Is This the End of the ‘Moderates’? [Updated]

As Hemingway wrote, one goes bankrupt two ways, gradually and then suddenly. Elections in Australia are won on two factors: external and internal.

In practice, almost always internally, but external factors occasionally play a dramatic role. In the run up to the 2001 election, John Howard surely couldn’t have believed his luck: first, the MV Tampa standoff, then 9/11 and the Great War on Terror. Similarly, Anthony Albanese surely couldn’t have believed his luck when Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Australian imports.

The second Trump presidency may be a godsend for the American centre-right, but it’s proven a nightmare for at least two Western centre-right oppositions. Just a week before the Australian election, the Canadian elections saw the once-favourite Pierre Poilievre-led conservative opposition suffer a shock defeat. The party leader even lost his own seat, as Australian opposition leader Peter Dutton has.

Just as the Canadian Liberal government had milked tariffs and Trump Derangement Syndrome for all it was worth, so did the Albanese Government. The mainstream media were only too happy to join in. ‘Trumpian’ became their favourite slur against Peter Dutton. When Jacinta Nampijinpa Price vowed to “Make Australia great again”, the media and Labor nearly creamed themselves.

Another external factor was the Chinese Communist Party. Not only have the CCP’s mouthpieces been openly cheer-leading for Labor at the last two elections, China has been bankrolling Labor and its candidates for years. CCP-linked figures have been a constant on the shadowy fringes of Labor politics. In the last days of the 2025 campaign it emerged that a CCP-linked Chinese community group was recruiting ‘volunteers’ to campaign for Labor and Teal candidates. At least one Labor MP is under investigation by the Australian Electoral Commission.

But external factors only go part of the way to explaining the coalition’s thumping defeat on the weekend. Indeed, the fact that the Conservatives in Britain suffered a similar drubbing six months before Trump’s election victory, suggests a far deeper malaise affecting Western conservative parties. ‘It’s all Trump’s fault’ is too convenient an excuse.

It must be noted that, in the UK election, people didn’t vote for Labour in droves, they deserted the Conservatives in droves. Reform accounted for nearly all of the votes the Conservatives lost between 2019 and 2024. (Yet, thanks to Britain’s outdated first-past-the-post system, Reform only got five MPs, while the lower-polling Liberal Democrats scored a whopping 72.)

This is what happened in Australia in 2025. Not a huge swing to Labor, but a huge swing from the coalition.

The vast majority of Australians didn’t vote for Labor: they just didn’t vote for the Coalition, either.

In all the media hoopla about Albanese’s “victory for the ages”, a simple fact is conveniently glossed over: Labor’s primary vote is dire. Albanese’s Labor won a landslide victory with just over 34 per cent of the primary vote. Yet, Labor were trounced in 1996 with a primary vote of nearly 39 per cent. Labor’s vote last week was just a couple of per cent above its century-long low in 2022.

So how on Earth did that become a landslide victory? Simple: the coalition’s base are walking away in disgust. Repeating the process that has buried coalition parties in Victoria and West Australia for years, the party has been white-anted by the so-called ‘moderates’ – who are really just Greens in more expensive suits. Good Oil readers will be only too familiar with the phenomenon in the form of Christopher Luxon’s National Party.

The most frustrating part of it all is that, for nearly 18 months leading up to the election, the coalition and leader Peter Dutton had been doing such a powerful job. From the moment the coalition took the principled decision to oppose the Voice referendum, Dutton repeatedly made the political running. On everything from cost-of-living to energy policy (although Labor ran a shamefully deceitful anti-nuclear campaign so full of lies that even ABC debate moderators called it out), Dutton was directing the national conversation and it paid off in the polls. The coalition’s stocks continually rose.

And then the election was called – and all that vanished in a puff of hubris and just plain stupidity. I’m not the only observer to comment repeatedly that this was the worst campaign we’d ever seen. There was no great contest of ideas, only a grubby race to see who could hand out the most taxpayer-funded ‘free stuff’ – and, on Labor’s side, just how outrageous the lies the media would let them get away with. Apart from the ABC debate moderator’s rebuke on Albanese’s grotesque lie on the cost of nuclear, it seems the media will let Labor skate on pretty much anything.

But the campaign wasn’t won by Labor, it was lost by the coalition. Buoyed up by the steady rise in the polls over the previous 18 months, the thinking, or what passed for such, of coalition strategists seemed to be that they didn’t have to do anything. Just sit back and coast into office. Which is exactly the fatal hubris that, on the left, killed the election bids of Bill Shorten in 2019 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

‘Small target’ is a bad enough strategy: sleepwalking is even worse. Most coalition MPs were missing in action throughout the campaign, including too many frontbenchers. As one senior frontbencher has said, in the aftermath, the Dutton campaign group “was the most dysfunctional organisation I have ever worked for”.

