The Liberals are having an existential crisis

At a fork in the road: do they go left or right?

At a fork in the road: do they go left or right?

Picking up the pieces after an election defeat, the remaining members of the Liberal Party are at odds about whether the party should become more conservative, or move closer to the centre of the political spectrum.

The Liberal party now have just 56 seats in the House of Representatives, no leader and there are more men called Andrew in parliament than there are female Liberal MPs in the lower house.

The former finance minister Simon Birmingham said the next-generation of the party will need to embrace a more ambitious climate target and preselect more women in its efforts to rebuild.

The NSW Treasurer Matt Kean, said the party should pivot left to try and win back the voters who abandoned them and attempt to woo candidates, like those women who ran as independents, to the party.

"It's an unmitigated disaster. What we saw is our traditional Liberal Party voters abandoning the Liberal Party for the people that want to take stronger action on climate change," Kean said.

On the other side, some say they need to go harder to the right to capture their disaffected base in the outer suburbs and regional Australia.

The new Liberal senator for South Australia Alex Antic said "we are not the party of capitulation to net zero...The time is now to understand that, the Liberal Party’s experiment with the poison of leftism and progressivism must be over."

Quite the fork in the road.

Then you add in the National Party, who the Liberals have been in the Coalition with. 

The Nationals didn't lose any seats after campaigning on a consistent message that they were not impressed with the Libs' climate targets that could have consequences for regional Australia.

"We adopted a Liberal moderate platform on energy, on climate, on the culture issues, and that platform has failed,” Nats senator Matt Canavan said.

Senator Matt Canavan

The post-mortem

This election was bad for Australia's major political parties, with both Labor and the Liberals losing overall support. But it was an absolute nightmare for the Libs.

"So many strong women have come through and rattled us," a teary Liberal supporter said in the wake of the conservative party's disastrous result at the federal election, losing six seats to the wealthy, educated white female independents.

"These are uncertain days for the Coalition and the Liberal party. There will always be a need for a centre-right party in Australia. But the loss of so many from the moderate wing will, if not amended in coming elections, radically shift the balance of power internally within the party and its position within the Australian party system," ANU political science lecturer Marija Taflaga said.

"Perhaps a party with 50% women might have shifted the Coalitions’ internal culture and made it able to hear a major shift going on within the electorate," Taflaga added.

On the result former Labor Senator John Black said: "The Liberals regarded the women in wealthy seats as doctor's wives, when in fact they were the doctors." 

The post mortem of the result will be expanded to a wider Liberal party review.

A plethora of "blue ribbon" seats were snatched by independents and the ALP around the country.

But it wasn't a pendulum swing away from the Libs. Or an enormous push toward the ALP (it lost the "safe" seat of Fowler). But the "teal" impact was like a bath bomb which saw votes and preference votes exploding all over our Westminster system.

The election was a watershed moment for Australian politics and no one knows that more than the losing blue team right now.

"We now need to be bold, be brave and stand up for what we believe it," Liberal Party national vice-president Teena McQueen said.

What even is the "Liberal Party"?

The Liberal Party of Australia was founded by Sir Robert Menzies. With founding principles focusing small government, big business, live and let live. Its creed is: "Individual freedom and free enterprise". 

British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill meets Australian PM Sir Robert Menzies outside the Savoy Hotel in London. Churchill won WW2 for Great Britain and then lost government soon after.

Menzies, in his famous 'Forgotten People' speech of 1942, spoke of 'the forgotten class' of voters who were in the middle ground but "politically homeless", Troy Bramston, Menzies' biographer in his latest book about the Libs grandaddy, said.

"This became the creed of the Liberal Party when it was formed in 1944. Menzies made a direct appeal to 'professional men and women'. He spoke of the need for his party to represent the educated, community-minded, progressive, middle class. They had moral values. They have now left the party and found a home with the teal independents," Bramston said. 

It's a theme that dominated the tenure of former Liberal PM John Howard. Who swept to power in 1996 by going after traditional Labor-held seats in Western Sydney suburbs populated by families with mortgages and blue collar jobs who held socially conservative views. "Howard's battlers" endured until Howard was voted out in 2007. Tony Abbott revitalised it with his "Tony's tradies" pitch to the next generation in the 2010s when he romped home in the 2013 election with a 90-seat haul. 

The exit polls from the 2022 campaign showed that some areas experiencing mortgage stress (or slight anxiety) voted for the coalition.

Social conservatism may not be cool, but economically it has proven to work, albeit in the past.  

What happens next for the Libs?

Firstly, they need a federal leader.

There are reports former Defence Minister Peter Dutton will win a party room vote and become the next Opposition Leader. 

Dutton was described on Monday by WA Labor premier Mark McGowan as a "extremist".

"I don’t think he represents modern Australia at all, he doesn’t seem to listen, he’s extremely conservative, and I actually don’t think he’s that smart," McGowan said. "I've seen him present on things, I don’t really pick up there’s much there."