The treasurer, Scott Morrison, says voters have stopped listening to politicians and increasingly see partisan conflict as completely irrelevant to their interests.



In a frank speech to the Liberal party’s federal council in Sydney, Morrison said Australians had “collectively reached for the remote and turned down the volume on Canberra’s noise”, tuning out from politics and from media coverage of politics.

Referencing Robert Menzies’ 1942 “forgotten people” speech, Morrison said “the twist for today’s forgotten people ... is they have also chosen to forget us, the political class, making them much harder to reach”.

“They are giving up on politics holding any value for them because, too often, it is simply not relevant for them,” Morrison said. “After 10 years of political brawling, Australians are fed up with the politics-as-usual approach.

“This means that, outside the bubble of Canberra, it is increasingly not about the conflict of partisanship. These are old political fights and battle lines that hold little if no interest to everyday Australians.

“Australians have their own tribes, which usually have nothing to do with politics. And their views do not always fit neatly into our partisan boxes, and nor do they care.”

Morrison said the complexities of the current political climate meant the Coalition could not “slavishly follow past political orthodoxies, simply because they worked before” and the government must recognise that political and economic times had changed.

He said contemporary political times differed from the Howard years and had been framed “by the tectonic global economic shifts of the past decade and what we have inherited”.

He said the dominant forces shaping the current political landscape were globalisation and technology, and those two factors had impacted voters both positively and negatively.

He said the global financial crisis had thumped economic growth and the effects of the downturn had lingered. “Businesses have survived rather than thrived and wage earners have only had modest growth in their incomes.”

Morrison said the lack of income growth had created a sense of contingency. “The fall in earnings post the GFC has made people feel more vulnerable to the many forces beyond their control.”

He said that, when incomes rose, voters were more inclined to “feel more in control of our own futures”.

“The fall in earnings post the GFC has made people feel more vulnerable to the many forces beyond their control,” he said. “It has also made them more acutely aware of the essential services they rely on, like Medicare, the PBS, schools funding and income support.”

He said it was the job of the Liberal party to give people hope. “The public is demanding to be better heard, better understood and to ensure we focus on what matters to them, not us. And above all they want results.

“The challenge for us as Liberals is to come to terms with the fact that it is no longer about convincing Australians to be on our side but to convince Australians that we are on theirs.”

Morrison said to “crack through this thick ice” which was separating voters from the political class, politicians needed to “communicate candidly and with authenticity”.

He said the budget – which included spending on health and education, and a $6.2bn levy on the banks – was an effort on the part of the government to convince Australian voters the Liberal party was on their side.

The government used the May budget to shift to the political centre to the chagrin of some conservatives but it has not reaped any tangible political dividend from the change in political direction. Labor remains ahead of the Coalition on the two-party preferred measure in all of the major public opinion polls.

The treasurer said the challenge for the Coalition at the next federal election “was not so much to differentiate ourselves from Labor but to differentiate ourselves from being the party of politics as usual”.

Morrison said the recent UK election showed voters were prepared to listen to people they regarded as genuine political outsiders. He said voters in the UK had declined to listen to Theresa May and most of the British media about the deficiencies of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

“UK voters didn’t care and turned out in larger numbers and voted for him. Like president Trump, Corbyn took on the role of the authentic outsider; challenging a system that many voters did not think was serving them any longer.”

But Morrison said the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, could draw no comfort from the Corbyn case study, because he was not an outsider.

“Just being the opposition is not enough to qualify Labor as an authentic alternative,” he said. “Bill Shorten is no political outsider. Nor is he defined by his authenticity. It’s no coincidence his initials are BS.

“Bill Shorten is not feeling Australians’ pain, he is seeking only to cynically exploit it.”

The weekend federal Liberal council has seen a changing of the guard organisationally, with the appointment of the former backroom adviser Andrew Hirst as the party’s new federal director and the former New South Wales premier Nick Greiner as president.

A critical review of the Liberal party’s last federal campaign by the former party director and federal minister Andrew Robb identified a number of problems that culminated in Malcolm Turnbull almost losing the election last year.

The Robb review found the government was flying blind for key periods after Tony Abbott assumed power in 2013 right through to the 2016 federal election, because the research and data analytics functions were severely under-resourced.

The review found the Liberals were outgunned on the ground by Labor and progressive activist groups, and failed to develop a strategy to neutralise or rebut key attack themes, such as the so-called “Mediscare” campaign.

It also criticised the lack of concrete policy sitting behind the Coalition’s “jobs and growth” campaign slogan and a lack of attention to defining political opponents, noting that a campaign for re-election needed to be formulated during the whole parliamentary term of government.

The party used the occasion of the weekend council to launch a new website to boost its grass roots campaigning infrastructure and the government has telegraphed efforts to diminish the influence of progressive third-party activist groups, like GetUp, in reforms coming to parliament after the winter recess.

Turnbull used his speech to the event to deliver a more upbeat message. He characterised the government’s education funding, childcare package and company tax cuts as “some of the most substantial reforms in a generation”.

He also emphasised the government’s momentum. “Despite the prediction that’s been made about deadlock in the Senate, we have negotiated the passage of 126 bills through the parliament in just 11 months since the election.”