Liberal moderates were in the ‘winner’s circle’ under Turnbull. It’s a different story now

The seventh anniversary of same-sex marriage being legalised in Australia passed with barely a whisper last week in Liberal politics as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton waded deeper into debates about nuclear energy and the Aboriginal flag.

It was a far cry from December 2017, when Malcolm Turnbull was prime minister and the moderate faction of the Liberal Party was riding high after passing the historic change.

Indeed, six months before the laws passed to rapturous applause in Parliament House, then-cabinet minister and factional chief Christopher Pyne had boasted at a private dinner that the moderates were in the “winner’s circle”.

Surrounded by his moderate Liberal allies, then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull celebrates parliament passing same-sex marriage laws in 2017.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Turnbull, Pyne and their fellow moderates – who, broadly speaking, favour free market economics and socially progressive causes – didn’t know it at the time, but the passage of same-sex marriage would mark the peak of the faction’s power.

Scott Morrison, a conservative Christian leader, would replace Turnbull as prime minister within nine months of the same-sex marriage vote. The number of moderate MPs has been shrinking since.

After last week, the “winner’s circle” is the smallest it has been in decades.

In 2019, there were about 22 members in the group. After the 2022 election, when teal independents swept six moderate MPs from blue-ribbon Liberal seats, the faction fell to 14.

Leading moderate Marise Payne called time on her 26-year parliamentary career last year and the number of heavy hitters in the faction has kept shrinking.

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham and government services spokesman Paul Fletcher announced their departures in the past three weeks, marking another three decades of political experience leaving the faction.

In Coalition ranks, there is talk that Fletcher pulled the pin on re-contesting his Sydney seat of Bradfield because an internal party poll in the seat suggested he would lose to independent candidate Nicolette Boele, who is running for the second time.

Fletcher did not directly respond to a question about the polling, instead saying he was confident the Liberal Party would choose an excellent candidate to replace him and that the party would hold Bradfield.

“It is clear to me from feedback on the ground that people want to see the back of this Albanese Labor government,” Fletcher said.

Whatever voters’ attitudes in Bradfield, there’s a grim joke doing the rounds in the Liberal Party that aptly sums up the moderates’ shrinking influence: “Did you know Peter Dutton is the leader of the national right [faction]? Yep, and he’s also the leader of the Queensland moderates.”

The quip makes the point about how far parts of the party, such as Queensland, which once counted moderate MP Trevor Evans among its representatives, have shifted to the right.

Dutton and the Liberal Party’s national, or hard right, faction are ascendant. The 2022 election cemented a shift to the right in the party that has been under way for more than a decade.

The numbers confirm the decline, too.

With Morrison in the prime minister’s office in 2019, a generation of seven moderates quit or lost their seats, including Pyne, one-time leadership contender Julie Bishop and former attorney-general George Brandis (now a contributor for this masthead).

The winner’s circle: Liberal moderates were a powerhouse during the Turnbull government. Clockwise from top left: Simon Birmingham, Christopher Pyne, Paul Fletcher, Julie Bishop, George Brandis and Marise Payne. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen, Oscar Colman, Liliana Zahiaria, Getty Images

And while the moderates were instrumental in blocking the former Morrison government’s religious discrimination laws in 2022 and quietly petitioning the former prime minister to sign up to a net zero carbon emissions plan, despite the Nationals’ opposition, it wasn’t enough to save them.

In the 2022 election, a combination of teal, Green and Labor candidates ran a scythe through the moderate faction again. Nine more left the parliament.

The exits of Birmingham, Payne and Fletcher, who had been the three most influential and senior moderates left in the federal Liberal Party, highlight the seismic shift in the factional power and influence of Dutton.

As one ally of Dutton – a conservative MP who asked not to be named to be able to discuss internal party dynamics – puts it, the moderates “all thought that Peter wouldn’t resonate with the Australian people and that they would be there, ready, to offer an alternative [opposition] leader. But he has shown them.”

Dutton campaigned hard against an Indigenous Voice to parliament and has more recently declared he would not deliver press conferences in front of an Aboriginal flag if elected prime minister, embracing culture-war causes that sit uncomfortably with the moderates but reaping major political dividends.

“Peter understands where the middle ground is – he wants to govern from the political centre,” the conservative MP says. “His success has been a hit to the moderates.”

But the moderates have different attitudes to Dutton’s ascendancy.

One moderate MP, who freely admits they had been “dreading Dutton as leader”, praises the opposition leader’s consultative approach and handling of the party room.

In one November example, Dutton read his MPs the riot act on abortion, telling them not to freelance about restricting the procedure before publicly declaring he personally supported a woman’s right to choose. And if Dutton does lead the Liberals to a surging vote share nationwide, moderates stand to benefit in several marginal seats.

But moderates also lauded Morrison’s consultative approach, and his leadership ended with their ranks being devastated. Now some moderate MPs admit the faction is in decline.

“The Liberal Party must convince voters that all interests and values are represented by the party, but at the moment, they are not ... conservative voices cannot be allowed to overpower moderate voices like this,” the MP says.

Some of the moderates believe Birmingham and Fletcher’s departures will help rather than hinder that mission, despite their tenure in parliament. Fresh talent in the faction, one MP said, would help its members challenge conservative forces in the party more than departing members had.

The remaining moderates carrying the free-market and social-progressive torch are a mix of former ministers such as Sussan Ley, Jane Hume, David Coleman and Richard Colbeck (not known for their factional heft) and up-and-comers such as Dave Sharma, Maria Kovacic, Jenny Ware and Keith Wolahan.

Bridget Archer, perhaps the straightest-talking MP in the party, one who frequently crossed Morrison during his prime ministership, remains exiled to Siberia within the Liberals. Julian Leeser, a Sydney moderate who quit his frontbench position on principle to campaign in favour of the Voice, is rarely heard from. Senator Andrew Bragg, one of the party’s most visible moderates and who was unafraid to cross the party’s leadership in the past, is the party’s spokesman for home ownership and has less latitude to make his views known.

Brandis, the former attorney-general and moderate stalwart, argues in a column for this masthead that the departures and quieting of some moderates all point to a decline in the faction’s influence. That bodes ill for the party, he argues.

“[John Howard] understood that political success is about addition, not subtraction; that the Liberal Party is most successful when it builds a broad coalition – enlarging, not narrowing, the constituencies to which it appeals,” Brandis writes.

In his valedictory speech in late November, Birmingham argued that moderate values were still relevant. “Those on the harder edges of the left and the right who seek to divide our country only make us weaker in our division,” he said. “I am confident that Australia is a country whose values sit towards the centre.”

In Peter Dutton, Birmingham concluded, “the Liberal Party has a leader who understands that”.

Voters will be the measure of that claim at an election due by May. If they disagree, those blue ribbon moderate seats lost in 2022 will not come back to the Liberal Party, and the moderates’ decline will look near-terminal.

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