Right thinking voters complain bitterly about the inability of the Liberal Party to learn from serial, devastating election losses, but can we voters learn anything ourselves? And by “can” we, I mean, do we have the actual capacity to, because there certainly are lessons available if we are willing and able to learn them.

The human capacity for “confirmation bias” may be most pronounced in political party leaders and loyalists, but it’s not theirs alone.

Confirmation bias is the inclination to search for and interpret information and events in a way that supports your prior beliefs, such as, “Our current policies and campaign strategies are the best way to win government,” or, “Our historical party support and voting behaviours are the best way to get better government.”

When the Liberal Party lost the Western Australia election in 2021 under the wokist leader they’ve ever had, they went from 13 seats out of 59, to just 2, with the Nationals getting 4 more. The Liberals borrowed extreme energy policies from The Greens like phasing out coal, and were so irrelevant to the usual right-of-centre supporters that donors left them cash-strapped and easily outspent by Labor.

Instead of learning the lesson that imitation of leftists leads to Liberals losing elections, they doubled down on dumb and decided the Christians were to blame. They concluded the voters perceived the Liberal Party as too conservative and not progressive enough. In other words, the very progressive leaders of the Western Australia Liberal Party who controlled its policies, campaign strategies and press conferences took no responsibility and blamed the relatively powerless conservatives entirely.

In South Australia’s 2022 election, the one term Liberal government was also eviscerated under the leadership of “moderate” Steven Marshall. The pundits predicted a hung parliament, but one should never underestimate the ability of a weak Liberal leader to do worse than reasonably expected. Indeed, the new Liberal leader David Speirs observed a distinct “lack of narrative” in his party’s campaigning. No South Australian Liberal premier has earned two terms in government since 1962.

It was the same in New South Wales, with the Liberal Party going from 35 seats before the 2023 election out of the possible 93, to just 25. Matt “Green” Kean was that state branch’s most progressive power broker, and so effectively clipped the wings of the conservative Premier in exchange for supporting his leadership that Kean was in effect pulling the leader’s strings. The NSW Liberal campaign was also truly indistinguishable from extreme Green environmental policy.

Do we even need to examine the train wreck election history of the Victorian branch of the Liberal Party whose leaders love to suicidally assassinate its conservative and Christian MPs? How’s that working out for you?

Amanda Stoker soberly asked:

“How many elections will it take for a chunk of people in the party I so love to realise that the path forward doesn’t consist of pretending to be the Diet Coke version of Labor or the Greens?”

It’s a great analogy, as it truly does seem as if the Coalition is struggling to understand the liability of competitor imitation and the strategic advantage of bold differentiation. Very few voters want “Labor lite”, and are happy to just choose Labor if not given a clear contrast.

In this most recent election in the magnificent state of Queensland, the LNP has won largely thanks to a broad sense of it being “time” to give the other bloke a go after nearly a decade of Labor government. In fact, the mood was so strong that the pathetic Premier Palaszczuk (who won in 2015 with promises of committees, reviews, commissions and enquiries instead of any policies or vision for the state) was forced to quit ten months out to try and save the election.

In 2015 Queenslanders rejected the decisiveness and much needed reforms of the Newman Government – and the LNP have never stopped meekly apologising for him since. Even now, the freshly sworn in LNP Premier has solemnly promised to be more like Labor, and protect the apparently sacred public service no matter how bloated or wasteful they actually are or become.

The confirmation bias of the LNP moderates makes them believe that a visionless, small target campaign is the way to win elections. They campaigned on health, housing affordability, cost of living and youth crime, but went to water on the real issues most oppressive to at least thousands of Queenslanders: the obscene harms done in the gender clinic at the Queensland Children’s Hospital with mandatory one-size-fits-all “therapy”, and the actually very unpopular extremes of Labor’s extreme abortion legislation.

I predicted Steven Miles would be the next Opposition leader nearly a year ago, so far behind was he in all polls. We knew him well. His snide, churlish manner and political slavery to thuggish unions were all too familiar to voters, and his failures as health minister were a stain not quickly bleached.

Just a month ago the pundits were confidently predicting the LNP would march into office with at least 57 seats in Parliament, 10 more than the 47 necessary to form majority government.

But Labor smelled the LNP’s weakness and fear of being cornered on moral issues, and exploited that weakness masterfully.

What ensued was political incompetence borne of moral cowardice despite one of the most pro-life grassroots memberships in the nation. Candidates were silenced and banned from even attending Christian political forums. Crisafulli bizarrely refused to pivot or adapt to the full on assault, instead promising to be as toxically feminist as the Labor party. His deer-in-the-headlights refusal to address the burgeoning campaign issue made him look both unwilling to admit the LNP is largely pro-life and unable to prosecute the weaknesses of Labor on the generational issue.

The iconoclastic Dr Joanna Howe offered sage campaign advice to Crisafulli, suggesting three things he could have argued to expose Labor’s weakness in its extreme abortion legislation.

“Health Minister Miles promised late term abortions would not increase under his bill, but have actually doubled in three years.

 

Queensland midwives are reporting trauma from being forced to leave babies to die if they survive an abortion. The LNP will legislate equal human rights for all people born in Queensland to protect babies and frontline health workers.

 

Labor has made Queensland the abortion capital of Australia with more abortions per capita than NSW and Victoria. The LNP is committed to more choices for Queensland mothers with more maternity beds, more frontline health workers, more perinatal mental health care and other support for mothers.”

If the LNP is watching, they should note – if able to suspend their confirmation bias – that the very proudly pro-life policies of the Katter’s Australian Party not alone didn’t hurt them electorally, but very nearly put them in the balance of power had the LNP done any worse, which ended up with much less seats than predicted and only a handful in majority.

As for “we the people”, what can we learn? The lessons here are that the tide is turning slowly, and the election issues really are again becoming also moral instead of just economic. It is our silence and predictability which allows Liberal Party leaders and candidates to spit on church forums, and the solution is to join those parties to help them represent us too, instead of take us for granted.

The solution is to as personally as possible communicate with every candidate at every election that moral & justice issues like the sanctity of human life and the immutability of sex/gender are what we are looking for our elected representatives to advocate for.

Even when candidates don’t reply, they do hear, and they will observe the growing dissatisfaction with the extreme social carnage of “progressive” politics. Meaningful change is generational, not seasonal, and one day anti-abortion candidates will be as common as anti-slavery candidates.

That bright day will come because voters learned to not be blindly loyal to parties, but to proactively communicate to every single one of them the moral character required to be a politician, and to then genuinely preference the pro-life, pro-women, pro-family candidates from any party above the pro-abortion ones.

My generation will end abortion.

Dave Pellowe is a Christian political educator & commentator, founder of The Good Sauce, convener of the annual Australian Church And State Summit and host of Good Sauce’s weekly The Church And State Show. Since 2016 Dave has undertaken the mission of arming Christians to redeem culture through events from Perth to Auckland, videos, podcasts and articles published in multiple journals across Australia and New Zealand. [more]

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