Liberal MP Paul Fletcher sees red over teals, but look deeper and there's more at play

Paul Fletcher, the longstanding Liberal member for Bradfield, is the opposite of a firebrand.

Politically speaking, he's more of a fire blanket. Cerebral, bespectacled, considered, reliable, Fletcher has over the years (along with Simon Birmingham, who announced his retirement last week) periodically been sent out on morning radio to smother political crises, such is his gift for bringing a flame-retardant, "nothing to see here" effect to even the most out-of-control conflagrations. He is a man who really does, in this very specific sense, "hold a hose".

On Monday night at the Sydney Institute, however, Fletcher doused the institute's familiar scenery with accelerant and ripped off a fiery denunciation of the "teals" — the independent candidates who two and a half years ago tore a significant hole in the ranks of the parliamentary Liberal Party.

Fletcher — who came frighteningly close to losing his own seat to a "teal" challenger in 2022, and faces a repeat challenge this time around — denounced the teals as a "Green left con job".

His lengthy speech adduces several items of evidence. First, that "these so-called spontaneous community movements, by apparently complete coincidence, appeared in a range of Liberal seats and made no appearance in Labor seats".

Second, that they were funded by "Melbourne billionaire's son Simon Holmes a Court and a group of other wealthy people".

Finally, he asks: "Is it a coincidence that in a third of the new seats they won in 2022, the teal candidate was the daughter or niece of a long-time Liberal MP, with the same last name? Of course, it is not a coincidence: it was part of a deliberate plan."

"The intention was to get people to think, 'That nice teal candidate could almost be a Liberal, I'll vote for her.'"

Fletcher's case is that a cashed-up group of opportunists exploited Australia's preferential voting system in 2022 by dressing some Greens up in twin sets to dupe Liberal voters into installing a Labor government, thus creating "the most serious threat to majority government in 80 years".

He argued that the teals only got elected in the first place because of Australia's preferential voting system.

"If Australia had a first-past-the-post system, none of the six teals who entered the parliament in 2022 would have been elected," he declared.

"Of the six, most had a first preference vote which was only in the 30s or even 20s, a long way behind the first-preference vote secured by the Liberal candidate."

He is absolutely right about the last point: The preferential voting system — in which we order the candidates by order of preference rather than just choosing one like they do in the United Kingdom — definitely helped teal candidates get elected in 2022.

And why is it that Australia has a preferential voting system?

A conservative invention

We have it because way back in 1918, Billy Hughes — the Labor defector and leader of the Nationalist Party, from whose remains Robert Menzies was ultimately to build the Liberal Party — introduced preferential voting specifically in order to dack the Labor party.

The conservative vote was being split at the time by an increasingly powerful agrarian lobby. Hughes' Nationalist Party was weakly organised, and increasingly reliant for its electoral success on talking angry farmers out of running their own candidates. In a series of by-elections in 1918, the Farmers Union ran candidates that split the conservative vote, delivering the seats to Labor.

So late that year, with yet another by-election due in the Victorian seat of Corangamite, Hughes smartly introduced legislation to make voting preferential, arguing — against strident Labor objections — that such a system would give greater expression to a broad range of voter sentiment. Corangamite, as Judith Brett records in her excellent book From Secret Ballot To Democracy Sausage, became the first federal seat to be determined by preferences. The Labor candidate received the highest number of first-preference votes, but was overwhelmed by the collective preferences of the non-Labor candidates.

At the next federal election in 1919, the new system worked a treat. The Nationalists won 37 seats, the farmers' groups won 11 and the Labor Party, thoroughly hornswoggled by the new system, won just 26.

This is, of course, the origin story of the Nationals.

What's the lesson? Probably that the preferential system can work well as a relief valve for major political parties whose constituencies are split deeply on a certain issue.

But it can create a vulnerability if a government is incautious enough to leave a significant demographic feeling unheard or abandoned.

Preferential voting — a conservative innovation which worked nicely in 1919 — came back 103 years later to deliver a nasty uppercut to its designer's descendants.

There's another factor at play

But this is not just a story of electoral design. It's also a straightforward one of constituency neglect, which almost always drives the emergence of fringe or third-party groupings in this country.

Certainly, the Climate 200-backed campaign mercilessly and forensically exploited the vulnerabilities of the Morrison government around accountability, gender and climate, concentrating on electorates with the highest proportion of voters who cared explicitly about those things.

Fletcher ranks this as a failure of democracy, or a con job.

But it only worked because professional women, who warmed to the teal candidates along with frustrated clean-energy enthusiasts in those affluent safe Liberal seats, had a visceral reaction to a prime minister who found a number of explicit and non-explicit ways of telling them they didn't know what they were talking about.

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is (to borrow from Shakespeare) that the very Liberal MPs unseated by this electoral phenomenon were some of the Liberal moderates (Trent Zimmerman, Jason Falinski, Dave Sharma, Tim Wilson) most sympathetic to the views of their mutinous constituents!

But then, the Liberal moderates were also the grouping who — in the mad scrabble of the leadership spill in August 2018 — decided that instead of backing their own candidate, Julie Bishop, they'd gather behind Scott Morrison, in a desperate bid to ward off the prospect of a Dutton-led Liberal Party.

Thus they installed a leader whose pugnacity palpably contributed to the electoral whipper-snippering at the 2022 poll of key moderates which — after the election loss — made a Dutton leadership not only inevitable but rock-solid.

Fletcher is now among the most senior of the Liberal moderates still plugging along in a Coalition that is entirely shaped around Peter Dutton. Dutton must now be recognised as the most successful first-term Liberal opposition leader in living memory, bearing in mind that the usual tradition in the Liberal Party, after a loss as scorching as 2022, is a fratricidal reign of intra-party terror lasting anywhere from three to 12 years.

Cause, effect, cause, effect.