Why Australia’s Liberal Party Must Be Buried and Forgotten! By Paul Walker and James Reed
As we all know, Australia's Liberal Party suffered a devastating defeat in the May 2025 federal election, losing to Anthony Albanese's Labor Party despite the latter's dismal record: an 8% drop in living standards, soaring national debt, and divisive policies like the failed Voice referendum. Far from capitalising on Labor's vulnerabilities, the Liberals, led by Peter Dutton, collapsed, securing only 41 seats, their worst result since 1946, and losing Dutton's own electorate of Dickson. Building on James Allan's Daily Sceptic article (May 8, 2025), this blog piece argues that the Liberal Party's failure stems from its abandonment of conservative principles, strategic incompetence, and structural dysfunction, planned stupidity and internal treason as George Christensen has shown in material at Nation First. The Liberal Party is irredeemable and must be replaced by a bold, principle-driven conservative nationalist alternative.
The 2025 election was the Liberal Party's to lose. Labor's first term was marred by economic and social missteps:
Economic Decline: Real wages fell 7.8% from 2022–2025 (Australian Bureau of Statistics), with inflation outpacing wage growth. House prices surged 20% due to record immigration (1.2 million arrivals since 2022).
Policy Failures: The Voice referendum, rejected by 60% of voters, exposed Labor's divisive racial agenda. Net Zero policies drove power bills up 15% annually, while productivity stagnated (1.2% GDP growth in 2024).
Governance Woes: National debt neared $1 trillion, with deficits projected to 2030 (Treasury forecasts). Defence spending remained at 1.9% of GDP, below NATO allies, despite regional tensions.
Yet, the Liberals failed to exploit these weaknesses. Their campaign was incoherent, their policies timid, and their leadership fractured. The party's collapse had three key drivers:
Abandonment of Principles
The Liberals once stood for economic liberty, individual freedom, and social cohesion under leaders like Robert Menzies and John Howard. Today, they are a shadow of that legacy, surrendering to progressive orthodoxy on every front, becoming Labor lite, like a distasteful flat beer:
Culture Wars: The party refused to challenge Labor's woke agenda. On free speech, they ignored Labor's misinformation laws, which 55% of Australians opposed (YouGov poll, 2024). On transgender issues, they stayed silent as Labor pushed gender-affirming policies in schools. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), accused of Left-wing bias by 62% of voters (Roy Morgan, 2025), faced no Liberal push for reform.
Net Zero Capitulation: Instead of rejecting Net Zero, which increased energy costs and alienated rural voters, the Liberals proposed a slower transition to renewables, alienating both climate sceptics like we at the blog, and moderates. These cowardly half-measures that pleased no one.
Immigration Inertia: With immigration driving housing unaffordability (median Sydney home: $1.4 million), the Liberals offered a meagre 10% cut to Labor's intake, ignoring Howard's 90,000 annual cap that 68% of voters supported (Essential poll, 2025).
This abandonment began with Tony Abbott's 2015 ousting, when moderates like Malcolm Turnbull prioritised centrism over conviction. The result: a "broad church" too vague to inspire, leaving conservatives adrift.
Strategic Incompetence
Peter Dutton's campaign was a masterclass in self-sabotage. His "forgotten Australians" strategy targeting outer-suburban, working-class voters, while good in principle, ignored urban electorates, costing seats in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. The Liberals lost 12 urban seats to Labor and independents, with affluent voters citing Dutton's "harsh tone" and lack of economic vision.
Policy missteps compounded the damage:
Flip-Flops: Dutton backtracked on public servant cuts and work-from-home bans after focus group backlash, projecting weakness.
Nuclear Fumble: His nuclear energy plan, a potential wedge against Labor's renewables, was poorly explained, with only 35% voter support (Resolve poll, 2025). Labor's fear campaign, warning of "Chernobyl in your backyard" went unanswered.
Trump Effect Dodge: Labor painted Dutton as "Temu Trump," tying him to Trump's 10% tariff on Australia. Instead of rebutting this or highlighting Trump's economic wins (e.g., 3% U.S. GDP growth in Q1 2025), the Liberals stayed silent, letting Labor's narrative dominate. The reason is that the Liberals are free trade globalists.
The Liberals' small-target strategy, avoiding bold policies to minimise attack, backfired. Labor's disciplined campaign, centreed on cost-of-living relief (e.g., $300 energy rebates), outmanoeuvred them, winning 92 seats to the Liberals' 41.
