Liberals’ act of self-harm risks party’s extinction
Revival to achieve a competitive position is not impossible but hardly likely. The Liberals are guilty of the deepest self-harm displayed by an election-defeated party over the past half-century. In truth, the party is clueless about how to extricate itself from the identity crisis it has engineered.
That crisis was revealed at the May 2025 election defeat. It is far deeper today, as documented by the polling slide. Its origins lie in the emotional and intellectual agitation of the Australian centre-right in response to the election humiliation and, above all, the conservative breakout to remake Liberal identity.
The triumph of the conservatives has been stunning – they carried the Coalition and the Liberal Party room to declare political war on net zero at 2050; they subverted reducing emissions as a mechanism to combat climate change; their purpose is to limit renewables and promote fossil fuels; they champion a large-scale reduction in immigration; their tactics helped to ferment a divided and disrupted party over the past several months; the upshot was to discredit in the public’s mind the already vulnerable first female leader of the party, Sussan Ley; and with the enthusiastic backing of most of the conservative media Ley has been reduced to an interim status, awaiting her political execution sometime next year at the hands of a conservative successor.
Many conservatives are pleased, believing this is progress. It is trite to state the obvious: none of this needed to happen. What comes next? When Ley narrowly defeated Angus Taylor 29-25 as leader, future rivalry was assured. But instead of offering a nominal veil of unity, the party, assisted by Ley’s own mistakes, chose the option of massive ill-discipline triggering a collapse in Liberal Party standing only to find that neither of the potential challengers, Taylor and Andrew Hastie, actually wanted the political odium of doing the deed at year’s end.
So the Liberals stagger onwards. Much of the party along with the media won’t let the leadership issue die. But this ugly inheritance raises only more ugly issues. The conservatives calculate they need to wait longer until the party’s fortunes are so dire that even the moderates are conscripted to eliminate Ley.
But Ley won’t surrender easily. Her media performances over the past fortnight selling an energy policy she didn’t want have been impressive. Who, pray, would be a better salesperson? The Liberals have no John Howard or Tony Abbott available to take command. Any newly elected conservative leader in 2026, after liquidating Ley, will face a herculean job achieving a united party and persuading the public the Coalition is a viable alternative.
As these events unfolded, the structural woes of the re-elected Albanese government deepened dramatically. Australia is locked on a low-growth path, apparently unable to resurrect productivity, facing meagre gains in living standards, the cycle of interest rate cuts over or nearly over and Labor’s energy transition discredited by rising power prices, uncompetitive industry and unachievable emission reduction targets.
It offers a golden opportunity for a credible opposition. The Liberals need to decide their core purpose. Is it to wage an ideological battle within the centre-right to convert the party into a legion of conservative crusaders or is it to appeal to the Middle Australia voters they have so spectacularly lost?
If the answer is the former then the Liberals are effectively finished over time as a majority governing party. But they will have some compensation: their depiction as heroes by the pro-Trump populist conservative media that believes Australia must find its own way to bottle the spirit of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. It is time to say again: that doesn’t work in Australia’s preferential voting system, something Labor understands perfectly.
This type of conservative cultural mentality has two consequences. First, it makes Pauline Hanson more acceptable to conservative voters as she campaigns against net zero and immigration. How bizarre is it that conservatives rail against the folly of being Labor-lite but seem happy about being Hanson-lite? How does that work for the Liberals? The symbolism of Barnaby Joyce’s expected defection to Hanson will only encourage voter defection from Coalition to One Nation.
Second, the conservative decision that policy action on climate change must be reversed or limited is already unleashing a populist hostility towards much of mainstream Australia’s concern that climate change is real and needs to be met with meaningful action. Just six months after the 2025 election it seems a forlorn prospect that the Liberals will win back any of the currently held teal seats at the next election. How smart is this tactic? It has the fatal consequence of allowing the teals to prevail at a third election with the risk of the permanent loss of these seats. And it invites the teals and their backers such as Simon Holmes a Court to look to fresh acquisitions.
The future of the Liberals was defined recently in speeches by two conservatives, Taylor and James Paterson, both saying the indispensable need for the party was to represent and uphold its two traditions – classical liberalism and conservative faiths. Saying the Liberals must retain both traditions, Taylor told the author: “It’s not the Liberal Party if we don’t.” Precisely.
Their message: there is no alternative. Paterson rejected any UK type Farage-lite populist identity. On economic policy, Paterson said the Liberals must stand by free markets, and on cultural policy they must champion conservative faiths. These are the conservative realists. Taylor and Paterson repudiate wild recent talk about a split in the party.
Obviously, that would consign the country to the Labor Party for the duration. While nothing short of madness, it typifies an aberrant populist view in some quarters that a new zeitgeist beacons and that the Liberals must rededicate themselves and polarise the nation in the noble cause of fighting the tyranny of the left. That misreads Australia and is their path to doom.
Provided the Liberals can get the balance right between strong alternatives to Labor – as distinct from stances that unnerve the voting public – they have a chance to recover. That means a credible energy policy, a reduced but responsible immigration intake, an economic policy based on spending restraint, enhanced productivity and tax relief, and a cultural agenda anchored in patriotism and social cohesion.
While Ley was too passive during the internal energy debate, she has been aggressive in outlining an economic policy agenda, loaded with dangerous ambition. It is extraordinary this has been virtually ignored. In her economic speeches, Ley has pledged a personal income tax cut at the next election, a pledge Abbott avoided when he won in 2013. (Abbott actually increased personal tax in his first budget.)
She put industrial relations back on the agenda, an option Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton all refused to do. And Ley signalled in her commitment to small government and spending restraint she would welcome and defy the inevitable Labor scare campaign triggered by her fiscal responsibility pledge.
These high-risk in-principle economic pledges are far more substantial than the net-zero debate that has gobsmacked the nation for months. What is going on in this crazy country? Our politics seem driven by cults – if the cult is that Ley stands for nothing then the cult must prevail over the reality that contradicts it. Will a new leader stand by Ley’s economic promises or chicken out? Or maybe in the current situation of the Liberals it doesn’t even matter.
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It is all self-inflicted. As the year ends the Coalition sits on 24 per cent of the primary vote – the lowest in Newspoll history – pointing, without recovery, to extinction as a governing party with the senior partner, the Liberal Party, burdened by a leadership crisis, also self-inflicted.