It's unbelievable that some claim the Liberals must go even further to the right, when it was going to the right which caused the party to become largely irrelevant. Do they want to join One Nation, muttering incoherently in the nutty corner?
The Independents who have seized former Liberal seats would once have been Liberals, but were driven out when the Liberals stopped being liberals and became Conservatives.
I was visiting Mackellar during the elections, where Dr Sophie Scamps cruised back into office. Dutton was regarded as being like some weird stranger here, not saying anything which appealed to an electorate of educated, progressive young families and retires. His claim that 'The Liberals would always be better economic managers' was laughed at by people who remembered Morison's repeated deficits and mindless stunts and Tony Abbott, who comes from the Northern Beaches, being such a failure as PM.
As things stand, the Liberals are irrelevant here now, and in most of NSW.
As for successors, Susan Ley comes across as shrill and nasty, while Angus Taylor failed to produce a single credible economic plan. As one unhappy Liberal polling said, the Liberals had nothing to campaign with, no message to sell.
I think it’s instructive that the British conservative and union party (the ones who destroyed nearly all the great British institutions and were very nearly responsible for the dissolution of the United Kingdom as a political entity) look like it’s going to merge with reform, who are one nation with slightly more sophisticated spokespeople. Neo liberalism is dead and these results and the omnishambles which is the Liberal Party of Australia proves it. And yes, they keep going right.
The earth has developed a slight irregularity in its orbit as the corpses of Deakin, Reid, Menzies and Fraser spin uncontrollably in despair at what has happened.
Conservatives are supposed to conserve, it's what 'conserve' actually means, to protect important things.
So, for example, Conservatives should be ardent conservationists, keen to conserve the essential things, like our only planet.
Instead, our so-called Liberals, who aren't liberal at all, are determined to tear down the best things, like our environment and civil society, and replace them with rampant selfishness and profit before people.
However, the majority of our population values our environment and civil society, generosity, Medicare, opportunity for all, public education, fair pay for fair work etc.
It's what makes Australia special.
We fought for over two centuries to turn a nasty penal colony into a 'fair go for all' society in which no-one gets left behind.
It's the opposite of Gina's Reinhart's attempts to cut wages and trick taxpayers into subsidising nuclear power to enrich uranium miners.
Do the Liberals and Nationals still not understand that Albanese Labor's huge win and the banishment of the Liberals to the urban margins and the Nationals to the bush signals the middle class is rejecting selfishness and embracing community spirit?
If they don't, then it is unlikely the LNP will win back government any time soon.
Albanese could be PM for at least another term, and be succeeded by Chalmers.
Murdoch media talking heads, and miner Gina Reinhart, say the Liberals should go even further right, which would take them out near the racist One Nation, and guarantee they would be unelectable. Crazy stuff.
There aren’t enough votes on the far right to win government. Either the Liberals head to the centre, or they become more irrelevant to most Aussies.
Judging from the results of the Liberal leadership ballot the federal Liberals seem to be about equally divided between the moderates who made Susan Ley leader and the conservatives who voted for Angus Taylor. So we can expect continued in-fighting and indecision.
You can’t completely write off a political party but the current liberals are as close to being written off as any of their predecessors. If 2022 made their chances in government in 2025 impossible, 2028 is not even a pipe dream. As I think we’ve mentioned, the liberal party’s natural constituency was the aspirational middle class - the very people Howard kicked into all the while telling them he was one of them. Those who had made their way in found themselves excluded. And the urban and suburban middle class shrank. And hence so did the support for the liberal party. Howard was essentially a long painful and botched suicide for the party.
Even if the Liberals were to do the work and do community outreach and develop fit for purpose policies, the scale of this defeat, exacerbated by the single member constituency electoral system, may leave the party in a diminished state. Does anyone in the party room want to wait 8-9 years for a realistic shot at government? Like the WA Liberals, even an 18% swing against the state ALP primary vote hardly moved the dial. They risk becoming the permanent opposition like the ALP from 1949 through the 60s.
In dire straits such as these, unconventional thinking may be the only way out. Both the Greens and LNP face tremendous challenges with the resources of state now firmly controlled by the ALP which will be able to sandbag its own seats knowing it only needs 34.69% of the primary vote. It can ignore 65% of the rest of the country.
While it is unlikely, there may be the opportunity for an unlikely alliance on this issue if the LNP knows it is shut out from Government and the only way back is some form of proportional representation. The task of winning back 36 individual seats is just too daunting and with the splintering of the electorate being what it is.
I came to Australia as a £10 Scot a life time ago. I left Australia last November and now live as a permanent resident in south east Asia where I’m building a small resort/reception centre.
One of the things that has struck me here is the complete lack of culture war, war on wokeness and worries about political correctness and gender roles. These are the politics of division and the stoking of resentments if not hatred.
It is difficult to describe the feeling of freedom, relaxation, and relief that the complete absence of the constant drip of negative anti wokeness/culture war brings - I believe that many Australians including those in the conservative side of politics would feel the same way.
