The Liberal Party under John Howard was famed for its blend of economic liberalism and social conservatism. And yet, when asked what the Liberal Party stands for, the temptation is to borrow the satirist’s line and say “elections.” The loss of federal office after eleven years, and the party’s absence from office in any state or territory, gives the Liberal Party a rare period of grief but also the opportunity to reinvigorate its core principles.

One option is to say that the party doesn’t need fixing because it’s not broken. Advocates of this approach would point out that the party did win 36 per cent of the first-preference vote in the federal election, while in the Victorian election of 2006 it won 35 per cent (and those figures don’t account for the votes of the junior coalition member, the Nationals).

Advocates of the minimalist response would say that the Howard government lost office, like the Keating (Hawke) government before it, because it ran out of steam. They could also say, as the perpetual campaign cyclists argue, that we are already into the third week of the 2010 campaign and open debate is fodder for one’s opponents. (On this score it is bracing to note that the ALP has wasted no time in attacking the credentials of former ALP member and current Liberal leader Brendan Nelson, with a website already up and running under the banner “Nelson Facts.”)

So the party could now simply bide its time, be effective in opposition, hope for some major governmental stuff-ups, and trust that any handover of the leadership to Malcolm Turnbull does not unduly startle the voters. (Nelson’s victory by three votes over Turnbull in the Liberal Party leadership ballot a fortnight ago appears less and less convincing, if that’s possible, as the number of ineligible voters and eligible non-voters at that ballot now exceeds the margin of three votes and continues to grow. Fran Bailey, at the latest count, is now likely to lose her battle in McEwan by fewer than ten votes.)

But such an instrumental approach to politics may end up seeing the opposition in opposition for three, maybe more, electoral cycles. Now is the time for debate.

The Liberal Party has the rare opportunity to engage in policy debate in the purity of opposition, as it has been termed. In recent times whenever policy debates occurred within the Liberal Party they were quickly doused by Prime Minister Howard, who would then say that the party was a “broad church.” That phrase to me always seemed to mean “some Liberal Party members would like it to be a broad church.” Now is the time for the broad church to meet in synod.

The starting point for any “directions” debate would be the observation that the economic liberalism of the Howard government contributed significantly to Australia’s current overall prosperity, and to note that the Liberal Party will almost always be seen as the preferred custodian of the economy when compared to the ALP. The Rudd government will no doubt seek as one of its core goals to change that dynamic, but it does not have history on its side. The only serious economic debate the Liberal Party should have concerns Work Choices. The party needs to answer the question: did Work Choices owe more to the desire to win a long-standing ideological battle against unions than it did to the economic imperatives of freeing business from unnecessarily restrictive employment requirements? The party may well come to the conclusion that the rare achievement of a Senate majority in 2005 - which enabled the passage of the Work Choices legislation - was the undoing of the Howard government.

Other than this there is no need for the party to debate the economic liberalism of the Howard years. Where the party can move is in the broad area of social policy. There is room now for the party to debate and adopt a distinct and philosophically coherent stance on a range of social policies that could be underwritten by a desire to be true to the central tenet of liberalism - that governments should only interfere in people’s lives where others are in danger or are being harmed.

If this tenet were followed the approach of the Liberal Party may break with its trajectory under Howard in a diverse array of policy areas, from registration of gay unions to an apology to Indigenous Australians. It could draw from the Fred Chaney approach to Indigenous affairs to point out that the lack of access by Indigenous Australians to the same level of service provision that other Australians enjoy is a question not of special rights but of basic citizenship. It could draw from the Petro Georgiou approach to asylum seekers, which eventually did win the day at least for detained asylum-seeker children. The Liberal Party should be leading these debates by asking what policy response most allows individuals to flourish without unduly impacting on others. It is a philosophy that can be applied to federal and state policy arenas as diverse as education, health, national security, law and order and even public transport. (Whether the federal parliamentary party is open to engaging in such debates will remain to be seen. The signs, it must be said, are not good, even at this early stage, with Petro Georgiou still in the ministerial cold, having been left out of Brendan Nelson’s recently announced opposition front bench.)

That is not to say that debates about the appropriate level of individual freedom versus governmental regulation are always easy. To take one difficult example, should the Liberal Party condone the semi-pornographic depiction of women on public billboards? Such imagery as currently exists in Melbourne could not be shown on G-rated television shows, but should the Liberal Party condone it on the basis that the establishment of a new advertising classification system, rather than the current complaints-based one, would constitute unnecessary governmental intervention? Or should it support at least an improved complaints process on the basis that it would be protecting children from harm?

This is the sort of debate the Liberal Party should be having. Labor will always be hamstrung by the perception, if not the reality, that unions have an undue influence on it, while the role of factions give Labor the appearance at times of being a “machine.” But at least everyone knows that the Labor Party stands for workers, or now “working families.” In 2010, when we are likely to have both state and federal elections, the Liberal Party will be more than competitive if it can be said to stand for economic prosperity and personal freedom.