Taylor Swift and the Liberal Party suffer from the same problem

There seems to be a moment in the career of every pop star when she has become so famous that it’s hard not to write songs about being famous. Taylor Swift – who is not so much a pop star as an epoch and a mega-culture unto herself – has reached that point.

The second song on Swift’s newly-released album, Life of a Showgirl, has her crooning (to her also-famous footballer fiancé Travis Kelce) about how “that view of Portofino was on my mind when you called me at the Plaza Athenee” (a famous five-star hotel in Paris) and lamenting that she would “trade the Cartier for someone to trust”.

In the song, titled Elizabeth Taylor, Swift sings that “oftentimes it doesn’t feel so glamorous to be me” and in the next breath she is reminiscing about dining in “the best booth at Musso & Frank” (a famous five-star fine-diner in Hollywood).

She is too clever not to deliver such lines without her usual Swiftian irony, but Elizabeth Taylor brought to my mind a scene from the sitcom 30 Rock, where studio executive Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin) delivers a tough talk to his network’s superstar, comedian Tracy Jordan.

“Tracy,” Jack tells him, “you may come from humble beginnings, but you’ve been rich for a looong time, and I think it’s affecting your act”.

Cut to Jordan doing a stand-up bit about how the people in St Barts eat their lobster.

The federal Liberal Party does not suffer from the problem of excess popularity, but they have succumbed to the political version of this kind of out-of-touch tail chasing. Once a political party starts fighting about its own fighting, and once its chief output is about itself, it needs fresh material.

In the case of the federal Liberal Party, the internal division and the evident animosity within the party room is not just affecting the act. It is the act.

The recent departure of West Australian MP Andrew Hastie from the Liberal front bench (he resigned last Friday from his position as opposition home affairs spokesman) was only the most recent symptom of a more profound problem.

As with the sacking (from the front bench) of controversial Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the ostensible differences were policy ones – like the fight over whether to stick with Australia’s net zero carbon emissions commitment, and differences of opinion over immigration rates.

But the real divide is ideological. The Liberals’ right-wing flank seems to gaze longingly at the success of the anti-immigration, populist parties sweeping democracies throughout the West.

Meanwhile, the moderates within the Liberal party room look to the cautionary example of the British Tory party, which teeters on the brink of oblivion, and see a potential dystopian future.

The Tories were once the most electorally successful political party in any parliamentary democracy, ever. Now, they hold just 119 seats in the 650-seat British parliament, and they face electoral wipeout by Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party Reform UK.

Former Labour Party strategist-turned-politics podcaster Alastair Campbell calls the Tories the “second most popular populist party”.

One of the more embarrassing aspects of the Libs’ internal spats is how thoroughly they expose the poverty of new ideas and lack of intellectual depth within the party. This week this masthead published an extract from Niki Savva’s forthcoming book, Earthquake, the election that shook Australia. Savva reports that the chief of staff to former opposition leader Peter Dutton, Alex Dalgleish, pulled together Dutton’s policy advisers for a meeting in February 2024.

The boss wanted them to work up “novel and innovative policy ideas”, according to Savva’s report.

“Dalgleish told them this was because, up until then, shadow ministers had been unable to produce anything of quality.”

This was little more than a year out from the eventual federal election. The fact that Dutton didn’t, according to this report, trust his own frontbenchers to come up with policies in their own portfolios, is extraordinary. Dutton wanted the Australian people to vote in a ministerial line-up that he, himself, didn’t think was particularly worthy.

This week Senator Price popped her head up again, telling 2GB’s Ben Fordham that she had written to Ley (presumably in a private letter, or private until she talked about it on syndicated radio) about her concerns “about backgrounding and leaking to the media”.

“It’s got to stop … we look like a clown show,” she said.

Like a pop star singing about eating lobster tail in a leather booth, it is not very interesting material. For ordinary voters, it is entirely unrelatable.

Occasionally, a possible policy debate looks like it might poke its head through the clownery.

Hastie has said he is interested in the crisis in modern conservatism, and what it looks like in a fractured age. He wants the Liberals to once again appeal to “aspirational middle Australians”. Recently, he raised eyebrows with a post to his social media about the nobility of old-school Australian car manufacturing.

“We used to make complex things in this country … but that’s all gone,” he said, standing next to a gleaming red vintage Ford Falcon GT.

“It’s not just about the cars, it’s this sense that we’ve now lost something … we are a nation of flat white makers when we could be making beautiful cars like this again.”

Hastie hankers for a past where Australians “build stuff with our hands”.

It’s the kind of muscular, male-centric rhetoric that Tony Abbott used to favour, and which is unlikely to win back the female voters who have deserted the Coalition. Let alone the younger voters who also abandoned the Coalition at the election, and who feel little connection to halcyon Holden days past.

Such voters probably care less about the model of the car they’re driving, or where it was manufactured, than they do about all the other things they worry about on their work commute, or as they’re dropping the kids to school, or, most likely, juggling both.

They likely don’t have too much time or emotional energy to feel nostalgia for a vehicle. No matter how flash it is.

Jacqueline Maley is a columnist and author.

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