Misdiagnosing the "Trump Effect"
Allan dismisses the claim that Trump's tariff and persona sank the Liberals, calling it "Trump Derangement Syndrome." This theory holds that centrist and conservative voters, spooked by Trump's policies, swung to Labor. But evidence is thin:
No Clear Link: Polls (YouGov, May 2025) show only 12% of voters cited Trump's tariff as a major issue, compared to 65% prioritising cost-of-living. Albanese's tariff response, a $2 billion trade diversification fund, was not markedly stronger than Dutton's vague "diplomacy" promise.
Global Counterexamples: In Canada, Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives hit a 40-year high in popular vote (39%) despite Trump comparisons, losing only due to progressive vote consolidation (CBC, April 2025). In Britain, Nigel Farage's Reform Party won a by-election in Labour's 16th-safest seat, defying "Trump = Hitler" attacks by embracing his border and energy policies (BBC, March 2025).
The Liberals' failure to counter Labor's Trump narrative, unlike Farage's defiance, reflects their strategic timidity. They let Labor define them, losing conservative voters to minor parties like One Nation (8% vote share) and moderates to Labor.
Why the Liberals Are Irredeemable
The Liberals' collapse isn't a temporary blip but the culmination of decades-long decay. Their structural, ideological, and cultural flaws make reform impossible.
Structural Rot
The party's leadership selection, controlled by 50–60 MPs rather than members, breeds factionalism and mediocrity. Post-election, moderates like Simon Birmingham blamed "harsh conservatism," while conservatives like Andrew Hastie called for bolder policies (The Australian, May 9, 2025). This infighting paralysed the party, with no clear successor to Dutton, names like Angus Taylor and Sussan Ley lack broad appeal, promising another crushing electoral defeat and the end of traditional Australia.
The expulsion of Moira Deeming in Victoria, followed by her 2024 defamation win against state leader John Pesutto, exposed a party purging conservatives to appease moderates. The Liberals' centralised structure stifles grassroots energy, unlike Canada's Conservatives, where 1 million members chose Poilievre.
Elite Disconnect
The Liberals no longer speak to any major demographic:
Urban Voters: Affluent city dwellers, hit by housing costs and tax burdens, swung to Labor or independents, who won 10 teal seats (Guardian, May 2025). The Liberals' focus on suburban "battlers," while good, ignored these voters' priorities, and they needed to address everyone.
Multicultural Communities: Once a Liberal stronghold, multicultural electorates like Chisholm and Bennelong flipped to Labor, with 70% of non-English-speaking voters backing Albanese (SBS, 2025).
Rural Base: Even regional voters, angered by Net Zero and immigration, split toward One Nation and independents, costing the Nationals (Liberal allies) five seats.
This disconnect reflects a party elite out of touch with modern Australia's diversity and economic pain.
Failure to Ride the Global Conservative Wave
Globally, conservative movements are thriving by embracing populism and principle:
United States: Trump's second term, with 4% unemployment and $500 billion in government waste cut (Bloomberg, April 2025), has galvanised the GOP. His border closures and Net Zero exit resonate with voters tired of elite overreach.
United Kingdom: Farage's Reform Party, polling at 22% (YouGov, May 2025), upended the two-party system, winning local councils and a by-election in Hartlepool. Farage's embrace of Trump's energy and free speech policies neutralised Labour's attacks.
Canada: Poilievre's 39% vote share, despite a loss, positions the Conservatives for future gains, with Carney's minority government reliant on separatists (Globe and Mail, April 2025).
Australia's Liberals, by contrast, ignored this momentum. Their refusal to fight on immigration, energy, or cultural issues left them out of step with global conservatism's bold clarity.
A New Conservative Party: The Path Forward
Burying the Liberals means building a new conservative party that reflects voter priorities and global trends. This party must be unapologetic conservative, nationalist, grassroots-driven, and strategically savvy.
Core Policies
Economic Freedom: Slash immigration to 90,000 annually or lower, as under Howard, to ease housing pressures (70% voter support, Essential, 2025). Cut income taxes by 5% and eliminate renewable subsidies, saving $10 billion yearly (Treasury estimates). Prioritise coal, gas, and nuclear for energy security, following Trump's U.S. model, rejecting climate change woke BS. Abandon wind and solar and keep to fossil fuels.
Cultural Pushback: Pass a Free Speech Act to counter misinformation laws, mirroring Florida's 2024 legislation. Reform education to remove ideological bias, banning gender theory in primary schools (65% parent support, IPA poll, 2025). Defund the ABC's $1.1 billion budget unless it proves neutrality. No, let's defund them anyway, as they are hopelessly Left and woke. SBS as well.
Social Cohesion: Reject race-based policies like Welcome to Country mandates, emphasising national unity. A 2024 CIS poll found 58% of Australians want "one Australia" over multiculturalism.
