I once read a man his own political party’s constitution, and he laughed at me.
He had stood for parliament more than once, wanting to carry the party’s banner and speak in its name. He had also taken the view that an existing Chinese Communist Party foothold in an Australian local government was not worth contesting. So I read him the clause. The party exists, it says, to resolutely oppose Marxism and all other totalitarian philosophies, and to safeguard Australia against any form of internal subversion. It is on the first page.
He said the constitution wasn’t relevant. And he was right. Nothing turned on the clause, because nothing ever does.
The Liberal Party of Western Australia opens its constitution with a profession of faith. Before a single rule of procedure, before an officer is named or a branch described, clause 3 affirms the party’s belief in God, in Whose wisdom and divine guidance it places its hopes for the future of the nation, and pledges it to uphold the sacredness of the individual conscience. Then come the articles: allegiance to the Crown, the rule of law, the right of private property as the basis of liberty, the family as the basic unit of society, free enterprise as the alternative to socialism. Clause 4(i) is the one I read him.
It is built exactly as a creed is built. Affirmation, then articles: what one believes, set down before anything else. Like a church reciting what it holds before it passes the plate. The party chose this form, and has reaffirmed it through eight amendments, the last in October 2023. The man who laughed had read all of it. It bound him to nothing.
The party has not lost the words. The words are immaculate, recently amended, sitting on the first page where anyone can find them. What is lost is the connection between the words and anything that follows them.
Consider what membership asks. The form screens for two things, and only two: whether you have belonged to the Liberal Party before, and whether you have belonged to another party (not an impediment in itself). Then it takes the payment. At the foot of the page, it asks you to sign: not a profession of belief, but an agreement to abide by the constitution and the code of conduct. That signature is the one place a confessional body would ask whether you hold the faith. This party uses it to ask whether you will keep the rules. A member may sign in good conscience and reject every word of the creed. The party never asks the other question. It built the one place to ask, and spends it on housekeeping.
A creed that binds no one is not a creed. The failure is not apostasy, but drift. The party has not renounced its faith.
A renunciation would at least be an event. A thing with a date, a vote, a person who stood up and moved it. This has been a sleepwalk. The party kept the words of the faith and abandoned the requirement to hold them, so that the words remain on the page, available to be pointed at, binding no one who points. A body that believed in nothing would at least be honest about itself. A body that recites a creed it does not require has agreed to treat its founding convictions as decoration.
It will be said that a party is a coalition of interests, not a confession of faith; looseness of this kind is adaptation, the very thing that lets a broad party win. Perhaps. But then such a party should not keep a creed. This one does, and not by accident. It has had seventy years to remove it and never has. The creed stays; only the requirement to hold it has gone.
Nowhere does this show more plainly than in how the party ordains.
A church does not admit a man to the priesthood the way it admits a parishioner to the pews. The parishioner professes the faith and takes his place. The priest is examined in it, formed in it over years, and held to the higher standard for a plain reason: he will stand in the pulpit and speak for the body. His word becomes, for the people in front of him, the church’s word. A church that ordained without examination, that laid hands on whoever applied and paid the fee, would not have relaxed its standards. It would have abolished the priesthood and kept the vestments.
This is what preselection has become. To carry the party’s banner into a seat it can win is to be ordained; set apart to speak in the party’s name, to be the party as far as most voters will ever see it. It is the one act in which the creed ought to bind tightest, the moment the body chooses the people who will preach. And it is here that the disconnection is most complete. This is not a complaint that candidates hold the wrong views; serious Liberals have always disagreed about immigration and tax and the monarchy. The man I read the clause to had not arrived at a rival interpretation of the party’s principles. He had treated them as not requiring anything of him, and remained eligible to be endorsed under the very clause he set aside. Because endorsement, like membership, counts the numbers a candidate can bring and not whether he holds the faith to be binding. The party will lay hands on whoever the branches deliver. The vestments are real. The priesthood is gone.
Set this against the thing the party says about itself whenever it is asked what it is for. It says it is a broad church.
The phrase is offered as a strength, and rightly understood it would be one. A broad church holds the Anglo-Catholic and the evangelical under a single roof. It contains real disagreement without flying apart, because the disagreement happens inside walls that hold. The breadth is the room inside the creed, and the room can be very wide. Menzies built it wide on purpose. His original statement found space for social justice and for enterprise, for the volunteer and for the rule of law, for flexibility and for the things that do not change. Breadth was never the problem.
But breadth of that kind is a function of the walls, not their absence. A church is broad because it has decided what falls outside it. Remove the decision and you have not built a wider church. You have built a marquee. Open on every side, sheltering whoever is under it, moving with the wind.
The Liberal Party still calls itself a broad church. It should look hard at the noun. A church has walls, a creed that decides who stands within them, and a priesthood examined in the faith it will preach. What this party has is a creed on the first page of its constitution — professed by no one, enforced against no one, and laughed at by the very people who ask to preach in its name.
That is not a broad church.
It is a roof with nothing underneath.