Mediaboss Marketing

One reason often suggested is demography: younger voters are increasingly alienated from conservative parties. Yet, it was ever thus: the Liberal Partys past electoral success was never based on capturing the under 30s. The loss of younger voters is actually a problem common to both major parties. If you are under 25, you are as likely to vote Green as you are to vote Labor; that trend is set to continue.

Peter Dutton meets locals in his north Brisbane seat of Dickson. Paul Harris

At least as important to the Liberals current woes as demography, is geography. The Liberal Party is today less representative of metropolitan Australia than it has ever been. Add to that the proportionately larger influence within the Coalition of the National Party whose electoral base has held firm while the Liberals bled marginal seats in the cities and the opposition today is overwhelmingly a party of regional voices.

This is evident in the makeup of the Coalition leadership. Not one of the six who occupy leadership positions comes from Sydney or Melbourne. The largest city represented in the leadership group is Brisbane (Peter Duttons electorate Dickson is on Brisbanes northern outskirts). The two Senate leaders (Simon Birmingham and Michaelia Cash) come from the smaller capital cities (Adelaide and Perth respectively).

Of the other three (Liberal Deputy Sussan Ley, and the Nationals leaders David Littleproud and Perin Davey) two hail from southern NSW and one from western Queensland. Most of the other senior frontbenchers also live in regional Australia, including Angus Taylor (Goulburn), Dan Tehan (western Victoria), Barnaby Joyce (New England) and Ted OBrien (Sunshine Coast). Of the 24 members of Duttons shadow cabinet, only seven slightly more than a quarter are from Australias three largest cities.

The weighting away from the large cities is even more pronounced in the opposition party room. Of the 56 Coalition members of the House of Representatives, only 16 represent electorates in Australias eight capitals (Sydney, 7; Melbourne, 2; Brisbane, 4; Perth, 2; Adelaide, 1; Hobart, 0; Canberra, 0; Darwin, 0). The aggregate population of the capital cities is about 17.5 million more than two-thirds of Australias 26 million people. Yet the capital city electorates represented by Liberal MPs are barely more than 10 per cent of the House of Representatives. Even taking into account senators, most of whom are capital-city based, the figures do not get a lot better.

By far the largest proportion of Coalition MPs comes from Queensland: 21 of the 56. As I well know, having represented the state in the Senate for 18 years, Queensland is predominantly regional in character. It is the only mainland state where most of the population lives outside the capital city. While the politics of NSW are dominated by Sydney and the politics of Victoria are largely about Melbourne, the politics of Queensland are not, primarily, the politics of Brisbane, which is often radically at variance from the rest of the state.

Modern Brisbane is a progressive city within a conservative state. While regional Queensland is the bastion of One Nation, Brisbane elects more Green MPs than Melbourne. Only four of the 21 Queensland Coalition MPs come from Brisbane. The other 17 more than 30 per cent of all Coalition MPs are from regional Queensland, as are most of the senators.

In Queensland, the Liberal and National Parties merged in 2008 to form the LNP. In that merger, the regionally based National Party was by far the strongest element, the Brisbane-based Liberals very much a minority. The LNPs animating spirit is less Sir Robert Menzies than Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Although in Canberra, LNP MPs are allocated between the Liberal and National parties, at home they are expected to be unreservedly LNP. Dutton (who supported the merger) is proclaimed not as the next Liberal prime minister but the first LNP prime minister. If one aggregates the LNP MPs with the nine NSW and Victorian Nationals, the number of Coalition MPs who are actually members of the Liberal Party in their home state is fewer than half (26 out of 56).

The strength of regional Queensland in Coalition politics is a mixed blessing for Dutton. Obviously, it presents a mighty electoral bulwark. Yet the very strength of that bulwark steers the Coalition in directions which, while popular in the north, are often unpalatable to voters in southern capitals or in Brisbane itself. Since the Coalition has maxed out on the number of Queensland seats it can win, there is no further electoral dividend there. But the bulwark can be an impediment to reaching swing voters in the metropolitan south.

Barnaby Joyce in his seat of New England. Supplied

The politics of regional Australia are very different from the politics of metropolitan Australia. The average voter is typically older, poorer and more wary of change someone who is more likely to see reform as a threat than an opportunity. Regional Australia is less culturally diverse. Its social attitudes are less liberal. It is more dependent upon the old economy of mining and agriculture than the digital and services economy of the big cities. It often feels disempowered, and that sense of disempowerment can sometimes provoke a defensive parochialism. It represents a shrinking proportion of the population.

