What qualities make someone a good team player? In sports we all have a pretty good idea: in public, a good team player always supports his or her coach and teammates. If you think someone on the team isn’t giving his or her best effort, or a coach’s strategy and choice of personnel is poor, second-rate, even grossly wrongheaded you keep the criticisms in-house. The same goes for if you think a fellow teammate should be dropped or traded.  You see, even when we think a complaining player’s grumbles and gripes are perfectly correct, we can also recognise that taking them public will hurt team morale. It will undermine the coach’s authority. Odds are that such public dissent – however perceptive and accurate – will have a net negative effect in any cost-benefit analysis. That, at least, is the general position.

Yet are there exceptions to this rule of thumb that says, ‘Good team players are always positive, constructive and avoid mouthing any negativity’? And here I think there are a couple of exceptions, probably more, to this general rule of ‘be a Pollyanna not a Cassandra’. To start with, we can see that the general rule might be outweighed by the need for fixing the team’s performance where the team has performed badly for quite a while.  The more dire the team’s recent performance, the more the cost-benefit analysis points towards favouring public criticisms of other players, of the coaches and of the management. Because then the vocal, open criticisms aren’t really doing much to worsen team morale – it’s already woeful. Moreover, such sharp, blunt critiques in dire times might actually do something to help change the team’s direction and trajectory.

Half-relatedly, the general ‘be a Pollyanna’ rule seems far less applicable to retired players, especially to retired players who had been stars and had taken the team to great results and championships. Why?  Because their criticisms carry a lot of extra weight. They are less likely to be the day-to-day grumbles of the disaffected who are not getting enough playing time or who disagree with the coach’s tactics. If retired star players are openly criticising the team, that doesn’t mean these past prodigies are automatically correct. But it does mean people will listen.  And ponder. And if the team’s position really is dire, if coaches and management need to be cleaned out, well, these past greats can achieve more than others. Staying publicly silent in such situations might actually hurt or slow down the team’s recovery. Put more bluntly, if the yesteryear stars are in public always pulling their punches then odds are this seemingly virtuous conduct is actually counter-productive. The self-censoring critics are undermining the goal of turning around the fortunes of the team. Or at a minimum they are contributing nothing to achieving that goal.

So who thinks that the same general considerations that apply to sports teams also apply to political parties?  Because I do.  And readers don’t have to be Las Vegas mind-readers to have guessed that I’m talking about the current state of Australia’s Liberal party. It is a total mess. Three years ago you’d have been laughed out of any room if you’d have said that the nondescript, few observable accomplishments, from the far-left of the party room Sussan Ley would be a future party leader. And that once she became leader she would then stack her shadow cabinet with the most left-leaning, Labor-lite (sorry, the euphemism used is ‘moderates’) collection of party room MPs ever seen in the party’s history. I doubt anyone three years ago would have taken such prognostications remotely seriously. Worse, it would have been obvious back then that outside the immediate environs of teal-voting, inner-city, ABC-obsessed constituencies, this was a terrible recipe for success.  And to be clear, I mean an even worse recipe than the one Peter Dutton’s ‘we stand for nothing’ advisors foisted on us during last month’s election campaign. Nor is the tired refrain ‘let’s give her a chance’ persuasive. Like many of you, I knew from day one that Turnbull would be a disaster.  So will this Team Ley.

So where are the team players with the public criticisms? I suppose calculations of future advancement make it very tough for current players to speak up – though it’s patently obvious that nearly half the party room recognises this current situation is a disaster. A brave MP could do what Matt Canavan and Alex Antic have done which is to stay on the backbench where they can openly argue for an end to the idiotic genuflecting at the altar of the impoverishing net zero gods, speak up for free speech, and lobby for a massive cut in our world’s highest per capita immigration. But bravery and perceived self-interest are unusual bedfellows with sitting MPs.

What about the past team players then, the former greats of the Liberal party? I’m talking now about John Howard and Tony Abbott as I think it’s obvious that the views of Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton are not worth anything. Turnbull started the rot in the party and has sniped away at anyone and everything that doesn’t serve to enlarge his already monstrously large ego. Morrison was a Covid thug. He signed us up to net zero without any notice to the voters. He’s done more to ruin the fiscal and monetary position of this country than any recent PM. And Dutton pusillanimously refused to run on any core values and hence managed to run the worst election campaign I have seen in my life. There’s no reason to listen to these past players.

But my Lord there’s plenty of reason to hear from John Howard and Tony Abbott.  And I don’t mean their mouthing the hackneyed, threadbare utterings that ‘the Libs need to pull together’ and that ‘everyone should come together’. Enough with not criticising the team. Look where that has gotten us to now. Who would contest that this Team Ley, right now, is to the left of what Bill Shorten’s Labor took to the 2016 election? Tony and John are doing no favours to the Libs by pretending that this offering can win the next election. Or that it won’t see the mass departure of conservative voters.  Or that anything other than Australia’s virtually world-unique preferential voting system is preventing a UK-like Reform party from popping up and doing to the Ley Libs what Reform is doing to the UK Tories – namely destroying a party that was taken over by left-leaning cuckoos whose views were significantly out of sync with the party membership and with what wins elections. Speak now John and Tony. Before it’s too late.