It’s one of those dilemmas politicians like to call wicked problems. Politicians, at least the folks still on the planet, know that it’s important to build a political movement from the ground up, but such movements can sometimes produce outcomes that are uncomfortable for people in power.



One of these case studies exists presently with the Liberal party in Victoria, where Malcolm Turnbull has been used as a recruitment tool, and not in a positive way. Conservative forces in the Victorian branch have used the rolling of Tony Abbott and Turnbull’s alleged progressivity as a rallying cry to recruit new members.

An army is being raised in Melbourne’s outer-eastern suburbs with the objective of taking the Liberal party back from the Costello clique – the group that rose to a position of influence when Peter Costello was the most significant centre-right political figure in Victoria.

The grassroots recruitment drive has been active amongst conservative church groups looking for a home after the collapse of the Christian micro-party Family First.

•Sign up to receive the top stories in Australia every day at noon

Recruitment in contemporary post-partisan politics requires emotional triggers – just ask any activist group currently working either in the political sphere or on its fringes – so the wronging of Abbott and the pernicious influence of the safe schools policy have been deployed front-and-centre. The legalisation of same sex marriage has been there too, but in the background, given contemporary Australia splits every which way on that issue.

Some in the Liberal party in Victoria believe the hot-button issues of the recruitment drive are now being deployed internally as litmus tests defining where people sit in the firmament, and whether they are loyal to the correct powerbrokers and causes. People uncomfortable with the rise of the arbitrary litmus test feel there is now a party-within-a party: a faction that wants to dominate and dictate, not integrate.

Liberals' historical baggage is weighing the government down | Katharine Murphy Read more

Critics say this group can be mobilised for preselections and AGMs, but that it clusters and caucuses as its own discrete faction inside what was once a broad-based political movement. Political parties can become vulnerable to a reverse takeover by single-issue activists when their core membership sinks as a consequence of people’s partisan loyalties becoming less rusted on. It’s a vulnerability.

The insurgent group in Victoria is led by a millennial activist called Marcus Bastiaan. He was once a protege of the state party president Michael Kroger, but according to some internal accounts no longer needs his numbers and his patronage.

In the federal sphere, Bastiaan is aligned with conservatives Michael Sukkar (an ambitious up-and-comer who has characterised party moderates somewhat colourfully as “socialists” and “termites”) and the veteran Howard-era conservative Kevin Andrews, as well as frontbenchers Alan Tudge and Greg Hunt. Josh Frydenberg is a Krogerite and also runs with this clique, but several sources report is not involved in the current machinations, with a huge portfolio load and an electorate in Melbourne’s inner-east to tend.

At a recent state council, the insurgents seized control of the operation and put preselections on hold in open defiance of Turnbull’s desire to have them sorted by July in order to ensure the Liberals are battle-ready before the next federal election. The move has created intense discomfort inside the state party, with incumbents fearful of facing challenges.

People close to the Bastiaan/Sukkar group say the intense discomfort narrative is being fuelled by the Costello group in order manufacture a sense of crisis. Party sources claim Sukkar has repeatedly over the last month offered to guarantee the positions of all lower house incumbents – so this is much self-interested and theatrical hand wringing about nothing.



It doesn’t seem like a sound political strategy for a party that will need every swinging vote

The Senate is another issue. Unless things calm down, battles loom there.

The Victorian upheaval is about power – who deploys it and who is deprived of it – this is institutional politics after all. But it is also about ideas.

Once upon a time, the Costello-ites – the group of Liberal MPs associated with the Melbourne-based rightwing think tank the Institute of Public Affairs – were considered to be the right of the Liberal party, with the core definitional questions grounded in economic philosophy.



But the new guard of the right is now sufficiently post material to advocate the socialisation of coal-fired power stations. Social conservatism, not dry, market economics, is the frontline of the battle of ideas.

Class consciousness also features. Internally, the battles are being characterised as the bogans form the boondocks versus the ruling class of old-money Melbourne. “Are we the party of Toorak, or Ringwood,” says one person. “What’s going on now is a necessary rebalancing”.

Obviously, conservatism in the Liberal party is not a new phenomenon. John Howard (who likes to talk about the virtue of broad churches) mastered the art in government of projecting conservative values without being captured by them or the various activists promulgating them. The danger in the contemporary ructions in Victoria, many insiders argue, is the potential for the tail to end up wagging the dog.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The insurgent group is led by a millennial activist called Marcus Bastiaan, who is aligned with conservatives such as Michael Sukkar, pictured – an up-and-comer who has characterised party moderates as ‘socialists’ and ‘termites’. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

The Sukkar-led group argues grassroots organisation is not a thought crime, and of course, it isn’t. It’s a necessity when the Liberal party is greying, and shrinking.

The basic “organise or wither and die” instinct is 100% correct. The progressive side of Australian politics has been far more effective over the past decade than the right in building the structures that help political parties mount the field campaigns that help them win elections.

Conservative Christians are also highly motivated people to recruit, having lost so many totemic social battles over the past 50 years: the advancement of the individual rights; feminism; same-sex marriage. The inclination will be to stand and fight.

But the problem for the Liberal party in Victoria is the organisational instinct is out of step with the resting disposition of the community that the political movement seeks to represent. Victoria is the most progressive-leaning state in the country (excluding the ACT, which is, of course, a territory).

The Liberal party listing right, and socially conservative religious right, will renew the base, and activate the grassroots in some areas of Melbourne, but it doesn’t seem like a sound political strategy for a party that will need every swinging vote it can muster at the coming federal election. As one party insider puts it: “It’s dangerous, it takes us away from where the bulk of Victorians are”.

Countering it is also difficult. Turnbull making a public intervention would only make matters worse, given he’s been cast as public enemy number one in the recruitment drive. It’s possible the state executive could intervene if events start to run off the rails. It’s also possible we’ll see some public pushback from senior Victorian figures federally in the event things get nuclear.

Sitting alongside the Victorian problem is the women’s problem. The Liberal party has a serious problem with women: recruiting them, promoting them, and ensuring worthy candidates aren’t knocked off by 20-something blokes with sharp elbows bellowing self-importantly about the meritocracy.

This problem is becoming more and more obvious as time passes, and the negative contrast with Labor in representative terms becomes more apparent. In the Victorian context, another able woman, Jane Hume, finds her head on the chopping block courtesy of the conservative putsch, with several colleagues believing she will lack the numbers in the event her position is challenged.

Frontbencher Kelly O’Dwyer is constantly having to hold out hostile incursions, and the new guard is also said to be hostile to Julia Banks – the MP who managed to snatch the seat of Chisholm from Labor at the 2016 election, against the political tide andgiving the Coalition the seat it needed to command a lower house majority.

While several party sources say the Sukkar/Bastiaan group won’t come for Banks or O’Dwyer and possibly not even for Hume, because all hell will break loose, the broader problem remains.

It’s bigger than the vagaries of individual preselections. This problem goes to party culture.

Liberal women have always had a tough job persuading preselectors they can come to Canberra and balance a political life with their home lives – the party has always had trouble attracting what Tony Abbott might (and did, unfortunately) call “women of calibre” – but if the party becomes more dominated by motivated conservative Christian activists, this can only spell trouble.