Although much has been written about the flight from the Liberal Party of inner-city elites in the context of teal victories in wealthy electorates such as Wentworth, North Sydney and Kooyong, the Liberal Partys deeper problem as was evident from the Aston byelection is its loss of touch with suburban Australia. That has always been the core constituency of successful Liberal governments: Menzies forgotten people, Howards battlers, Tonys tradies.

The domination of the Coalition by conservative regionalism is an important cause of its alarming disconnect from suburban, big-city dwelling, more liberal, multicultural Australia. And increasingly, the Tweed River is replacing the Murray as the key fault-line of non-Labor politics.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. .

Visit link:
Why is the Liberal Party in the doldrums? Its a question of geography - Sydney Morning Herald

Susan Holt is leader of the New Brunswick Liberal Party. Image: Submitted

New Brunswicks Liberal Party has released a new report with ways it says will help address the housing crisis.

The report includes 25 action items directed at the government under six focus areas, including:

The action items were putting forward are inspired and shaped by folks across the province, and were optimistic that by bringing everyone to the table government, developers, non-profits, and New Brunswickers we can ensure everyone has a place to call home, Liberal leader Susan Holt said in a news release.

The report comes as the province works to develop a housing strategy which is set to be released in June.

Liberal housing expert Benot Bourque says the province is changing and diversifying but our housing sector is not changing with it.

We need to start re-imagining and building housing developments now so that we can be a leader well into the future, said Bourque.

You can read the full report by clicking here.

Regional news director for Acadia Broadcasting's New Brunswick radio stations. A self-described weather geek who wakes up way before the sun to keep you informed.

Follow this link:
Liberals release recommendations to address housing crisis - country94.ca

Testing an out-there idea: Lger was curious what would happen if the Liberals and NDP were to run one candidate between the two parties in every riding an extremely hypothetical scenario. Pollsters asked people for their thoughts on a one-time alliance, not a full-fledged merger.

The results: Although a LPC-NDP alliance would likely to defeat the Conservatives, it would not crush the right-of-center party.

Lgers poll shows that, under current conditions, the Conservatives lead in voting intentions with 36 percent of support nationwide, six points ahead of the Liberals at 30 percent. The New Democrats hover near 19 percent, which is their usual level of support.

The LPC-NDP alliance would collect 41 percent of support across the country, two points ahead of the Conservatives, who would garner 39 percent.

Election math: As separate parties the Liberals and NDP would win the support of nearly half the electorate (49 percent, a share similar to the 2021 election). Together, theyd only pick up 41 percent.

The breakdown: Overall, 89 percent of Liberal voters would back an LPC-NDP alliance; only 75 percent of NDP voters would do the same. The Conservative block would remain intact with 96 percent retention.

The end result: With 41 percent of the vote and favorable regional numbers (see below), this hypothetical alliance would likely beat the Conservatives in a general election.

Using Lgers numbers, the 338Canada model estimates it would win around 175 seats against about 130 seats for the Conservatives. It would be a win for the alliance, but barely above the majority threshold in the seat count.

The short-term gains could well lead to long-term pains, a victory likely to become unstable with the wear and tear of time.

Lets quickly look at the regional breakdown.

Ontario: Lger measures the Conservatives ahead by four points in Ontario (37 percent to 33 percent). When asked about a speculative alliance, 46 percent of Ontario respondents would support it, while 39 percent would side with the Conservatives.

As separate parties, the LPC and NDP would amass 56 percent of the Ontario vote, according to Lger. Together, their share would drop to 46 percent. In that scenario, the Conservatives, Greens and the Peoples Party would fare better by a few points.

Quebec: In Quebec, Lger measures a statistical tie between the Liberals (31 percent) and the Bloc Qubcois (30 percent). The CPC takes a distant third with 19 percent, while the New Democrats amass only 14 percent.

How would Quebec voters react to an LPC-NDP alliance?

The LPC-NDP combo would take first place with 37 percent, but with a proportion of voters dramatically lower than the sum of its parts (45 percent). In fact, given the size of the Quebec subsample, the LPC-NDP alliance would still be in a statistical tie with the Bloc Qubcois (34 percent), which would pick up four points. Seat-wise, the Quebec landscape would be eerily similar to the one revealed after recent elections.

