Malcolm Turnbull urges Liberals to find room for liberals or risk losing more seats

The former PM says if the Liberal Party adopts a right-wing populist agenda and squeezes out moderates it will doom the party to irrelevancy

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. Picture: AAP

Malcolm Turnbull says the Liberal Party must resist adopting a right-wing populist agenda and find more room for genuine liberals in party ranks or risk losing more seats to Labor, Greens and teal independents.

“In terms of who (the party) currently represents, or is seen to represent, that is increasingly defined by those who adhere to the right-wing populist agenda,” the former prime minister said in an interview for a new edition of a ­biography of Robert Menzies.

“Many people in the Liberal Party regard that constituency as being the party’s ‘base’ – it is not. The base of a political party is best regarded as those who habitually vote for it, and that base is being rapidly diminished.”

Mr Turnbull said the party membership was now “overwhelmingly older, more male than female and much less diverse” than the broader electorate and there was a pressing need to re-anchor itself, as Robert Menzies envisioned, as a home for both liberals and conservatives.

“There is today very little room for liberals, and that is showing up in the electoral results,” he said. “My primary vote in Wentworth in 2016 was 62 per cent; in 2022, Dave Sharma’s was 40 per cent.”

He emphasised that Menzies “went to pains” not to describe the Liberal Party as “a conservative party” and positioned its philosophy and purpose between big-business establishment politics on the Right and the democratic-socialist tradition in Labor and the union movement on the Left.

“The Liberal Party itself was a patchwork of many organisations,” Mr Turnbull said.

“(Menzies) was the architect of an avowedly broad church, but it is important to remember that in his day there was the galvanising threat of international communism, triumphant in the Soviet Union, which bestrode half of ­Europe. China was about to fall under communist control.”

“There was a chilling inexorability about the advance of communism which was increasingly influential in the union movement and hence the Labor Party. These were very different times. Menzies’ Liberal Party was more united around what it was against – communism and socialism – than what it was for.”

Mr Turnbull said it was imperative the Liberal Party recruited parliamentary candidates from a greater diversity of backgrounds and life experiences, with varied occupations. “When I joined … in Wentworth in 1973, it was very much a cross-section of the middle and professional class.

“There were QCs and local solicitors, Macquarie Street surgeons and local GPs, captains of industry and local shopkeepers, and so on. It felt broad-based.”

Mr Turnbull’s interview is one of a series with every living former Liberal prime minister included in a new preface to the second edition of the Menzies biography.

Troy Bramston’s Robert Menzies: The Art of Politics is republished by Scribe on August 15