Different voting makes better party
There is tremendous scope for fresh ideas, for new thinking, for being prepared to use 2008 as a year of modernisation of our organisation. The party needs to embrace a change that will replenish our membership. A strong membership base is a strong resource – for developing policy, in campaigning, in fundraising, in spreading the word, in providing the candidates, staff and personnel that every political party needs.
We should embrace a practice that has been initiated by right-of-centre political parties around the world to their benefit: allowing all party members to select the parliamentary leader. In one sweep, we would give Australians a reason to join and become active in the party. An influx of new members would revitalise the membership of the party – bringing us new ideas, destroying rotten boroughs, creating a phalanx of new campaign workers, fund-raisers, and potential candidates.
For many, this will seem radical. But it is not too radical for Britain’s Conservative Party, the French Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) or the Canadian Conservative Party. The Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the United States have raised grassroots participation to unprecedented heights. I would envisage that the Liberal Party adopts a similar model to our sister party in Britain. In essence, the Conservative Party allows the parliamentary party to choose the candidates who will be offered to the membership from among their number. The broader membership of the party then chooses between the two candidates who emerged from the parliamentary party ballot.
The British model ensures the parliamentary party puts forward two candidates who they believe have the capacity to lead the party to victory, fulfil the role of prime minister and have a largely unified party behind them. But it also means the candidate who is selected by the Conservative Party members has shown their appeal to a wider audience than the few hundred members of the parliamentary party. To win, they would likely have demonstrated their ability to conquer the media, to articulate a message, and to have an agenda that a wider audience wishes to support.
By: Christopher Pyne, Federal Liberal Member of Parliament. This article was based on a speech delivered to the Sydney Institute on 4 March 2008, SMH, 5 March 2008
