In God Do These Libs Trust

by Mike Steketee - The Australian

Onward Christian Soldiers is soon to become the battle hymn of the Liberal Party in NSW. Not really, but you could be mistaken for thinking so. Churches, as well as campuses, are the new recruiting grounds for the Liberals around Sydney.

More precisely, it is the hard Right of the party that is reaping a harvest of new members and prominent among them are crusading Christians. Liberal Party stalls at universities even carry posters of John Howard. How times have changed: in times past, they would have been trampled within a half-hour.

Attracting new members has been a losing battle for political parties for decades, but conservatives have been signing up in significant numbers in NSW. But that is offset by the resignation of small-l Liberals in protest against issues such as Iraq and refugees.

However, these trends represent something less than the remaking of the party in Howard's image. For one, he is not comfortable with the approach of so-called faith-based Liberals. Unlike him, they wear their religion on their sleeve and are outspoken on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriages and extramarital sex. While these issues mostly strike a chord with Howard, they also ring political alarm bells because they are emotional and divisive, both in the Liberal Party and the wider community. That is clear from Howard's action to close off the abortion debate launched after the election by Tony Abbott, a hero of the new hard Liberal Right.

To date, the swing to the Right is largely confined to the NSW Liberals and is a product of their particular traditions, which include a much more forceful factionalism than those of other states. Factional differences in states such as Victoria and Queensland are based more on personalities than ideologies, typified by the long-running warfare in Victoria between the Jeff Kennett forces and the now-dominant group around Treasurer Peter Costello and Michael Kroger.

In NSW, the moderates who have controlled the state branch for most of the past 25 years have been wetter than their counterparts interstate and the conservatives drier. Howard, the first elected NSW Young Liberals president in 1962 and metropolitan vice-president 10 years later, is a product of the latter stream. Prominent NSW moderates include NSW Opposition Leader John Brogden, federal Human Services Minister Joe Hockey and lapsed adherents Attorney-General Philip Ruddock and Communications Minister Helen Coonan.

Hockey is the nominal leader of the so-called Group, the moderates' faction, which was formed at the start of the 1980s in response to the aggressively spreading influence of the far Right, also known as the Uglies.

One of those who cut his teeth in the Uglies was David Clarke, a member of the NSW upper house, a committed Catholic and the mastermind behind the present rise of the Right. Few people outside the party have heard of him (though some confuse him with the Macquarie Bank executive chairman of the same name) because he is much less ambitious for himself than for his vision of complete right-wing dominance of the party -- a cause he prosecutes with a zeal bordering on fanaticism.

"Everyone underestimated David Clarke," says one of his opponents. "He has done a very big job for his faction." That job includes winning control of the NSW Young Liberals for the Right after two decades of control by the moderates. The federal and formerly NSW Young Liberals president, Alex Hawke, works in Clarke's parliamentary office.

Recently the Right also won the numbers on the Women's Council, another long-time stronghold of the moderates. Many in the Right are anticipating gaining control of the two statewide representative bodies -- state executive and state council. When it comes to preselections, the Right already has seen off moderate senator John Tierney and has its sights set on senator Marise Payne, as well as moderates in state parliament.

All is fair in love, war and politics but, for what is supposed to be a mainstream party, the approach of the NSW Right poses dangers. At its most enthusiastic, that approach includes a determination to root out all parliamentarians and staff members who do not fit into its narrow view of monogamous, heterosexual morality. It also involves a winner-takes-all mentality, with the most zealous not content until all moderates are put to the sword.

Combined with a hard-Right policy agenda, this is a sure way to frighten millions of voters. One example of that comes from the US, where Newt Gingrich and his troops stormed the Congress under the Clinton administration but self-immolated as Americans baulked at their promise of right-wing revolution.

The new warriors of the NSW Right could do worse than reflect on the views of two leading conservative Liberals. Federal Finance Minister Nick Minchin, a right-wing factional powerbroker with a long-time ambition to organise the Right on a national basis, told the federal Young Liberals in January: "Our factions should be the champions and custodians of the great conservative and liberal traditions respectively, the two great schools of thought [that] our party represents in Australia."

A year ago, Costello spoke of the change then recently deceased former Victorian premier Rupert Hamer represented from his predecessor Henry Bolte - the first an urbane and cultured moderate, the second a down-to-earth country conservative. "The Liberal Party is at its strongest when those two strands intertwine," said Costello. "Each complements the other and gives it greater strength."