With the rise of the Greens and a state election looming in Victoria, it’s time for more angst about preferences.

The Greens’ hopes of winning seats from Labor next month depend on getting Liberal Party preferences — just as they did to win the federal seat of Melbourne, and to get within range in Grayndler and Batman. The Liberals, realising that they have something valuable to trade, are now concerned about whether they should continue to help the Greens, and if so, what they should ask in return. Christian Kerr raises the issue in yesterday’s Australian.

The important thing to remember about preference debates is that what appear on the surface to be arguments about tactics are usually something deeper. People who seem to be talking about what is best for their party’s interests are actually reflecting more fundamental ideas about what their party stands for.

This is fraught territory for a major party such as the Liberals, because their preferences have usually had only symbolic importance: for most of its history, Liberal Party preferences have hardly ever been distributed, so Liberals are really not used to the idea that they determine who gets into parliament.

The major exception to that was the debate over preferencing One Nation back in 1998-2001. Most Liberals were careful to couch the debate in pragmatic terms — was it in their immediate political interest to deal with One Nation? — but it was clear that it actually separated those who felt a degree of philosophical kinship with the Hansonites from those who did not.

And so it is with the Greens. Some Liberals take it as almost self-evident that the Greens are philosophically further removed from them than the ALP is. Others find this view deeply mysterious, while still others see it as true but irrelevant.

The debate is chaotic because the Liberals are a diverse bunch, with no single agreed vision of what the party is for. Are they primarily a class-based party, representing the interests of the property-owning classes (as their origins clearly suggest), or are they a more ideological party — and if the latter, what ideology do they stand for?

Whether the Liberals are a middle-class interest group or a vehicle for liberalism, either way they should feel more comfortable with the Greens than the ALP. And if (as sometimes seems the case) they have no animating principle at all except the quest for power, then it makes sense to assist the Greens at the expense of their main opponent. Only if they see themselves as a specifically conservative or right-wing ideological party should they feel closer to Labor.

That, however, is the position of most of Ted Baillieu’s opponents in the Liberal Party (and, incidentally, of The Australian as well), and they are putting their case forcefully. In the pragmatic terms in which it’s put, the argument makes sense: the Liberals should be trying to get a quid pro quo from the Greens that might help them in marginal seats. (Although they shouldn’t gild the lily, as Kerr’s sources did in claiming that an open Greens ticket would have won them Corangamite and La Trobe: Possum Comitatus on Monday showed why that isn’t true.)

But the pragmatic argument is in constant tension with the ideological one. At the end of the day, the anti-Baillieu forces don’t actually want to deal with the Greens — they want to destroy them. And since the Greens can be equally intransigent, their search for common ground is going to be quite an interesting exercise.