The Liberals are not just going through a phase – this is a full-blown identity crisis

How do you solve a problem like the Liberals? A good start would be to get the party at every level – parliamentary, organisational and, most difficult of all, the rank-and-file – to understand how much trouble it’s in. Not “Oh well, we’ve lost two in a row, Peter Dutton turned out to be an unusual unit and campaign HQ let us down. But Anthony Albanese is no good, voters will work that out, we’ll go out and listen to the community, the electoral wheel will turn, and if we hang on and hang together, things will swing our way.”

That appears to be the general response so far and it won’t cut it. The party is not just going through a phase like a surly teenager. Its predicament is dire and its future is clouded.

Credit: Illustration: Dionne Gain

When the Coalition won the 2019 election, it secured 77 seats. When it lost in 2022, it dropped to 58 seats. At this election, it’s fallen to 43. That’s a total loss of 34 seats over just two elections.

There have been other sustained electoral wipe-outs over the years, most of them suffered by the Labor Party. Under Gough Whitlam in 1975 and 1977, Labor was hit by two landslide losses. Liberals of an optimistic bent point out that Labor recovered relatively quickly after 1977, winning office just two elections later in 1983. But the ALP had Bob Hawke and Paul Keating waiting in the wings as well as a highly talented front bench willing to absorb tough lessons from the Whitlam years.

If the Coalition has a budding Hawke or Keating type among its diminished ranks, now would be the time for them to assert themselves. One of the worst consequences of a powerful electoral drubbing is that with the numbers reduced, there’s a lack of leadership and front bench options. That can lead to some awkward outcomes. In a rational environment, a leadership contest between Sussan Ley, Dutton’s faithful deputy, willing to go along with and defend all of his brain snaps and policy indolence, and Angus Taylor, who in three years as the opposition’s ineffectual chief economic spokesman never had a good day, would not have been optimal.

But politics doesn’t work like that. Ley prevailed against Taylor and much has been made of her subsequent banishment of Jane Hume to the back bench. Hume did not have a good election campaign. But based on performance, shouldn’t Ley and Taylor, who is now defence spokesman, warrant some time in the sin bin too?

Succeeding Ley as Liberal deputy leader is Ted O’Brien, the hot gospeller for the supposed category killer nuclear energy policy, whose message got colder the closer he got to the election. O’Brien’s solution to achieving net zero by 2050, cooked up with Dutton, gradually became the policy that dared not speak its name during the campaign, such was its unpopularity. His “punishment” for what was a policy fiasco, with its missed deadlines and unpersuasive modelling and costings, is to be elevated to the opposition’s second-most important portfolio as shadow treasurer.

Because the business of politics never ceases, there’s a natural sense of obligation to keep the show up and running. This was why the Liberals and Nationals were motivated to paper over the cracks within the Coalition after their brief post-election spat. However, the fractures remain and the most prominent of them relates to climate change and the pursuit of net zero by 2050. There will be blow-ups over climate change down the track, for sure.

No previous Liberal leader has had to do what Ley will have to do if she does her job properly. Fulfilling the traditional opposition leader’s role should be a minor part of her duties. Most of her energies should go to overseeing a root-and-branch reappraisal of her party’s purpose in a society that is very different to the one she and her colleagues believed they were serving before the election.

The Liberals have lost entire constituencies. A look at the newly created electoral map shows that in this highly urbanised country, most metropolitan Australians do not feel a connection with the party. The community independent movement, known generically as the teals, is an outgrowth of the battles between the party’s moderates and conservatives that began in the 1980s. For the most part, the conservatives won and the moderates lost. The movement has taken hold in many of the most affluent parts of the nation’s two biggest cities. The well-off, who can afford to have more moderate views, have given up on the Liberals and formed their own loose version of a political party. Even allowing for Tim Wilson’s win in Goldstein, this is a catastrophe for a party that by definition exists to represent the interests of capital against the party of labour.

It resembles what happened to the ALP in 1955 when many Catholics split off from Labor over the role of communists and communist sympathisers within the labour movement to form the Democratic Labor Party. An entire constituency was lost, ensuring Labor would remain in opposition federally for 17 years. In Victoria and Queensland, where the split ran deep, Labor had to wait until the 1980s before returning to office at the state level.

The Liberal Party is not in good health. In its merged form with the Nationals, it holds office in Queensland and the Northern Territory. In Tasmania, where a 9 per cent swing to the ALP at the federal election wiped out the party’s MPs, the state Liberal government is fighting for its life. In Western Australia, the Liberals are essentially a rump. As they are in South Australia, where the party last weekend formally rejected a net zero target. In NSW, the deeply factionalised state division is in disarray. In Victoria, the state opposition is, with some determination, testing out novel ways to help a clapped-out Labor government secure yet another election win. The party that disdains identity politics is going through one massive identity crisis.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.

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