Western Canada: Potential seat gains for an LPC-NDP alliance would be limited. In British Columbia, the alliance would not do better than a tie against the Conservatives. In Alberta and the Prairies, the CPC would retain their dominance in seats and vote totals.

The bottom line: In Canadian politics, the party that wins the center, wins elections. The center may be a moving target, but the point remains that neither of the main parties will benefit by migrating too far to either side of the spectrum.

With Poilievre taking the CPC to the right, appealing to his hardcore base with an anti-CBC and anti-elite stance, Liberals need to be wary of the siren call that is further rapprochement with the NDP. Lgers numbers suggest it could be a one-time hit with limited long-term upside.

Here is the original post:
338Canada: What if the Liberals and NDP were to join forces on the campaign? - POLITICO

In different but complementary and insightful ways, Robert D Kaplan, John Gray and Helen Thompson have made a persuasive case for a tragic future of global and regional struggles among great powers and lesser powers alike over security, resources, and values. If they are correct, and I think they are, then the project of liberal internationalism has failed for now and perhaps forever.

Liberal internationalism entranced many elites and citizens in the West and the world three times, following three global conflicts the two world wars and the Cold War. The promise of liberal internationalism was that zero-sum struggles among countries over power, wealth, and values, in which one countrys gain means losses for others, could be replaced by non-zero-sum collaboration to promote mutual security, mutual prosperity, and common values.

One way to eliminate interstate competition, of course, would be the unification of humanity under a single state, by force or by federation. But liberal internationalists have been committed to a world of national self-determination by many sovereign states, including new ones that emerge by secession or the partition of former multinational empires. Liberal internationalists have sought to reconcile their two goals of national independence with global harmony by replacing competition among states for relative power and relative wealth with global governance rather than with global government.

In the liberal internationalist vision, security would no longer be provided on a self-help basis by individual states or alliances. Instead, a system of collective security would make all states, big and small, powerful and weak, safe from the aggression of others. Interstate aggression would be outlawed by treaties, and outlaw states would be punished by national or global military forces deployed to enforce global law by a global organisation the League of Nations or the United Nations.

Following the Cold War, many liberal internationalists in the West, including neoconservatives and humanitarian hawks, were committed to the dream of a world without interstate conflicts, but realised that the United Nations would never effectively function as global police officer. Many found a substitute in the idea of a league of democracies which would oversee the post-Cold War world. Others hoped that a single country, the United States of America, could reduce incentives for interstate competition and provide security for all countries or at least all deserving countries by policing the world as the global hegemon. If post-Soviet Russia and post-Maoist China consented willingly to membership of a liberal internationalist order or rule-based system policed by the US and regional allies, then great-power politics would vanish. Only small and recalcitrant rogue states such as Saddam Husseins Iraq and North Korea would threaten the American-led liberal international order.

Select and enter your email address Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. World Review The New Statesmans global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. The Saturday Read Your new guide to the best writing on ideas, politics, books and culture each weekend - from the New Statesman. The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. Ideas and Letters A newsletter showcasing the finest writing from the ideas section, covering political ideas, philosophy, criticism and intellectual history - sent every Wednesday. Green Times The New Statesmans weekly environment email on the politics, business and culture of the climate and nature crises - in your inbox every Thursday. Events and Offers Sign up to receive information regarding NS events, subscription offers & product updates.

Your email address

The strategy of collective security has implications for trade policy. If the League of Nations, the United Nations, or Team America kept the peace, then individual countries would no longer need to try to maximise their control of industries, markets, and natural resources vital to national defence, just as individuals under a common national government are liberated from the need to stockpile arms and supplies as a precaution against attack by their neighbours. Free of the need to provide for national militaries, except perhaps for forces that states would contribute to global collective security campaigns, countries could abandon economic nationalism and join a borderless, rule-governed global market in which individuals and firms were the only participants.

What about conflicting values? Liberal internationalists from the aftermath of the First World War to the aftermath of the Cold War hoped that conflicts of values among countries would simply disappear as the result of the inevitable conversion of all of humanity to liberal democracy, founded on ideas of individual human rights derived from the American and French revolutions during the 18th-century Enlightenment. In place of older distinctions between Christians and pagans and civilised and barbaric countries, mostly-Western liberal internationalists distinguished liberal from illiberal states and democracies from autocracies. In a secular version of post-Christian theodicy, liberal internationalists assumed that the conversion of the heathens to Western liberalism was unavoidable and could be sped up by evangelisation and the occasional coup or war of regime change.

