Media
|
Speeches
October 14, 2025
SPEECH
TOM HUGHES ORATION
***CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY***
Tuesday, 14 October 2025
Introduction and acknowledgements
Thank you for that generous introduction Julian, as well as the honour of delivering this Oration tonight.
Julian and I have been friends long before either of us were elected to parliament.
You are a man of great intellect, courage and principle.
I was delighted to see your remarkable leadership on antisemitism recognised last week with the McKinnon Prize.
In a dark time for our country you have been a tower of strength.
Although we have generally been on the same side of most debates – and I certainly hope we will be in the future – I have particularly admired the way Julian conducts himself when we have disagreed.
As the Liberal Party enters a phase of rebuilding I am glad to have someone of Julian’s substance and thoughtfulness making a major contribution to that task.
Tom Hughes was a great Australian.
He served our country with distinction in war, our party in parliament and, of course, the law.
Reading about his numerous robust encounters with student protestors on campus, I am grateful that Julian has booked a more secure venue for tonight’s event.
The Hughes family has continued to make significant contributions to public life and our Party, I am grateful that Michael is here to represent the family.
Where to from here?
There are many of worthy topics we could discuss tonight.
But there is really only one that matters for the Liberal Party.
How did we find ourselves here?
And how do we get out of it?
My starting point is this: this is a serious moment for the Liberal Party.
But it need not be an existential one, depending on how we respond to it.
We face serious organisational challenges.
We must learn how to campaign and communicate better.
Our approach to data and analytics is particularly outdated.
Labor had teams of people working on this task and ran rings around us.
They built their success on this foundation.
As important as these challenges are, however, they will not be my focus tonight.
Partly because the last thing the Liberal Party needs is politicians, much less Senators, getting on the tools as campaign experts.
I fundamentally believe in Robert Menzies’ division of powers between the parliamentary party and organisational wing.
They select candidates and run campaigns.
We set policy.
My focus tonight is the intellectual task facing us.
Ultimately in politics, it is ideas that are the most important.
The best campaign in the world cannot sell a bad message.
No amount of data, money or slick social media content will convince people to vote for a vision they don’t like.
And a truly compelling agenda can overcome outdated campaign techniques.
Our policy agenda, and the message it conveyed, is the single biggest factor which contributed to our defeat.
But although this was undoubtedly a devastating election outcome, we are not so diminished that we are incapable of again earning the trust and support of the Australian people.
There is nothing fundamentally defective with our values.
It was only six years ago that the party won a ‘miracle’ election victory federally.
In August last year the CLP secured government in the Northern Territory with a 17 per cent swing.
One year ago this month the LNP took office in Queensland after almost a decade in the wilderness.
And it was only three months ago the Tasmanian Liberals triumphed in their election.
That is not to say all is well with the Liberal brand.
Far from it.
We have just suffered our worst federal defeat in our 81-year history.
In the wake of that it is natural and healthy to undergo a period of reflection, self-examination and debate about our future.
We have all agreed that one of the lessons of the last term is we put off too many debates and prized unity and discipline above almost all else.
We can’t afford to make that mistake again.
We need to have these debates, and some of them will be necessarily public and contested.
It is an opportunity not just for parliamentarians but for commentators and supporters to participate too.
But that does not mean unity and discipline are not important.
On the contrary, in a modern communications environment they are essential.
When communication channels are fragmented, consistency of message is critical.
That means there is a time limit on this soul-searching process.
We must do it now at the start of the term so it does not drag on forever.
An ongoing mass public therapy session doesn’t exactly scream “ready for government.”
If we are still engaged in this process at the back end of the term it will send a message to the Australian people that we are focused on ourselves, not them.
A senior Liberal official recently told me that in their 20 years of conducting focus groups, they are yet to hear a swing voter in a marginal seat say they are voting Liberal because of the freedom we grant our parliamentarians to speak out.
Of course, I would never trade our intellectual freedom for the stifling conformity of Labor politics.
Former Labor Senator Doug Cameron once likened joining the Labor caucus to having a “political lobotomy.”
It is a freedom I have used myself.
One of my many career-enhancing moves was to threaten to cross the floor under the Turnbull government to prevent the ratification of an extradition treaty with China.
