Amid the hype over the battle for the presidency of the Liberal Party in Western Australia, there is cause for concern. The contest has been described as a test for the leadership of the Leader of the Opposition, John Howard. Mr Howard has repeated many times that the organizational wing of the party is not subject to the parliamentary leadership and vice versa. He said before the weekend ballot that he would not back either contestant and he would work with whomever won. That may have been a sensible stand before the vote. It may not be afterwords.
The contest was between former senator Reg Withers and the incumbent Dr David Honey, widely seen as the protege of Senator Noel Crichton-Browne whose forces have attempted (with some success) to install candidates with right-wing views as Liberal candidates in Western Australia.
The effect of this push has been to dump two sitting Liberal MPs in favor of candidates approved by the Crichton-Browne group. It means one, perhaps both, of the dumped Liberals will stand as Independents, to the detriment of the Liberal cause federally. It has meant also that many rank-and-file moderate Liberals in Western Australia have left the party. Come election time that means fewer people working on the ground, once again to the detriment of the Liberal Party federally. That trend will only continue now Dr Honey has beaten Mr Withers, no matter the narrowness of the margin. Mr Withers promised a middle course.
Mr Howard asserts that the organization pre-selects the candidates and the parliamentary wing does not interfere and that conversely the parliamentary wing devises policies and the organisational wing does not interfere. Mr Howard is attempting to say east is east and west is west (so to speak) and never the twain shall meet.
However, there can be a nexus. If membership of the organizational wing is fairly small (and Liberal Party membership have never been very high) branches can be stacked by a determined group with a particular (usually extreme) political agenda _ in a way that goes beyond the ordinary democratic random joining of the party by interested people. The group persuades people by various means to do its bidding, including selecting its candidate in the branch. The candidate then carries the extreme political agenda to the national arena to the embarrassment of the main party.
The trouble for Mr Howard, and indeed any leader of any parliamentary party, is to distinguish the ordinary workings of party democracy from a concerted attempt fundamentally to change the party and its policies _ usually to the party’s detriment because these groups are invariably small and, though convinced they are showing the one true way, do not reflect the values that would make them electable in the eyes of a majority of voters.
The way two very successful Western Australian Liberal candidates have been tipped out, to the consternation of many of their electors, suggests that what happened in Western Australia was the latter.
If Mr Howard thinks that is what has happened in the west, he should realise the twain has met and he should act. Otherwise he might find that in the west at least that the party that he describes as a “broad church” has become a small vestry.