In his war message to Congress on 2 April 1917, the US president Woodrow Wilson declared: The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. Echoing Wilson, in his second inaugural address 0 January 2005, George W Bush asserted: The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

The millennial hopes of liberal internationalists after the First World War were frustrated by the resumption of great-power rivalries that led to the Second World War. After 1945, the conflicts of the US and its allies with the Soviet Union, China and other members of the communist bloc disappointed and disillusioned those who had high hopes for the United Nations system. Now, the replacement of the USs fleeting post-Cold War global hegemony with great-power struggles pitting the US and its allies against China and Russia, along with the return of non-alignment as a strategy among many other nations, marks the defeat in our time of the liberal internationalist project.

In the emerging multipolar world, as throughout most of history, states will have to look after their own security, alone or with the help of military allies. This makes it imperative to adopt strategies of self-sufficiency in militarily essential manufacturing, raw materials, energy supplies, workforces, and consumer markets, at the level of blocs or alliances if not of individual countries.

In the realm of values, the project of liberalising the world has failed as decisively as earlier Western attempts to Christianise or civilise humanity. Saudi Arabia and Iran and many other Muslim countries, including Afghanistan under the Taliban, have non-liberal religious regimes of a kind liberals hoped would give way to secularism and individualism. In different ways Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey have consolidated postmodern autocracies that can function effectively in the age of computers and rockets.

Nor is liberal democracy healthy in its Western heartlands. In the last generation, real power in the US and European countries has drained from legislatures to increasingly powerful executives, judiciaries, transnational agencies and corporations. The result has been the replacement of the old politics of left and right by conflict between elite technocratic insiders and alienated citizens represented by colourful and often ineffectual and corrupt populist tribunes such as Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump. As the multiple prosecutions of Berlusconi and Trump show, lawfare the weaponisation of the judicial system for partisan purposes as a substitute for elections is being normalised in North Atlantic democracies, having long weakened democratic institutions in the oligarchic societies of Latin America. Liberal democracy cannot flourish if political factions routinely seek to jail or censor rival politicians.

Military and economic competition, together with ineradicable conflicts of religious and secular values, cannot be eliminated as utopian liberal internationalists have hoped. But inevitable interstate conflicts can be moderated and prevented from escalating into all-out war. Age-old diplomatic expedients such as spheres of influence and neutral zones, along with newer methods such as arms control treaties, summit meetings and hotlines, can limit great-power rivalries and proxy conflicts. Instead of treating free trade as the norm and justifying sanctions and embargos only as punishments of global outlaws, we can acknowledge the legitimacy of selective protectionism and industrial policy by nations and blocs, while engaging in the trade-war equivalents of arms control negotiations. And conflicts among incommensurable values can be managed by what John Gray has called a modus vivendi , or co-existence, in a permanently pluralistic world.

What audiences want is a tragedy with a happy ending, an American movie mogul once declared. What the realist thinker John Mearsheimer calls the tragedy of great power politics is a permanent feature of a world without a world government, but that tragedy need not end in universal ruin.

Michael Lind is a professor at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (Atlantic Books)

See the original post:
Liberal internationalism has failed, but we can live in a multipolar world - The New Statesman

On March 27, six people were killed at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, by a former student who identified as transgender. Everyone was rightfully horrified left and right, and whatever side of the sexuality and gender debate you are on.

A few days later, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre decried new bills emerging in state legislatures putting some restrictions on gender transition procedures for youth. Calling these bills hateful and threatening to freedom, she said, Our hearts go out to the trans community as they are under attack right now.

Predictably, that remark provoked outrage from people who found the timing inappropriate. Former White House press secretary and Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany called out the White House for the audacity of choosing that moment to speak of attacks on the trans community.

While Jean-Pierres comments were certainly misguided, they were not focused on Nashville at all. But their temporal proximity to the school shooting inflicted by a trans-identifying person was all it took. McEnany declared with emotion that it was the Christian community truly under attack, and her co-host Emily Compagno went on to insist that these state bills have nothing to do with anti or hate and instead protect Christians from this overbearing, overreaching government.

I sympathize with these concerns, and it is absolutely fair to raise them, but the entire exchange illustrates what gets lost in a cultural competition about who is being attacked.