But it is a freedom to be exercised judiciously.
The Liberal Party is not a think tank. Or an activist group. Or a debating society.
We are a political party designed to win and hold government.
Those of us who remain in parliament have a special obligation to our party and our country.
And our solemn task is to get ourselves in a state where we are capable of governing again.
The consequences if we fail are dire.
Our responsibility to Australia
Already we can see that the Albanese government has not gotten any better in their second term.
If they win a third or fourth they won’t either.
They have a big majority but a thin mandate.
It is a mile wide but an inch deep.
Labor is so bereft of an agenda they had to concoct a productivity summit to try to create one.
As the Prime Minister candidly admitted in a recent interview with Troy Bramston for The Australian, his core ambition is to make Labor the natural party of government federally.
That is no ambition at all.
On one level it is refreshingly honest.
On another, it is deeply weird.
A politician in a democracy admitting his true motivation is the accumulation of power, for its own sake.
It is particularly disturbing because Anthony Albanese is not above using the power of the state to entrench his party in power.
One of his first acts on returning to office was to arbitrarily slash the staffing allocation of an already depleted Opposition, to make it harder to hold him to account.
The Centre for Public Integrity has demonstrated this government is the least transparent in 30 years, with record low compliance with Senate orders and extraordinary rejection rates under freedom of information laws.
And that’s before the introduction of a retrograde FOI “reform” bill that would even further diminish the public’s right to know, as Julian has been powerfully arguing.
This behaviour is more befitting of a petty despot than a democratic leader.
If these trends were appearing in the developing world, our diligent local embassy staff would be busily preparing cables on the troubling backsliding on democratic norms.
But the truth is even with these abuses of power, it is not within Anthony Albanese or the Labor Party’s ability to become the natural party of government federally.
Only the Liberal Party’s failure will achieve that.
If you want to understand what the consequences of an entrenched, long term Labor government looks like, just examine Victoria.
Take it from me, it’s not pretty.
We have a moral duty to prevent the Victorianisation of Australia.
It can be done
Even in these challenging times for our party, I remain optimistic.
If we do our jobs well, I believe that not only can we compete at the next election, it is possible for us to win.
Political parties often misinterpret election wins.
The Liberal Party certainly has.
In 2004 we secured a come-from-behind victory.
But instead of realising it was primarily a rejection of the risk posed by Mark Latham, we thought it was a ringing endorsement of our then eight-year-old government.
We overreached on policy.
And we failed to renew.
Instead of a managed handover to the next generation of conservative leadership between John Howard and Peter Costello, we stuck with what we knew and what had worked so well before.
Kevin Rudd’s true political insight was to position himself as John Howard’s successor.
He was a safe, but welcome change – or so he told us.
He’d update the Howard model for the modern era.
It was fraudulent, but it was devastatingly effective.
We also misinterpreted our miracle victory in 2019.
We ran against Bill Shorten and Labor’s bold and unsettling policy agenda.
The Australian people did not want too much change too soon, and preferred the government they knew.
But they didn’t want stasis either.
And by the time of the 2022 election, with many senior ministers exhausted from managing the pandemic, we took an agenda to Australians that lacked ambition.
Labor is at risk of repeating our mistakes, and misinterpreting this result too.
While Anthony Albanese is entitled to a victory lap after a big win, he would be mistaken if he thinks this was a personal endorsement.
Their near record-low primary vote speaks to how Australians have not warmed to this government or the Prime Minister.
And if they are not able to solve the problems facing Australians – on productivity, housing affordability, budget sustainability and energy affordability – the public will turn on Labor too.
There’s also a risk we misinterpret our loss.
It is right for us to be humble after a result like this.
But just because we lost doesn’t mean we got everything wrong last term.
I am immensely proud of the strong moral stand we took on antisemitism.
It is evil and utterly corrosive to a free society.
I don’t think we lost a single vote on it. But if we did, I don’t care.
Although politicians want to win every vote and every election if we can, there are some things more important than that, and this was one of them.
I also admire Peter Dutton’s vision and courage embracing nuclear energy for Australia.
The execution was not perfect.
I doubt we will again take a publicly-owned and built power grid to a future election.
But we were right to recognise that emissions reduction without the world’s most reliable emissions-free technology is madness.
