does not know itself and has spent the past decade driving itself into an abyss.

Labor still has a chance to shape the future, and history won’t look back to discuss whether or not modern Labor was “moderate” or “centrist” enough. It will judge it on whether it met the moment and the times. The verdict from those flocking to disruptors is that no, it is not.