With no real team behind him apart from Treasury spokesman Angus Taylor, Dutton was offering nothing of substance. The only real policy they seemed to have was cutting fuel excise. But visiting a slew of petrol stations is no substitute for a well-disciplined campaign. Nor is falling over themselves to match or better the government’s handouts a substitute for a genuine contest of ideas.

Voters judged them accordingly. The coalition’s traditional centre-right base deserted them in droves. Notably, celebrated ‘moderates’ like the execrable Bridget Archer, who repeatedly crossed the floor to vote with Labor and the Greens, lost her formerly safe coalition seat in a landslide.

Get the message: coalition voters don’t want ‘moderates’ who are just Greens in more expensive suits. This is the same mistake the coalition have been making for nearly a decade. And they still haven’t learned.

The last coalition leader to lead the party to a smashing victory was Tony Abbott. Abbott came within a whisker of making Labor the first one-term government in Australia since the Great Depression and smashed them in a landslide at the next election. He did so, not by playing the wishy-washy ‘moderate’, but by offering a clear and unapologetic alternative to the woke left.

Then he was knifed by ‘moderate’ Malcolm Turnbull. The rest is a sorry history of coalition voters walking away from a party that just will not listen to them.

The big line from the mainstream media is that Albanese’s win is ‘historic’. This is simply untrue: in fact, the reverse would have been truly historic. Just the second one-term government in a century would have been big news. And the last one lost in the face of an historic crisis, the Great Depression. Australians almost never throw out governments after one term. So Albanese’s second term is not at all ‘historic’: even the swing to Labor was modest in the extreme: just two per cent. Labor’s primary vote remains dire.

The only reason the change in seats was so crushing was due to the scale of the coalition’s loss, rather than the marginal gain by Albanese.

What we are seeing is the beginning of the collapse of the two-party system. At present, though, there’s no credible third party on the centre-right, apart from One Nation. But One Nation, despite their growth into a mature, centre-right party, are still indelibly weighed down by leader Pauline Hanson’s early career.

So, the centre-right vote is fractured and leaderless. A serious, new, centre-right party is one solution, but that’s going to take multiple elections to happen. The Liberals, after all, rose from the ashes of the United Australia Party in the early ’40s. But that was a six-year project, with a former UAP Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, helming the new party.

The best option right now is for the Liberal-National coalition to get the message, once and for all: centre-right voters want an unapologetically centre-right conservative party. Not a party of wishy-washy, ‘moderate’ green-left wannabes. If they wanted that, they’d vote for the real thing (as the Teals have learned, to their benefit).

Let the absurd, virtue-signalling ‘doctor’s wives’ of the Sydney Harbourside Mansion set keep voting Teal. The future for the coalition is the Mortgage Belt. Menzies’ “forgotten people”. As Labor’s ineptitude inevitably drives the cost of living even further through the roof, these are the people who’ll be a centre-right party’s to win. These are the people who just want to see their mortgage repayments and their grocery and electricity bills return to sanity. Who are fed up with turbocharged mass migration. Who want their kids to go to school and learn, and not be indoctrinated with gender theory. Who think that Gaza is none of our business, but are shocked at the attacks on Jewish Australians.

There’re two silver linings in this election of dark clouds, though.

First, remember that Jacinda Ardern won re-election to a second term in a landslide. Before that term was out, though, she was gone as leader then her party lost. If the coalition needed another lesson in the pitfalls of ‘moderation’, ‘moderate’ National are sliding in the polls. Genuinely right NZ First are rising.

The other silver lining is the decimation of the Greens. As the count stands, the Greens are set to lose all four of their lower house seats. Party leader Adam Bandt is in a death struggle to hold onto his own seat.

So, there’s that, at least.

The first telling outcome will be the leadership contest to fill Dutton’s vacuum. Many coalition voters would be rapt to see Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as leader, but as a senator she’d have to wait for a lower-house seat to become vacant. An excellent choice would be former SAS officer Andrew Hastie. Most likely, though, is either Acting Leader Sussan Ley, or Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor.

Update:

The silver lining got just a little bit brighter overnight. As vote counting continued, dramatic swings in two of the Teal seats suddenly emerged. In Kooyong, Monique Ryan’s Saturday night victory declaration suddenly looks embarrassingly premature. Fellow Teal Zoe Daniel is down to the wire, with a lead of less than 100 votes.