Shouts from the desert

In recent years the major political parties have suffered a major decline in membership reflecting decreasing popularity among voters, and yet we are still faced with an ongoing two-way contest between players whose raison d'être has long since ceased to be relevant.

The ALP exists solely to give union members a voice in Parliament. It is still beholden to policy directives set by the union movement, which was fine when union members accounted for a significant proportion of the population, but now union members are a much smaller fraction of the population and the ALP has failed to make the transition to a broader-based party that is relevant to a respectable cross-section of the community. There is no question that the ALP's continuing attachment to and control by the union movement restricts its acceptance in the community.

The Liberal Party was founded to stand as a force in opposition to socialism and communism. While the party's basic principles still look largely like a check-list of principles of liberalism, it still includes a rejection of socialism as one of those core values. Socialism is no longer a threat to anybody, but to listen to some members of the Liberal party gives the distinct impression that they are stuck in an anachronistic "reds under the beds" mentality. Some of them harbour the fear that Julia Gillard (a member of Labor's left faction) will be elected leader of the ALP, and that the next time the ALP is elected to the national Parliament it will seize control and impose a Bolshevik republic (and to some of them, it is the "republic" part that hurts the most).

The Liberal party suffers from a second malaise - in order to effectively oppose socialism, it brought together political forces that in many respects were polar opposites. It includes the far right - those who seek to impose their view of society and morality on others - together with the small 'l' liberals, whose political philosophy is centred around a strong belief in individual freedom which is directly opposed by the far right. In the 1940s with the semblance of an overpowering threat from Soviet philosophy, this made a certain amount of sense: the small 'l' liberals effectively played off the far right - who had more in common with Stalin than with Menzies but opposed communism because it was "godless" - against the socialists, thereby using the far right to defeat the communist threat while maintaining liberalism as the "lesser of two evils".

With communism soundly defeated, the far right no longer feels the need to make concessions to Liberalism and is in its ascendancy in the Liberal Party. The small 'l' liberals can no longer point at a common socialist enemy to keep the far right from indulging their most oppressive fantasies. We now have a far right Prime Minister, who demands adherence to his philosophies as the price of entry into the Ministry, and a New South Wales division that is controlled by the far right.

And yet when we reflect on society, it is small 'l' liberal values that dominate. There are small 'l' liberals in both the ALP and the Liberals, but in each party they must deal with the extremes of the political spectrum, which shifts the party's politics in one direction or the other. The small 'l' liberals who dominate society are then forced to choose between one unrepresentative abberation and another - or in some cases between one abberation and a parody of itself offered by an opposition keen to be seen as more righteous than thou.

It would make more sense for the small 'l' liberals in both major parties to split off and form a true liberal political force that is capable of being truly representative of the society that they represent. By banding together in a separate party they would be in a position to play the rump of the "Liberal" party against the rump of the ALP to ensure a genuine balance. We saw what this would look like in a small measure this week with the RU486 vote, where true liberal principles won out, but unfortunately not all votes are conscience votes, and even though small 'l' liberals are a clear and convincing majority of Parliament, they are a struggling minority in the Coalition party room.

A new party formed from the small 'l' liberals of both major parties would be nice, but it seems unlikely to happen - it would require politicians who are much bolder than the bulk of those in Parliament now, many of whom have seriously compromised their principles in order to obtain political favour.