And the extraordinary power demands of AI which is leading to a nuclear renaissance in the United States will ultimately vindicate our stand, unless Australia is content to be a complete bystander on the industries of the future.
We have already been vindicated on our call for higher defence spending.
Every US ally, bar Australia, has accepted the need to lift their spending to hopefully end conflict in Europe and prevent it in the Indo-Pacific.
It will be only a matter of time before even the Albanese government does too.
Our task
In my view, we must call time on the apology tour.
It is now time to get on with the three critical tasks we must complete before the next election:
The first of these is the hardest, and the most important.
Lessons from history
The challenges of our era are not the same as previous generations and a copy and paste policy and political agenda will fail.
We should not be slavish adherents to the ideologies of philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Nor should we be limited by the political strategies of the same era.
But as conservatives by temperament who value tradition and believe in the accumulation of wisdom over time, we should not glibly dismiss them either.
Across the western world, centrifugal political forces appear to be pulling apart previously natural allies.
In every English-speaking democracy, centre right political parties for most of the 20th century were a philosophical alliance between conservatives and classical liberals.
During the Cold War, that was a comfortable alliance, especially in Australia.
Robert Menzies formed the Liberal Party in 1944 at the dawn of the Cold War.
The Liberal Party was formed not just out of the ashes of the United Australia Party but a whole range of constituent parts.
In attendance at the Canberra conference in October 1944 were twelve federal MPs from the UAP and 18 other organisations spanning the broad centre right of Australian politics at the time.
It included nationalists, liberal democrats, constitutionalists, country leagues, women’s associations and my former employer, the Institute of Public Affairs.
It was a disparate coalition, but an easy one in the context of the time.
Labor had just won its biggest ever electoral victory in 1943 under John Curtin at the height of World War II, securing almost fifty per cent of the primary vote.
Non-Labor parties had been decimated.
It was an inauspicious time to start a new political party, and there was every chance the new Liberal Party would go the way of the many attempts to consolidate the non-Labor parties in the first half of the 20th century.
One of the essential features of a successful political party is a core philosophy which endures over time.
We bind ourselves to principles because without them every generation of politician is tempted to prefer their own judgement in the moment to the lessons of history.
The Liberal Party’s history wars can be at times tedious and tribal.
So I won’t dwell in them for too long tonight.
One quote, from Robert Menzies, is much abused in factional debates.
In his memoirs, Afternoon Light, published in 1967, Menzies wrote:
“We took the name ‘Liberal’ because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his rights, and his enterprise, and rejecting the Socialist panacea.”
Of course, contrary to the inferences of some, Menzies did not mean ‘progressive’ in its modern ideological context.
There wasn’t much woke about a man born in 1894.
For our purposes this evening it should be enough to accept that two of the Liberal Party’s greatest living historians, John Howard and George Brandis, each from the conservative and liberal ends of our philosophical spectrum, both agree that Menzies was an institutional conservative and a classical liberal.
As Brandis wrote in 2022, “Menzies embodied both as, at its best, the Liberal Party does.”
And as John Howard argued in his 1996 Menzies lecture:
“Menzies knew the importance for Australian liberalism to draw on both the classical liberal as well as the conservative political traditions. He knew the importance for liberalism of upholding people’s rights and freedoms as individuals. He also knew the importance of values and priorities that had both a proven record of past achievement and a relevance to advancing Australia’s national interest into the future.”
Dr David Kemp, who is rightly regarded as the authority on the history of Australian liberalism for his remarkable series of books on the topic, argued in a Robert Menzies Institute podcast in 2024:
“Then you’ve got the Liberals, whose philosophy can be adopted by conservatives and often is, because once liberal institutions become established, as they were in Australia from colonial days, to be a conservative could also mean you were liberal in inclination.”
And,
“Australian liberalism from Menzies on has always emphasised the social importance to a democratic society of the family, the home, the great conservative institutions.”
As history shows, Menzies’ creation survived.
That’s not to say there haven’t been major ideological debates within what Howard has called our “broad church.”
The 1970s and 1980s were dominated by battles between the “wets” and the “dries” on economic policy, especially the role of the state in a market economy.
This debate was won comprehensively by the right of the party in favour of free markets.
