When you look around the Anglosphere you soon notice that right-of-centre voters in Australia have the least sway over the political party that purports to represent them. Put differently, the political class has captured the party far more here than in the UK, Canada or the US.

Start in Britain with the contest to replace Boris as leader of the Conservative party. Party rules give the first say to MPs. They vote until just two names are left. Those names are put to all paid-up members of the party. In other words, MPs cannot foist their preferred leader on the party. In the current contest, Rishi Sunak, who worked for Goldman Sachs and a hedge fund before getting elected to parliament in 2015, was the clear choice of Conservative MPs. He oozes establishment vibes and though he talks about Thatcher (think Josh Frydenberg) Sunak has overseen the biggest spending, highest taxing UK government since Attlee. He is also suspect on standing up to the EU and illegal boat immigration. Sunak scored 137 votes to 113 for Liz Truss in the last round of MP voting. But when the contest moved to the party base, Truss streaked ahead. She’s going to romp home it seems because her tax-cutting, anti-EU (and probably anti-woke) credentials are much more plausible than his. This is not a perfect set-up, but compare it to Australia and ask: Would the Liberal party base ever have voted for Malcolm Turnbull if the alternative were Tony Abbott? No. And that would have disciplined backstabbing MPs. Or imagine a 2019 contest between ScoMo and Peter Dutton. The left-leaning partyroom picked Morrison. But the party base would have opted for Dutton in a landslide. We lack constraints on the political class.

Meanwhile, in Canada the MPs have been completely taken out of the process. Anyone can run for Tory party leader and it is only party members who decide. Of course there are problems with this set-up. But MPs are far more focused on what their core voters want than in Australia. The Canadian Conservative party base is about to choose Pierre Poilievre. He would never be picked by MPs (there or here) because he supported the trucker protesters, wants to slash the budget of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; promises to fire the staff of the Reserve Bank for incompetence. Oh, and recent polls show him attracting increased support for the Tory party from young voters. Early tip. He’s going to beat Trudeau at the next election.

I would move to the British or Canadian set-up in a second. Overnight it would silence the Simon Birmingham/Christopher Pyne Black Hand wing of the Liberal party because these MPs – and everyone else – know that the ‘let’s wallow in net-zero fantasies and try to out-woke Labor’ approach is immensely unpopular with the party base. Right now these ‘moderate’ politicians can thumb their nose at the Liberal party base.

Here’s another problem that exists only in Australia. We have a preferential House of Reps voting system that works as a protection racket for the two main parties and their existing MPs. The US, Canada and Britain all have First-Past-the-Post (FPP) voting, the democratic world’s oldest and most successful system. You go into the ballot box and tick one name. That’s it. So, if you think your old, established conservative party has drifted way too far left you just vote for a small party more in tune with your views. If 5 or 10 per cent of conservative voters do this the established party is stuffed. It was not Boris and the Tories that delivered Brexit. It was Nigel Farage and the Brexit party. They never won anything except, ironically, a few EU seats. But they effectively put the Tory party in a position in which it couldn’t win. So, David Cameron offered up the 2016 referendum, confident his insider, pro-EU, establishment views would prevail. Wrong! My point is that a small party offering policies in line with those of the party base only needs to win 5 per cent of the vote to spell big trouble for the established conservative party under FPP. In the 2021 Canadian election, the People’s party, led by Max Bernier, scored five per cent. Now the Tories are about to choose Pierre Poilievre. You see FPP allows a party’s core voters to constrain and discipline their elected MPs in a way our preferential system does not. How many times have you heard the Mark Textor line that Liberal voters have nowhere else to go because at some point on their ballot they will opt to preference the Libs over Labor no matter how left the Libs drift? You see it is way harder psychologically to put Labor above the Libs (in our system) than it is to simply pick a third party (under FPP).

A last difference is this. Look at the US and how seriously Republican pre-selection battles are contested. There are no Morrison-Hawke stitch-ups where you shamelessly game the system by never turning up so that the PM et al. can choose the party’s candidates. Americans call them ‘primaries’ and long-established members of the political class have to face off against challengers from their party. So, they have to keep their local base happy. We are seeing all sorts of establishment politicians seeking to run as a Republican for the Senate, the House, and for State Governor lose to anti-establishment challengers. Sure, this is partly being driven by Mr Trump, who believes the Republican establishment let him down badly (a point that is hard to dispute by the way). Trump’s endorsements this primary season are running at something like 172-10. It is this sway that makes me believe no one, not even DeSantis, can beat Trump if The Donald chooses to run in 2024. (And to be clear, I really like DeSantis and believe he’d have an easier route to winning the presidency but I think he cannot beat Trump for the Republican nomination. And Trump will win too, although it will be much closer.)

Imagine how many ‘moderate’ MPs in Coalition partyrooms would be under threat if we could challenge sitting MPs. I doubt you’d hear many supporting the Voice or net zero by 2030 or all things woke.

In conclusion, incentives matter. In Australia there are few ways to discipline Liberal MPs who exhibit inner leftiness compared with Britain, Canada and the US. And it shows.