What is lost is the full truth, and the conversation that could take us there.

Like an autoimmune condition in which nonthreats are perceived as real attacks by a confused body, we all know how haywire things can feel when our closest relationships become amped up and hyper-reactive.

When my own family gets on edge, everything and anything including minutia about kitchen cleaning or scheduling details can feel like a threat, even an attack.

Didnt you realize I had planned something else for that night? Why is it that Im the only one who ever notices the dishwasher needs to be emptied?

So many people seem on edge right now like this primed to see things that arent truly threatening as attacks.

This same kind of a pattern is showing up more and more in our over-reactive public discourse today when, for instance, honest attempts to scrutinize someones ideas or work are angrily portrayed as an attack.

Philosopher Stephen Yanchar acknowledged recently that critical thinking has a reputation of being a slash-and-burn attack mode, but it also can be loving, kind and gentle a part of relationship building.

When was the last time you saw someone receiving a thoughtful critique with such generosity or did so yourself?

Thanks for pointing out some other things I need to think more about. ... I am grateful that youd highlight some limitations to my current approach.

Its much more common to instead shift the focus to the motive, or even character, of the person raising the questions. Then the questions themselves depart stage left, and weve got a juicier conversation on our hands, one focused on reputation debates rather than truth-seeking.

You see, there is power in accusing a sincere questioner of launching an attack. At the very least, it distracts and deflects from any uncomfortable attention on you or something you care about. Such a deflection can be very helpful indeed.

Former President Donald Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct multiple times over the course of his career. When fresh allegations surfaced during his first campaign, I was struck by how often he turned the attack back on the women, accusing them of attacking his campaign and threatening to sue them for defamation.

It almost feels like we should have a word for this when people being accused of serious things accuse their accusers of being the true aggressor. Many of my own colleagues have similarly experienced attacks simply for raising sincere questions and concerns about the harms of pornography.

National Reviews Jack Butler wrote recently about this same pattern of victims being portrayed as aggressors, suggestingthis is the unenviable position many conservatives find themselves in while trying to defend various Judeo-Christian norms only to be confronted by the commentariat on the left, who having initiated its latest volley, turns around and accuses us of being the ones waging culture war.

Whether individually or organizationally, there are perhaps good reasons for this tactic, each rooted in self-preservation. Jonathan Rauch, an insightful senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has pointed out the disproportionate influence that can come from claiming to be physically endangered and psychologically traumatized by someone elses comments.

Much like the emotional power of claiming one has experienced trauma (even if its just a microaggression), there are tactical benefits from insisting on being a victim of attack. Surely, the proliferation of both usages are tied to similar trends.

Much of this is no doubt part of a tribal society convinced that the major intersections between right and wrong correspond to the divisions between men and women, white and black, rich and poor, religious and non-religious. Once youre convinced of that, it hardly takes any leap of logic to feeling attacked by any group not your own.

Its important to point out that an over-reactive sensitivity and paranoia about threat are among the classic symptoms of psychological disorders like paranoid personality disorder, delusional (paranoid) disorder and schizophrenia. And psychotherapists have whole programs designed to help people recognize when a feeling of attack is real or overstated and mistaken.

Not all of this is merely psychological, of course; there are real threats around us, too, as reflected in the worrisome increase in violence in our neighborhoods and schools.

Its worth remembering who benefits from a flame-throwing discourse in which each side accusing the other of attacking it.Its not me, and its likely not you. But there are clearly some who stand to gain from our confusion, our division and our inability to arrive at truth together.The rest of us are left more vulnerable and raw primed from one moment to the next to either feel attacked or to be seen as attacking, when in fact most people are doing the best they can, with what they know.

There are plenty of bad apples out there. And they deserve some real scrutiny. But lets agree to stop pretending that people with honest questions and critiques are somehow attacking me or you.Theyre not. And with a little thicker skin and stronger backbone, we surely can all see that.

Jacob Hess is the former editor of Public Square Magazine and writes at Publish Peace on Substack. He has worked to promote liberal-conservative understanding since the publication of Youre Not as Crazy as I Thought (But Youre Still Wrong) with Phil Neisser. With Carrie Skarda, Kyle Anderson and Ty Mansfield, he also authored The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints.

Here is the original post:
Are conservatives or liberals really under attack? | Opinion - Deseret News