Left’s luvvies wise to stop dancing on Liberal Party grave
Without question, the Liberal Party ran a dreadful campaign in the lead-up to the 2025 election. Dutton has accepted responsibility for the Coalition’s failure. But fault should be shared around.
Listening to the ABC’s Radio National Late Night Live on Monday was very much a deja vu experience in which everyone essentially agreed with everyone else in a left-of-centre way. But, also, it was an occasion in which the death of the Liberal Party of Australia was again predicted.
David Marr was the presenter and his guests were Laura Tingle (ABC TV 7.30 political editor) and Niki Savva (Nine Newspapers columnist and ABC TV Insiders panellist). All three were antagonists of the contemporary Liberal Party and former leader Peter Dutton. This was yet another example of the lack of viewpoint diversity at the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster.
Marr asked Savva whether the Liberal Party “is fit for purpose in today’s Australia”. He suggested “the party’s view of Australia and Australia’s view of Australia … don’t seem to mesh”. To which Savva responded: “Well, they don’t at all and the voters tried to tell the Liberal Party (this) in 2022, which was their previous worst performance, that it needed to change.”
Savva repeated that the Liberal Party either needed to change or it would die – “and the Liberal Party is now dying”. My mind flashed back to July 17, 1983 when political historian Judith Brett wrote in The Age that “the Liberal Party in the 1990s seems doomed”. This followed the defeat of the Liberals, under Malcolm Fraser’s leadership, in March 1983.
At the time, Brett was a coeditor of left-wing magazine Arena. Writing in the left-wing Guardian on May 5, in the wake of the 2025 election, Brett declared that the Liberal Party “is in dire straits”. That’s four decades after she predicted its imminent demise.
Sure, the Coalition lost the 1983, 1984, 1987, 1990 and 1993 elections but returned to office in March 1996 under John Howard’s leadership as a four-term government.
Writing in these pages on May 7, New Zealand commentator Oliver Hartwich said the New Zealand Labour Party had won government in 2017 and swept back to office “in 2020 with the first single-party majority under our proportional representation system”.
In 2020, the Nationals, in opposition, received their worst result in decades. However, as Hartwich commented, “three years later, Labour was unceremoniously ejected”. Jacinda Ardern, the one-time radical, had stepped down as prime minister in January 2023.
Without question, the Liberal Party ran a dreadful campaign in the lead-up to the 2025 election. Dutton has accepted responsibility for the Coalition’s failure. But fault should be shared around. Moreover, it should be accepted that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese campaigned much better this year than he did as opposition leader three years earlier.
The Coalition had a poor attacking and defensive plan. Even so, it received around 32.3 per cent of the primary vote compared to the Labor Party’s 34.7 per cent. And just over 45 per cent of voters preferred a Coalition government to just under 55 per cent who preferred Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to continue in office.
On the figures, it is unlikely that the Coalition will win an election in the short term. But who knows – since only a fool would predict the economic future, especially with respect to the cost of living and reliability of energy.
Those who believed the Liberal Party could not win back seats that were lost to Climate 200 teal independents have been proven wrong.
Zoe Daniel in the Melbourne seat of Goldstein lost to Liberal Tim Wilson, who performed extremely well. And this was achieved under the leadership of the unpopular Dutton. At the time of writing, Monique Ryan, the sitting teal MP in the Melbourne seat of Kooyong, was in trouble, as was teal candidate Nicolette Boele in the Sydney seat of Bradfield. Daniel, Ryan and Boele all received a soft run on the ABC and in Nine Newspapers.
Labor has reason to thank Dutton since he gave a firm direction to his officials that the Liberal Party was to direct its preferences to Labor ahead of the Greens. In 2010 Adam Bandt won the seat of Melbourne for the Greens on Liberal Party preferences – having received a primary vote of 36.2 per cent. In 2025, Bandt won 40.1 per cent of the primary vote but lost to Labor’s Sarah Witty. In 2010, Bandt’s two-party-preferred vote was 56 per cent. In 2025 it was 46.7 per cent. The Liberal Party’s primary vote in 2025 was 19.3 per cent – its preferences elected Witty.
It was different in the Brisbane seat of Ryan. The Greens’ Elizabeth Watson-Brown defeated Liberal candidate Maggie Forrest – on the preferences of Labor’s Rebecca Hack. Forrest attained a primary vote of 35.2 per cent as against Watson-Brown’s 28.8 per cent but got over the line with substantial help from Labor.
To some, it does not make sense for the Liberal Party to preference Labor over the Greens. For my part, I have consistently argued that it is in the Liberal Party’s long-term interest to do so. Dutton had a dreadful election campaign. But at least he can claim some credit for the defeat of Bandt, a left-wing extremist who exhibited a hostility to Israel but said little about Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack of October 7, 2023.
Interviewed on ABC RN Breakfast on May 8, the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young told Sally Sara her party’s defeat by Labor in the seats of Brisbane and Griffith in Queensland “actually came down to the fact that the Liberal vote crashed and the Liberals had preferenced Labor”. Not so with respect to Brisbane, where the Greens finished in third place. Sara did not challenge Hanson-Young’s claim.
The Coalition, Greens, Climate 200 teals and other independents went backwards on May 3. But expect all to be around at the next election scheduled for about May 2028. Including the Liberal Party – which was said to be on its way out after Labor, under Ben Chifley, won the 1946 election. But Robert Menzies prevailed in 1949 – in spite of the saying, “You can’t win with Menzies”. Politics and predictions do not go well together.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of the Sydney Institute.
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