Every cloud has a silver lining

In a few weeks the Western Australian branch of the Liberal Party will be receiving a report from a review panel on what went wrong at the 2021 state election. The short answer is that pretty much everything went wrong and it is not clear what purpose will be served in pursuing a long answer.

The silver lining of the election wipe-out is that the Liberal Party now has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset itself for the future, but will it seize it?

The first thing it needs to do is to recognise that the machine it is running is over 70 years old and is no longer fit for purpose. Robert Menzies founded the Liberal Party WA during the Second World War and it came into its own from the 1950s, a time when there were high levels of community participation in all types of organisations, including political organisations.

High levels of membership and community participation supported an extensive branch network, and the views of the community fed into the party. The branches were grouped within divisions based on the boundaries of federal seats. It was a powerful system.

But by the 1980s party membership had dwindled away and the branches - and thereby the party - could be controlled by a small group of people. During this period, the Liberal Party entered the era of the powerbrokers.

The most damaging consequence of rule by powerbrokers was the widespread selection of poor quality candidates for parliament over a long period, because selection was based on fealty rather than ability. This weakened the parliamentary party, discouraged potential candidates and alienated many members.

Good governance is an important part of having an effective organisation and the current structure does not provide it.

The Liberal Party should redesign itself as an organisation that has a much smaller membership than it had in the past. One way to do that would be to de-layer the pyramid by removing all the branches and have members join divisions or the state party directly.

Second, the party should change the way it selects parliamentary candidates.

Historically it sought to select prominent local citizens and the membership of selection committees was weighted in favour of local branches. This led to intense local selection campaigns and allegations of powerbroker interference and branch-stacking every time a seat became available.

A lot of poor candidates were selected under this system but the worst aspect of it is that it serves the local branches and the political factions, and not the needs of the parliamentary party.

The objective of politics is to win government by having the majority of people vote for your team. The Liberal Party’s selection process is not aligned with this objective.

A better process would be to follow the modern board practice of using a skills matrix to identify the skills and experience required by the parliamentary team and the gaps that need filling. Candidates would then be selected to fill those gaps and to strengthen the team.

The time when a candidate had to be born and bred in an electorate has long passed. Instead of each branch doing its own thing, the focus should be on building a well-balanced parliamentary team.

That necessarily means a centralised selection process with input from the parliamentary party. It is the only way to achieve a coherent and strategic selection process.

A lot of people won’t like this idea. For one thing, uttering the word “centralised” can get you lynched in the WA Liberal Party. It will also affect local political fiefdoms.

Ideally there should be two teams of MPs: one comprising MPs in safe seats who are chosen for their expertise and experience, and another team for marginal seats comprised of people who are good at winning and holding seats.

In sport, not everyone gets to play offense. Some people have to play defense. It should be the same in politics and the people who are excellent at defense should be celebrated as much as those who are excellent at offense.

It also doesn’t mean that those in the first group will automatically be ministers or that those in the second group will never be ministers. Candidates are selected on the basis of political promise, but once in parliament some exceed that promise, while others disappoint.

The next step would be to move quickly to identify and select candidates to contest the party’s traditional “safe” seats that it expects to win back at the next election. Those candidates would serve as opposition spokespersons from outside parliament during the course of this government, while continuing to work in their day jobs, so the opposition can field a full team.

In state parliament, the opposition is very poorly resourced, so the party should select people who are leaders in the fields of health, education, resources, finance, planning, transport and so on, with the ability to take on government ministers, who have ministerial staff and government departments supporting them.

They don’t have to be in parliament to be effective because most political discourse now takes place outside of parliament - as the AMA has so ably demonstrated.

By putting forward a team that is capable and ready to govern, the Liberal Party can present itself as an alternative government at the next election. That doesn’t mean that it will win the next election – it means that, worst case, it has the opportunity to win back a large number of seats and, best case, if the wheels come off the current government, it will have presented a team that voters can elect into government.

Where does ideology fit into this process? Well, it doesn’t. We live in a post-ideology world. No-one is voting for free enterprise or socialism. The state government is effectively a big utility and service provider, and voters are voting for the most competent manager.

Today, in Western Australia, that is clearly the McGowan team. If the Liberal Party wants to do well at the next election, it had better show up with a better team.

• Simon Withers was mayor of the Town of Cambridge between 2007 and 2015.