It is not just a debate that occurred within the Liberal Party.
It occurred within broader society and came to achieve wide support both in Australia and across the west, often derided by the left as the “neo-liberal consensus.”
It has been to Australia’s immense benefit.
Between 1960 and 2020, Australians’ real living standards have almost tripled.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the most rapid period of growth occurred in the reform era between 1992 to 2012, when it averaged 2.8% per year.
It hasn’t just been an economic success, but a political one too for the Liberal Party.
Since 1946, when the modern Liberal Party first contested a federal election, we have won 19 elections to Labor’s 12.
We have governed Australia for almost two-thirds of the post-war era.
Of Australia’s longest serving Prime Ministers, the first, second and fourth are all Liberals.
Eight of the ten largest House majorities were won by Coalition governments.
The wrong path
And yet despite the economic and political success of Australian liberalism, there are some marginal voices arguing that the Liberal Party should split.
They argue that the differences between people who call themselves “conservatives” and “liberals” today are unbridgeable and we should go our separate ways.
Our task is to make sure these voices remain marginal.
Because if they succeed it would be a disaster for the Liberal Party and Australia.
A split of the Liberal Party today on ideological grounds would be about as successful for us as Labor’s split in the 1950s was for them.
Instead, we must seek to understand and incorporate the reasonable concerns of the good-faith actors on the right who today express dissatisfaction with the direction of the Liberal Party.
Some conservatives feel aggrieved that the post-Cold War liberal consensus damaged causes they care about.
Family. Faith. Nation. Community.
Their concerns are sincere. And they are legitimate.
Not everything about this era has been good.
In the United States Charles Murray captured this best in his book, Coming Apart, which illustrated the divergent social and economic outcomes of the rich and poor, including wage stagnation, substance abuse and a collapse of marriage as an institution among working class and welfare-dependent families.
Similar studies observe the same phenomenon in the United Kingdom in recent decades.
By contrast, Australia has not suffered anywhere near the same level of social dysfunction, as Simon Cowan has demonstrated for the Centre for Independent Studies.
But we are not immune, and it is a trend we should remain wary of repeating itself here.
Some other developments, like declining religious observance, are simply out of reach of politicians and the state.
A particular concern for today’s conservatives is the decline of Australian manufacturing.
Is it a grave national security threat that we no longer make fridges, washing machines or TVs? No.
But in an era of strategic competition our dependence on authoritarian powers for critical imports is a serious problem.
And if we were ever called upon to produce military platforms or munitions at scale in a time of conflict I have grave doubts about our ability to do so.
Our social cohesion has been tested – and at times has failed us – in the last two years.
I am deeply concerned about its trajectory when you contemplate the way it could be weaponised against us by our adversaries in times of conflict.
Our energy market is utterly broken by the pursuit of unrealistic targets, and it is hurting families and businesses.
Most crucially for young Australians, housing has become an unattainable dream.
The burden of working and saving to get into the market has had a profound and negative impact on their ability to make choices about family formation.
Migration post pandemic has been unplanned, uncontrolled and too high.
It has been a major contributor to our housing crisis, and it must be brought back to sustainable levels.
We must find a way of accommodating these legitimate concerns as part of a 21st century Liberal policy agenda.
But that is not an insurmountable task.
False choices
It is critical in resolving these debates that we avoid false choices.
Two caricatures are often presented in the media about the alternative paths available to the Liberal Party.
The first is that we should become a free market version of the Teals, which accepts the cultural zeitgeist and contests no social agendas advanced by the left.
Often we are told we should stop fighting the “culture wars.”
But this wouldn’t mean culture wars stop.
It would just mean we pre-emptively surrender in them to the left.
If we followed this advice we would be left with a soulless, hollow party which spoke to only the narrowest material aspirations of Australians.
It would leave us rudderless in navigating an uncertain world.
We are also told we should simply sign up to whatever emissions reduction trajectory the government proposes.
This would be a gross abrogation of our responsibility to the Australian people and the national interest.
It would also be a missed political opportunity.
Labor does not deserve the cover of bipartisan support for a climate policy that cannot withstand scrutiny.
Of course, these critics are not completely wrong: the economy must be at the heart of our pitch to modern Australia.
We must offer hope for a materially better future, especially to young Australians.
