Talking to Sky News’ Rita Panahi recently, Douglas Murray commented on the current dire state of the Liberal Party. “Just just like other centre-right parties around the world, they’ll always get bad advice from people who wish them ill – and they’ll take it.”
Case in point: the legacy media. When Malcolm Turnbull knifed Tony Abbott, the legacy media were beside themselves with joy. Witless lefty witterer Elizabeth Farrelly blithered that Turnbull “will be the longest-serving prime minister since Menzies. Possibly ever.” Leaving aside that Turnbull barely lasted three years, does anyone on God’s good Earth really think that Farrelly would ever vote Liberal?
“I’m afraid that’s a routine with centre parties,” says Murray. “Every time there’ll be people who would never vote for the Liberals who will say ‘I think what you need to do is come further to the left and nearer to me,’ and so on.”
Case in point:
This is an intellectual, cultural and political crisis of the centre-right in Australia, 20 years in the making, with the nation since 2020 moving decisively to the left; witness Labor’s wins at the 2022 and 2025 elections and, more important, the collapse of a consistent, conviction coalition policy stance.
The Liberals are increasingly divorced from the centres of cultural and opinion-forming power in Australia – the education and university sectors, the professional classes, much of the corporate sector, the climate change lobby and the renewable energy industries, the not-for-profit community organisations, the arts community, the public broadcasters, public sector employees, the trade unions and constituencies vital in shaping opinion – professional women and ethnic communities.
There’s just so much to mock in this Gish gallop of fatuous nonsense that it’s hard to know which balloon of idiocy to prick first.
“The centres of cultural and opinion-forming power in Australia”? Maybe in the elite circles where legacy media journalists attend the ‘best’ dinner parties, but in the real world where ordinary Australians live, work and socialise? Give me a break.
To take just one example, trade unions: less than one in five Australian workers is a union member and most of those are concentrated in the public sector. Many union members I know are only members because they work in closed shops, and for the benefits like free legal advice: they grumble that they wish the union would stop bombarding them with political bullshit they don’t agree with.
As for the nation ‘moving decisively to the left’: maybe from the ivory tower view of the left-elite, but the numbers tell a very different story. Labor recorded three of its five lowest votes in its history in just the last two elections. Its 2025 ‘sweeping victory’ was on the back of a vote just eight per cent above the lowest in its history and more than 16 per cent below its highest-ever vote.
By contrast, while the Liberals certainly recorded their worst-ever result in 2025, their worst-ever was less than three per cent lower than Labor’s ‘sweeping victory’.
What’s happened, then, is not that the nation has ‘swung decisively to the left’. What has really happened is that the major supposed ‘conservative’ party has swung decisively to the left, and their voter base has swung decisively away from them. The only problem is that, unlike the UK which has Reform, there is no credible centre-right alternative as yet.
Yet, the legacy media has the gall to revert to what they always do: screech at the centre-right party that, “what you need to do is come further to the left and nearer to me”.
Even more gobsmacking, this is the legacy media who have the gall to tell the ‘populist’ (as if that’s a slur) centre-right:
This group loses virtually every battle of ideas it fights, border protection and the voice excluded.
So, two of the biggest policy issues that the Liberals have actually chosen to fight on, they’ve won decisively.
Imagine if they – or at least the wet, weak, woke, ‘moderates’ running the party into the ground – had the balls to actually fight the left on garbage like ‘net zero’ and mass immigration. They’d romp home.
But the ‘moderates’ are too firmly ensconced in their inner-city lefty echo chambers to listen to what the Australian voters are begging for: an actual alternative to the left-elite.
The story of the Liberals in the five months since the election has been the elevation of a woman and moderate, Sussan Ley, to leadership.
And how’s that worked out for them? Isn’t their lowest-ever poll numbers a teensy, tiny hint that maybe the ‘moderate’ strategy, and fretting over quotas for women, just isn’t working out for them?
Robert Menzies and John Howard didn’t win record-long terms as prime minister by chasing after every policy brain-fart of the left, or by listening to the left-elite class. Indeed, Menzies explicitly addressed what he called the ‘forgotten people’ of Australia: “the salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on. These are, in the political and economic sense, the middle class […] envied by those whose benefits are largely obtained by taxing them.”
As Douglas Murray says, “Centre-right parties have a very, very, useful thing which they should be able to play back at it, which is aspiration. That is to show a means by which people who work hard in Australia – follow the rules – will actually be rewarded for it.”
If only the ‘moderates’ destroying the party of Menzies could be slapped into understanding this basic rule.