When all a political party has to offer the public is toxic masculinity, wedges, divisiveness and resentments, it deserves electoral oblivion.
Though it hasn't much been discussed, I do think the liberal party's policies on nuclear energy and the environment must've also had some sway in the decisions of the electorate. Their nuclear policy was so far out of the vision of most Australians given the uptake in renewables and when Dutton tries his best to avoid speaking on the issue throughout the whole election campaign, that says a lot.
And then they had nothing to say on environmental policies and seemed to be regularly contradicting themselves on carbon emissions reduction.
I believe that the Liberals need to go it alone so they can develop a set of policies that will appeal to urban electorates. The Liberals and The Nationals can create a coalition government once the Liberals regain the urban seats they lost.
One thing about Australian politics is that it doesn’t take a lot for the pendulum to move from left to right and back again. There is always a set of marginal seats that have fallen to the L/NP or the ALP as a group, tipping the result markedly, despite the overall swing seeming to be not huge. Over the last couple of decades there have been elections where Labor has won almost no seats in States like WA and Queensland, and other elections where the same fate has befallen the L/NP. This time (2025), for example, L/NP has no seats in Tasmania. That said, I think the situation has changed. The L/NP is not reaching the younger voters who firm the biggest bloc, who don’t read the Murdoch Press or watch Sky News.The group of independents Teals have survived as an alternative to the Liberals and will profit from any continued movement of the Liberals to right, and the Greens and others are a large presence in the Senate. And, sadly, the Liberals seem incapable of abandoning their failed policies, like the culture war. It will take time for them to rebuild, if indeed they can.
A good analysis. We need a strong opposition but this mob is not it. I view the overblown role that the Nationals have within the Coalition as being part of the problem, including supporting many of the Sky/Murdoch positioning.
Enough of the Teals held their seats in various states to give an indication of what a more moderate centrist party should be going… those people however don’t exist.
Watching Peta Credlin squirm through hours of vote counting on election night was pleasing though.
Angus Taylor's threat to cancel the tax cuts already legislated was political suicide.
The nuclear policy came from the Nationals, keen to secure jobs to replace failing coal power stations, but had no appeal in the cities.
The Liberals have to decide if they want to go to being an urban party or if they want to get list in the far right, where there are not enough voters to elect a government.
Albanese Labor has conquered the centre of politics and the Independents stand between the Liberals and urban relevance.
How long will it be before the Independents firm up their informal co-operation into a formal Progressive Party which blocks the revival of the Liberals?
It's unbelievable that some claim the Liberals must go even further to the right, when it was going to the right which caused the party to become largely irrelevant. Do they want to join One Nation, muttering incoherently in the nutty corner?
The Independents who have seized former Liberal seats would once have been Liberals, but were driven out when the Liberals stopped being liberals and became Conservatives.
I was visiting Mackellar during the elections, where Dr Sophie Scamps cruised back into office. Dutton was regarded as being like some weird stranger here, not saying anything which appealed to an electorate of educated, progressive young families and retires. His claim that 'The Liberals would always be better economic managers' was laughed at by people who remembered Morison's repeated deficits and mindless stunts and Tony Abbott, who comes from the Northern Beaches, being such a failure as PM.
As things stand, the Liberals are irrelevant here now, and in most of NSW.
As for successors, Susan Ley comes across as shrill and nasty, while Angus Taylor failed to produce a single credible economic plan. As one unhappy Liberal polling said, the Liberals had nothing to campaign with, no message to sell.
I think it’s instructive that the British conservative and union party (the ones who destroyed nearly all the great British institutions and were very nearly responsible for the dissolution of the United Kingdom as a political entity) look like it’s going to merge with reform, who are one nation with slightly more sophisticated spokespeople. Neo liberalism is dead and these results and the omnishambles which is the Liberal Party of Australia proves it. And yes, they keep going right.
The earth has developed a slight irregularity in its orbit as the corpses of Deakin, Reid, Menzies and Fraser spin uncontrollably in despair at what has happened.
Conservatives are supposed to conserve, it's what 'conserve' actually means, to protect important things.
So, for example, Conservatives should be ardent conservationists, keen to conserve the essential things, like our only planet.
Instead, our so-called Liberals, who aren't liberal at all, are determined to tear down the best things, like our environment and civil society, and replace them with rampant selfishness and profit before people.
However, the majority of our population values our environment and civil society, generosity, Medicare, opportunity for all, public education, fair pay for fair work etc.
It's what makes Australia special.
We fought for over two centuries to turn a nasty penal colony into a 'fair go for all' society in which no-one gets left behind.
It's the opposite of Gina's Reinhart's attempts to cut wages and trick taxpayers into subsidising nuclear power to enrich uranium miners.
Do the Liberals and Nationals still not understand that Albanese Labor's huge win and the banishment of the Liberals to the urban margins and the Nationals to the bush signals the middle class is rejecting selfishness and embracing community spirit?
If they don't, then it is unlikely the LNP will win back government any time soon.
Albanese could be PM for at least another term, and be succeeded by Chalmers.
