After driving into ‘an electoral dead end’, where to now for the Liberal Party?

Three weeks out from the federal election, Melissa McIntosh revved up the crowd for the Liberal Party’s campaign launch. On the far reaches of suburban Sydney, she made her welcome to Menzies’ forgotten people, Howard’s battlers, Morrison’s quiet Australians, “and, with Peter Dutton, the heartland of our Australian Liberal Party, the forgotten people, the backbone of our nation”.

This was a rallying cry to the aspirational workers, small businesses and tradies who had moved from city centres to outer suburbs, searching for their slice of the Australian dream and a better life. The Liberal Party, at this point, had all but abandoned appeals to inner-city voters lost to independents in former blue ribbon seats. These suburban battlers – in western Sydney and around the country – were to become its base.

Those voters had other ideas. McIntosh is one of few Liberal members to survive the scrubbing of more than two dozen blue seats from metropolitan electoral maps over two elections. Instead of flocking to the Liberals, outer suburban voters handed the party of Robert Menzies – Australia’s longest serving PM – its worst ever defeat. So did women, young people and multicultural communities across Australian cities, leaving the Liberal Party without a heartland.

Melissa McIntosh is one of few remaining Liberal MPs in the nation’s major cities.Credit: Janie Barrett

The MPs returning to depleted opposition benches now face an existential reckoning: what is the purpose of the modern Liberal Party, and who does it represent?

The new leader will decide. A decade-long fight over whether the party veers right or claims the political centre will reach a crescendo next week, when MPs choose either shadow treasurer Angus Taylor or deputy leader Sussan Ley to set the course for recovery.

They have both committed to bringing more women into the party and expanding its appeal, but numerous reviews and previous leaders have said the same thing without substantial change.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s defection from the Nationals to the Liberals intensifies the contest, damaging relations with the junior Coalition partner and promising to bring more culture wars even as moderates plead to ditch them.

The fight for the party’s future is not just between members. The Liberals are bleeding votes to minor parties and independents on both their left and right. Labor faces the same challenge. With structural declines in support for major parties, election swings have become more volatile. It makes it harder to gauge whether this is a one-off result or spells a long-term wipeout.

Predictions of either major party’s demise – such as after a 2012 state election rout took Labor down to just seven seats in Queensland – have often failed to eventuate. State Labor was back in government just one election later.

But either way, “there’s no sugar-coating the position the party now finds itself in”, retiring senator Linda Reynolds said this week.

“You can see through successive reviews in federal and state in terms of where we have taken the wrong turn, but we haven’t comprehensively understood those lessons … I don’t think we went into this election, or the last election, with a really clear idea of who we are as Liberals.”

Historian Paul Strangio sees this as the biggest watershed moment since the 2001 election, which John Howard won in the shadow of the September 11 attacks on the US and the Tampa affair. He says it defined the next two decades. “The Liberal Party side has been entranced by Howard’s legacy, and the Labor Party to some extent has been bullied by [it],” he says.

“Howard in that election very much transmogrified into the ‘strong leader’, particularly on issues such as border protection, with a degree of xenophobic underpinning ... It’s a politics that trades in anxiety and fear, and the Liberal Party in so much of its rhetoric since then has played to those same emotions.”

John Howard and his ministers ensured border security and anti-terrorism policies consumed the debate in 2001.Credit: Mike Bowers

This isn’t Trumpism. “It’s an Australian-made conservative populism that Howard was a master at. What the Liberal Party has gone to, particularly under [Tony] Abbott and Dutton, is a doubled down, more aggressive version of Howardism,” Strangio says.

“The problem is that his proteges have been no good at it. Howard could straddle constituencies, and people saw him as strong on the economy, which helped him ... He funnelled his message in a much more clever way, to speak to mainstream Australia. He wasn’t tribal in his media communications.”

But this era could be ending, Strangio says. “There was a sense, on Saturday, that there was finally a repudiation of that [direction]. Whether the Liberal Party wakes up to it, and can step away, is the big question.”

A resounding rejection came from the suburbs Liberals thought they’d win over with a 25¢ fuel discount and promise of lowering immigration to boost housing supply. Dutton made a strategic shift to target outer-city mortgage-belt suburbs at the expense of inner-city voters. He came away with neither.

The western Sydney seat of Werriwa, which hosted the Liberal campaign launch, remained comfortably with the government while the neighbouring Liberal seats of Banks and Hughes fell to Labor. In the Melbourne growth corridor seat of Hawke, where Dutton held his final rally of the campaign, Labor increased its margin. On the other side of the city, the Liberals lost the mortgage-belt seats of Menzies and Deakin.

