With the coalition – especially major partner the Liberals – sinking to its lowest polling on record, it’s become a very real question of whether the party’s decline is terminal. No political party is forever, after all. The Liberals themselves formed from the ashes of the United Australia Party, which itself formed from a split from Labor in 1931. The UAP in fact held government for most of its existence. Even when it dissolved, it was still polling numbers that even Labor today would envy.
But there seems little sense today that the Liberals will ever recover. At least, not so long as the dead hand of the ‘moderate’ faction continues to stifle it. The ‘moderates’ just can’t seem to grasp that its former blue-ribbon ‘doctor’s wives’ seats in the old money suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne are lost to it for good. Wokeism, the ‘moderates’ guiding compass, is a rich person’s boutique ideology, and there’s none richer or woker than the Teals.
Still, there are some last-gasp hopes for the Liberals. If the party can be dragged, kicking and screaming, back to its centre-right conservative roots, it might have a chance. Andrew Hastie, the young(ish, at 43) conservative from WA is increasingly seen as the Liberals’ last chance.
Andrew Hastie’s bid for the leadership isn’t just another chapter in the party’s factional saga. It is the Liberals’ Last Lifeline, the last chance to adapt to a changing political landscape before, overwhelmed with despair, conservatives break away and build something new.
Which is exactly what they’re doing, everywhere else. Even the MAGA movement is an upstart uprising inside the 170-year-old Republican party. In the UK, the process is going even further: Reform is a complete break with the old-school Conservative party. Why is this happening?
Liberalism, as an organising political philosophy, is reaching its end. Across the Western world, from Britain to Germany, the United States to France, parties clinging to a merely conservative form of liberalism are sliding toward electoral oblivion. Meanwhile, those willing to embrace the principles of National Conservatism, principles of cultural cohesion, strategic migration, industrial revival, and a renewed emphasis on national sovereignty, are emerging as the natural heirs to the political right in their respective nations.
Like most global trends, this shift is reaching Australia more slowly, but it is coming. Institutional decay, a fraying social contract and collapsing trust in legacy parties will inevitably lead to populist insurgency here as well. The real question is whether we will mirror the United States, where the establishment adapted to the populist revolt, or Britain, where a new party had to emerge to replace the old.
This is where the ‘moderate’ death-grip on the Liberal party is so inexplicable. It should be obvious by now that their foot-in-each-paddock philosophy of progressivism in stuffy suits is a loser’s game. If they haven’t conviction and honesty enough to just split and join the Teals, they should at least have the nous to let the conservatives steer the party back to electability. Otherwise the sudden surge to One Nation looks less like a brief political fad and more like an existential challenge for leadership of the centre-right. All that’s stopped the complete collapse of the Liberals to date is the lack of a credible alternative: One Nation are looking more a credible alternative by the day.
An ominous sign for the Liberals will be if Barnaby Joyce, who recently quit coalition junior partner the Nationals, jumps waka to One Nation. Joyce’s defection may well be the tipping-point that sparks a mass exodus of conservatives.
But the true yardstick the firing gun that would finally send conservatives sprinting from the party would be the loss of Hastie himself. If he is incapacitated, if it becomes clear he will never have the numbers to win the leadership, or if he were to leave the party altogether, that would mark the decisive moment. Without Hastie, the Liberals would lose the one resource capable of driving a populist pivot and heading off the momentum of any emerging alternative on the right […]
One Nation’s reform of its branch structure and deeper establishment in conservative regions – New England among them – is only the most visible example of an increasingly coordinated effort to exploit the Liberals’ drift.
If the party goes to the 2028 election with a warmed-over liberal moderatism that ‘reflects and respects modern Australia’, or with a stale, pre-2010 version of conservatism that ignores shifting public sentiment on migration, domestic industry, and free trade, it will face stagnation at best and oblivion at worst. And an unsuccessful campaign at what is almost certain to be a ‘migration election’ would likely be the final rupture, the moment when thousands of conservative Liberal activists and organisers conclude the party cannot be saved.
Even the supposed ‘yoof’ factor is not the death-knell for conservatism too many excitable legacy media journalists are eager to assure themselves it is. The most recent voting generation are the first in modern history to be more conservative than their parents. They also have the most to lose from the status quo of immigration, housing and climate policy.