Adopt Canada's member-driven leadership model, empowering 500,000+ Liberal members to choose leaders, bypassing factional elites. Create local policy councils to ensure urban and rural avoiding the Liberals' top-down failures. Give members a voice.
Farage's Defiance: Reform's success came from owning Trump's wins, border control, cheap energy, anti-woke policies, while rejecting "Hitler" smears. A new Australian party must similarly embrace global conservative victories.
Trump's Clarity: Trump's 100-day agenda (e.g., ending NPR funding, cutting DEI programs) shows the power of bold promises. An Australian equivalent must offer clear, measurable goals, not Dutton's vague "back on track" rhetoric.
Poilievre's Persistence: Despite Canada's progressive majority, Poilievre's focus on cost-of-living and housing kept conservatives competitive. Australia's new party must hammer Labor on economic pain points.
The new party must bridge urban and rural divides:
Urban Voters: Focus on housing affordability (e.g., zoning deregulation) and tax relief to win back affluent seats.
Suburban Workers: Champion cost-of-living measures, like energy bill cuts and wage growth, to reclaim outer-suburban electorates.
Multicultural Nonsense: Emphasise economic opportunity and social unity, countering Labor's identity politics.
A 2025 Lowy Institute poll found 62% of Australians want a "stronger, fairer" alternative to Labor and Liberals, signalling demand for this approach.
Start with a coalition of disaffected Liberals, One Nation, and independents, who polled 22% combined in 2025. Leverage social media and X, where conservative voices amplify anti-establishment sentiment. Host national conventions to draft a platform, mimicking Reform's 2024 "People's Contract." Target 2028 state elections to build momentum, as Farage did with local councils.
Allan's claim that Australia is the bleakest Anglosphere nation for right-of-centre voters is compelling:
United States: Trump's GOP controls Congress and the presidency, with 53% voter approval (Gallup, May 2025).
United Kingdom: Reform's rise threatens Labour and Tories, with 40% of voters open to "populist" parties (Ipsos, 2025).
Canada: Poilievre's Conservatives are poised for 2029, with Carney's government unstable (42% disapproval, Angus Reid, 2025).
Australia: The Liberals' 41 seats and 28% vote share (AEC, 2025) leave the right fractured. Labor's 92-seat majority and preference deals with Greens and teals entrench their dominance.
Australia's instant-runoff voting system, unlike Canada's First-Past-the-Post, favours established parties, making insurgencies harder. Yet Farage's 14% vote share in 2024 UK elections shows bold messaging can disrupt. The Liberals' failure to master preferences, losing 60% of minor party flows to Labor, seals their obsolescence.
The Liberal Party's 2025 annihilation was no accident but the inevitable result of abandoning conservative values, strategic cowardice, and structural rot. Its "broad church" is a graveyard of principles, incapable of riding the global conservative wave led by Trump, Farage, and Poilievre. Australia's right-of-centre voters, battered by Labor's economic and cultural failures, deserve a new party, one that fights for economic freedom, cultural sanity, and national unity. Burying the Liberals isn't just necessary; it's urgent. A new conservative movement, built on grassroots energy and global lessons, can reclaim Australia's future. The alternative is a one-party globo commo state, where conservative hopes die not with a bang, but a whimper.
"What Anglosphere country presently offers Right-of-centre voters the least hope for change? I don't think there is much debate that the answer to that question is 'Australia'. A Liberal Party that had every opportunity to romp home in last week's election instead imploded and was crushed by an Albanese-led Labour Party – one that had seen living standards drop almost 8% in its first term; that spent far too little on defence; that had been humiliated in its Voice referendum to entrench racial division; that despised free speech and half-welcomed pro-Palestinian activists who gave more than a few signs of being antisemitic; that had opened the floodgates to over a million immigrants, causing house prices to soar; that was in the full-on embrace of 'climate change' zealots worshipping at the altar of an impoverishing Net Zero religion; that oversaw tanking productivity, ever worsening education results and mushrooming power bills and public servant hires; and that had Australia on course to hit a national debt of one trillion dollars and deficits as far as the eye can see. That was the Albanese Labour Party that our supposedly conservative Coalition Party not only failed to defeat but, by running such an emasculated, incoherent campaign, allowed itself to be crushed by.