Howard’s battlers did not heed his cry. They may no longer exist as the Liberals imagine them. Dutton’s pitch to end tax breaks for electric vehicles, for example, would have hit hardest in the outer suburbs, rather than the inner city, according to a postcode analysis. “The outer suburbs are places of enormous growth and vast demographic change. They’re a kaleidoscope of ethnicities and cultures. I think the Dutton formula for those, which spoke to them with a strain of xenophobia based on division, missed the mark. It condescended them,” says Strangio.

“More broadly, there are long-term problems in how the Coalition is trying to pitch itself. Clearly, it has drifted towards conservative populism, and that’s losing women, it’s losing young voters, and now it’s losing the cities as a whole. They’ve driven into an electoral dead end.”

Demographic trends compound the Liberal Party’s predicament. Ian McAllister, who has been tracking elections for decades, says women, young people and the university educated have tracked away for at least four elections, regardless of the party in power. “These are underlying structural changes in the composition of society. All of these are working to the disadvantage of the Coalition,” he says.

Much of this is organic. Higher education correlates with more left-of-centre political views, and the portion of Australians with a university degree has soared from 4 per cent in the 1970s to more than 30 per cent today. The gender gap in voting patterns widened around 2010. “This was kick-started under Julia Gillard and continued ever since,” McAllister says. He links women’s lean left to higher rates of university education, more labour force participation, a growing number of single-parent households and decline in religion.

Even if the Liberal Party hasn’t driven this dynamic, there is a potent question about its response. The review of its 2022 election loss identified that “the Liberal Party performed particularly poorly with female voters, continuing a trend that has been present since the election of 1996”. It said voters sensed the Liberals were “failing to adequately represent values and priorities of women in modern Australia” and noted gender representation in parliamentary ranks was its lowest since 1993. Then it went into this year’s election without directing any policies at women, besides domestic violence. It ran twice as many men as women.

“Ten years ago I was part of a review into gender … and we recommended targets and how to get there without quotas,” Reynolds said this week. “That’s been the Liberal Party policy for 10 years, but it’s just sat on a shelf.”

Women will be found at the political centre, moderates say. The same with professionals and city voters. This was the argument being pushed by former premiers Nick Greiner and Barry O’Farrell this week. “I think that in the future the party needs to be liberal, sticking to its values, and it needs to be sensible, and it needs to be in the centre,” Greiner told this masthead. “The notion that you can get anywhere by not being sensible and centric is, I think, pretty bizarre.”

Retiring Liberal MP Warren Entsch has watched the Liberals’ move to the right unfold. He has sat in the lower house every year since Howard became prime minister in 1996, aside from 2007-10, and praises the long-serving prime minister, particularly for economic performance. But he agrees the party has been “slowly, slowly drifting” away from the centre. “I think we lost an opportunity when we didn’t elect Julie Bishop as leader [in 2018],” he says.

Entsch has identified changes in how policy is made. “With Howard, when there were contentious policies being discussed, he would invite backbenchers he thought were interested, share it with them, take opinions, and where necessary make adjustments,” he says. “From a backbenchers’ perspective [in this election], most didn’t know the policies until they were announced.”

Warren Entsch says the Coalition has lost its way, particularly regarding individual members being able to speak freely.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Another is the dominance of regional interests. Entsch cites the Liberal and Nationals partnership as a troubling force for the moderates, particularly since the parties merged in Queensland in 2008. “Nobody had any problem with me when I was campaigning for gay rights, when we had the Liberal Party separate. But when there was an amalgamation, and I was campaigning on gay rights, I was summoned to Brisbane to show cause why I shouldn’t be disendorsed,” he says.

The partnership muddies the waters for voters, Entsch says. The Nationals appeal to their regional constituents, as they should. But when LNP senator Matt Canavan stands in front of banners with “I choose coal”, it’s the likes of Jenny Ware in suburban Sydney who lose their seat. Ditto when Price is pictured in a MAGA cap. “[People] assume her voice is the voice of the leadership of the party. This is why moderates are punished,” Entsch says.

A Coalition split has been raised in the election aftermath, including by Canavan himself, as the Nationals’ influence in the joint party room grows proportionately. “The Nationals party has been able to hold seats,” he said. “The way the Liberal Party is being pulled and pushed in different directions, there’s an opportunity ... for the Nationals party to run in more seats. If that leads to us breaking up, great, fine.”