Murdoch media talking heads, and miner Gina Reinhart, say the Liberals should go even further right, which would take them out near the racist One Nation, and guarantee they would be unelectable. Crazy stuff.
There aren’t enough votes on the far right to win government. Either the Liberals head to the centre, or they become more irrelevant to most Aussies.
Judging from the results of the Liberal leadership ballot the federal Liberals seem to be about equally divided between the moderates who made Susan Ley leader and the conservatives who voted for Angus Taylor. So we can expect continued in-fighting and indecision.
You can’t completely write off a political party but the current liberals are as close to being written off as any of their predecessors. If 2022 made their chances in government in 2025 impossible, 2028 is not even a pipe dream. As I think we’ve mentioned, the liberal party’s natural constituency was the aspirational middle class - the very people Howard kicked into all the while telling them he was one of them. Those who had made their way in found themselves excluded. And the urban and suburban middle class shrank. And hence so did the support for the liberal party. Howard was essentially a long painful and botched suicide for the party.
Very true. Robert Menzies would be shocked at the current state of the Liberal Party he founded.
Thanks Eddy and David.
Even if the Liberals were to do the work and do community outreach and develop fit for purpose policies, the scale of this defeat, exacerbated by the single member constituency electoral system, may leave the party in a diminished state. Does anyone in the party room want to wait 8-9 years for a realistic shot at government? Like the WA Liberals, even an 18% swing against the state ALP primary vote hardly moved the dial. They risk becoming the permanent opposition like the ALP from 1949 through the 60s.
In dire straits such as these, unconventional thinking may be the only way out. Both the Greens and LNP face tremendous challenges with the resources of state now firmly controlled by the ALP which will be able to sandbag its own seats knowing it only needs 34.69% of the primary vote. It can ignore 65% of the rest of the country.
While it is unlikely, there may be the opportunity for an unlikely alliance on this issue if the LNP knows it is shut out from Government and the only way back is some form of proportional representation. The task of winning back 36 individual seats is just too daunting and with the splintering of the electorate being what it is.
I came to Australia as a £10 Scot a life time ago. I left Australia last November and now live as a permanent resident in south east Asia where I’m building a small resort/reception centre.
One of the things that has struck me here is the complete lack of culture war, war on wokeness and worries about political correctness and gender roles. These are the politics of division and the stoking of resentments if not hatred.
It is difficult to describe the feeling of freedom, relaxation, and relief that the complete absence of the constant drip of negative anti wokeness/culture war brings - I believe that many Australians including those in the conservative side of politics would feel the same way.
When all a political party has to offer the public is toxic masculinity, wedges, divisiveness and resentments, it deserves electoral oblivion.
Though it hasn't much been discussed, I do think the liberal party's policies on nuclear energy and the environment must've also had some sway in the decisions of the electorate. Their nuclear policy was so far out of the vision of most Australians given the uptake in renewables and when Dutton tries his best to avoid speaking on the issue throughout the whole election campaign, that says a lot.
And then they had nothing to say on environmental policies and seemed to be regularly contradicting themselves on carbon emissions reduction.
I believe that the Liberals need to go it alone so they can develop a set of policies that will appeal to urban electorates. The Liberals and The Nationals can create a coalition government once the Liberals regain the urban seats they lost.
One thing about Australian politics is that it doesn’t take a lot for the pendulum to move from left to right and back again. There is always a set of marginal seats that have fallen to the L/NP or the ALP as a group, tipping the result markedly, despite the overall swing seeming to be not huge. Over the last couple of decades there have been elections where Labor has won almost no seats in States like WA and Queensland, and other elections where the same fate has befallen the L/NP. This time (2025), for example, L/NP has no seats in Tasmania. That said, I think the situation has changed. The L/NP is not reaching the younger voters who firm the biggest bloc, who don’t read the Murdoch Press or watch Sky News.The group of independents Teals have survived as an alternative to the Liberals and will profit from any continued movement of the Liberals to right, and the Greens and others are a large presence in the Senate. And, sadly, the Liberals seem incapable of abandoning their failed policies, like the culture war. It will take time for them to rebuild, if indeed they can.
Oblivion
A good analysis. We need a strong opposition but this mob is not it. I view the overblown role that the Nationals have within the Coalition as being part of the problem, including supporting many of the Sky/Murdoch positioning.
Enough of the Teals held their seats in various states to give an indication of what a more moderate centrist party should be going… those people however don’t exist.
Watching Peta Credlin squirm through hours of vote counting on election night was pleasing though.
Angus Taylor's threat to cancel the tax cuts already legislated was political suicide.
The nuclear policy came from the Nationals, keen to secure jobs to replace failing coal power stations, but had no appeal in the cities.
The Liberals have to decide if they want to go to being an urban party or if they want to get list in the far right, where there are not enough voters to elect a government.
Albanese Labor has conquered the centre of politics and the Independents stand between the Liberals and urban relevance.
How long will it be before the Independents firm up their informal co-operation into a formal Progressive Party which blocks the revival of the Liberals?