Here are two theories for why this happened. One is patent nonsense but for all that still extremely widely believed (and not just by Left-wing pundits but by plenty on the Right too, those in the firm grip of Trump Derangement Syndrome, 'TDS'). This boils down to claiming 'it was Trump what dunnit'. The US President puts a 10% tariff on Australia (the lowest he put on any country) and this theory suggests that at that point Peter Dutton and the Libs were cooked. Centrist voters and more than a few conservative ones would flood over to Labour. But why think Albo would handle Trump better than Dutton? That's what I've been asking without once getting a plausible answer. A few of the TDS sufferers point to Canada and the fact the Tories lost a big lead there and the Left-wing Mark Carney won the election. But they don't mention that Poilievre actually achieved a 40-year high in the conservative popular vote share and that Carney won only a minority government that will most likely depend on Quebec separatists. What happened in Canada, with its First-Past-the-Post voting system, is that the progressive Left voters – a significant majority in all Canadian elections – abandoned the two other Left-wing parties and coalesced around Carney's party.
If you think that was more Trump's fault than Poilievre's then look at Britain. Nigel Farage's Reform Party just made a once-in-a-century breakthrough in terms of taking on the two established parties. His insurgent Reform Party defeated Labour in a by-election in its 16th safest seat that had a 14,700 vote Labour majority going in. Reform cleaned up in the local council elections, crushing the Tories and three-quarters crushing Labour. Reform got almost as many votes as Labour and the Tories combined. You know what both those establishment parties tried to do? They tried to tar Farage as a British Trump. It failed mightily. Why? Because Farage didn't run away from Trump's accomplishments. He recognised that in just 100 days Trump has a great record on closing the border and dealing with illegal immigration, championing free speech, fully abandoning the Net Zero religion and going all in on the cheapest energy possible, standing up for women against the trans ideologues, calling out judicial activism, finding hundreds of billions of dollars of government waste, ending all taxpayer funding of the incredibly Left-leaning public broadcasters NPR and PBS. What would conservative voters dislike about any of that? And if the attempt to tar Farage as a Trump is linked to the latter's tariffs, well it's simple as pie to point out that Farage has a much higher chance of bringing Trump around on that issue than a bunch of socialist ideologues who for four years have been calling Trump a racist, white nationalist, psychopath. In other words, Farage fought back against the 'You and Trump are Hitler' political playbook of the Left and by doing so this line of attack had zero effect.
Here's a far more persuasive reason why Team Dutton got smoked. It was because it deserved it! Where Trump and Farage are fighting the culture wars (Farage is taking things directly out of the Trump playbook), the best way to sum up the attitude of Australia's Liberal Party to any and all culture war fights is this: 'We abjectly and permanently surrender. Not just on issues we've already lost and won't relitigate but on any future ones that might come up.' Free speech stuff? We surrender. Transgender idiocies? Ditto. De-wokeifying the school curriculum and dealing with the ABC? Well, we were half-tempted to half-fight but on reflection, we surrender. Ditto working from home (which all Reform controlled councils in England now say they're going to ban).
And then there was the failure to fight Labour over Net Zero – not 'we'll pull Australia out and tell voters why we need to do this in a world where China, India and the US are all now out and not afraid of coal' but rather 'we'll also genuflect to the impoverishing renewables gods, just a couple of decades slower and less sincerely'. They were against tax cuts. Offered a truly pathetic and limp-wristed cut in Labour's immigration intake (when the correct approach was to say they'd go right back to the Howard era intake of below 100,000 per year, all carefully chosen). Heck, Dutton seemingly had to focus group things before he knew which way to go on Welcomes and Acknowledgements of Country.
Put it this way. Peter Dutton and the Libs died on their knees, forsaking any conservative values they may (who knows now?) once have had. It would have been far better to die on their feet after a big fight over immigration, Net Zero and dividing the country by race. Of course had they fought big time on those issues then I think they would have won, and mightily annoyed the ABC crowd as a side benefit.
Meanwhile Trump continues to work through the list of his myriad campaign promises. No small target strategy there and plenty for conservatives to love. Nigel Farage and Reform have upended the two-party British establishment and by fighting tooth and nail on values and principles have conservative voters gleeful while seriously threatening the continued existence of the world's oldest political party, the British Tories. Even in Canada there is plenty of hope for conservatives as Poilievre took the Tory vote to a 40 year high and kept Mark Carney to an unstable minority government. Only here in Australia do things look truly bleak for us conservatives. The 'broad church' Liberal Party is obviously too broad and hence devoid of any core principles and visible values. Be honest. We know it's been broken since the day Abbott was defenestrated.
Is there any remedy? Yes. The party power brokers and faction chiefs all have to be destroyed. And that can happen by copying Canada and taking the decision of who will be leader away from the MPs and giving it to the paid-up members. Almost a million Tory members picked Poilievre. Here, it's a few dozen scheming, self-interested MPs who do the picking. Things aren't good Down Under."
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University.
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