It’s not just this week that the junior Coalition party prevailed. The Nationals have come out on top over more than a decade of tussling over climate change and energy, including with the nuclear policy taken to this year’s election. The Liberals lost six seats to teals over climate in 2022; the Nationals lost none. This year in Queensland, where the parties are merged, all losses aside from Entsch’s former seat of Leichhardt came from Brisbane. The LNP held eight of the city’s 12 seats in 2019. Now it holds two.

“We hardly have any members, now, in metropolitan areas,” Entsch says. “We’re never going to get back into any sort of government unless we bring back voters [there].” This starts with dampening language around social and cultural issues.

“We need to be a little bit more conscious that, as Howard always said, we’re a broad church,” Entsch says. “Don’t start these culture wars in the middle of election campaigns … We’ve got to be prepared to make concessions that allow voices in those metro areas to be heard.”

There is a diminishing number of moderate voices in the party room. Liberal senator Andrew Bragg, one of few left, is making the same push. “I think it’s very important that we focus on the economic issues and that we avoid these cultural issues at all costs,” he told the ABC. “I think we have a healthy ‘live and let live’ ethos in this country, and we have diversity, and generally speaking, that’s what most Australians are comfortable with.”

Others think cultural debates should assume an even greater role as the party asserts its purpose. This is part of Price’s vision for how the Liberal Party should rebuild. “Let this be the moment we stop whispering our values and start declaring them again, not as fringe ideas, but as the foundation on which this country was built,” Price said in a statement.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott, who encouraged Price’s move to the Liberals, also pointed to flaws in progressive values as he dissected the campaign’s failings. “They accuse us of starting a culture war. I don’t think we started the war on our culture. There has been a war on our culture for the best part of 50 years,” he said on the Rebuilding Australia podcast, produced by former Nationals leader and deputy prime minister John Anderson. “The long march of the left through the institutions is essentially a war against Anglo-Celtic culture ... We need to resist the attack on our culture.”

Peter Dutton and former prime minister Tony Abbott at the Liberal Party campaign launch.Credit: James Brickwood

But there is strong consensus, from both moderates and conservatives, that the Liberal Party must find its economic narrative. This is a key part of its identity crisis. McAllister’s research observes a decline in the Coalition’s ownership of economic issues since 2019. Its position was further confused when it went into the campaign promising higher income taxes and state-owned nuclear power plants – anathema to traditional Liberals. It complained about government spending while matching Labor’s promises.

“We jeopardised our reputation for economic management by proclaiming a cost-of-living crisis as the only thing that mattered, which invited both sides to then offer relief packages, and it tended to generate into a competition as to who could give the bigger handout,” Abbott said.

“While we did occasionally acknowledge that you can’t subsidise your way to success, you can’t tax your way to prosperity ... We didn’t prosecute the argument, and we didn’t have the policy to make all those things come right, and that’s why there is such a challenge ahead.”

Abbott and other Liberal heavyweights are not conceding a decade in the wilderness just yet. Tim Wilson’s successful effort to reclaim Goldstein – one of just two inner city seats the party is guaranteed to hold – buoyed hopes that strong Liberal campaigns can rival the independent movement.

“We can come back, but it is going to take a lot of effort by people of conviction and courage over the next few years,” Abbott said. “My plea would be that we don’t get lost in debates about conservatives versus progressives and all of that sort of stuff.”

Former Liberal senator and moderate Simon Birmingham was more circumspect about its prospects. He urged an overhaul that reached every element – from its membership to the way it approaches culture wars.

“The broad church model of a party that successfully melds liberal and conservative thinking is clearly broken. The Liberal Party is not seen as remotely liberal and the brand of conservatism projected is clearly perceived as too harsh and out of touch,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

“The Liberal Party has failed to learn lessons from the past, and if it fails to do so in the face of this result, then its future viability to govern will be questioned.”

The next Liberal Party leader bears this responsibility. “They’re now left with an existential question,” says Strangio. “Will the new leader try to shift to the centre, or double down further?”

Which way the party swings will be decided on Tuesday. Both Taylor and Ley say they want to win back women and rebuild the party, but the party is far from settled about how it does so. With stakes so high, backgrounding in the lead-up has been rife. Entsch, after almost 30 years in politics, doesn’t underestimate the importance of next week’s vote. “The first thing we need is to make sure we get the new leaders right.”

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