There is a risk if we are seen to be preoccupied primarily by niche issues rather than the concerns of mainstream Australians.
On the other hand, we are told that our future lies in a Farage-lite, populist conservative party which abandons our traditions on free markets and fiscal discipline in favour of a new nationalism of picking winners and turning our backs on free trade.
It remains to be seen whether Reform can continue their polling momentum all the way until the next scheduled UK general election in August 2029.
And it is a matter for Britons if that is the path they want to choose for themselves.
But I am personally unconvinced a platform of significantly increasing government spending, in a country where it is already 44% of GDP, and has a large budget deficit, is fiscally sustainable.
Or for that matter, particularly conservative.
But even if it would work politically in the UK, that does not mean it would work in Australia.
Reform is currently averaging about 30 per cent in the polls.
In a non-compulsory, first past the post system with five major parties, that could theoretically achieve a majority in the UK Parliament.
But it’s less than the primary vote we just secured in our worst ever election defeat.
In our system of compulsory preferential voting we need a primary vote at least in the high thirties, and to be the preferred party of government for the majority of Australians.
What Reform has so far achieved is the political destruction of the Conservative Party as we know it.
A similar movement would have a similar political effect here.
If the Liberal Party adopted a Labor-lite economic agenda it would be a disaster politically and economically.
If we are in a competition of who can best hand out public money with Labor, we will lose every time.
The Liberal Party doesn’t win auction politics because Labor is always willing to outbid us.
Nor has central planning suddenly become more efficient.
Labor’s industry slush funds like the National Reconstruction Fund and other handout mechanisms are likely to torch billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money in bad investments.
They will also distort incentives for business and encourage the special-interest politics Menzies warned about.
The capture by special interests ultimately destroyed the UAP.
No one has yet overcome Friedrich Hayek’s information problem – no politician or bureaucrat can possess all the information required to efficiently allocate scarce resources – nor are they likely to.
A Liberal Party which abandons markets would consign Australia to a poorer future.
But, as I’ve already acknowledged, these critics are not completely wrong either.
We are no longer in the 1990s unipolar moment.
We must reckon with the impact of geopolitics on markets, or we will be mercilessly picked off by authoritarian states.
But the best way we can do so is with a ruthless focus on competitiveness and productivity, so that we provide Australian business with the best conditions under which they can compete, with a low tax, light regulation and affordable energy environment.
And where we do have to make interventions, we must be surgical in how we do so, for example with industries which have no real market dynamics, like defence.
Otherwise, every vested interest will beat a path to Canberra’s door with their hand out and a business case about why their industry is strategically important.
That will only lead to permanently bigger government, which no Liberal should want.
The irony of both of these critiques is that the biggest problems we’ve encountered in recent years have come when we are seen to have abandoned our values.
A poll conducted by Redbridge last week illustrated this perfectly.
Along with a belief that we are divided, the number one reason former Liberal voters say they no longer support us is “I no longer know what it stands for.”
That is because too often in the past, both in government and in opposition, we have adopted policies which are not in line with our publicly stated values.
To overcome that we must re-embrace the traditional Liberal values that have a demonstrated ability to earn the trust and support of the Australian people.
The base versus the centre
The other false choice we are often presented with is between our “base” and the “centre.”
Yes, Australian elections are decided by swinging voters.
The main game is to take votes, and seats, from the Labor Party.
But our core supporters matter too.
And they should not be taken for granted, as some have flippantly suggested.
No party survives without its members, volunteers, donors, activists and cheerleaders.
The Liberal Party needs many more of them, not fewer.
We need to appeal to both our traditional supporters and swing voters.
It is only a question of sequence.
We are at our best when we first lock in our base, and then pursue swing voters from a position of strength.
If we pursue swinging voters before we have locked in our core support, our right flank will be unstable and sap energy and attention from the contest with Labor.
But if we obsess over our base and no one else, we will consign ourselves to permanent opposition.
Our task at this stage of the electoral cycle is to find issues which appeal to our base but do not turn off swinging voters.
This is an easier task than many think.
For example, symbols of our national identity are widely supported by Australians.
Our flag. Our anthem. The constitution. The ANZAC tradition. Australia Day.
Only the most extreme elements of the left seek to tear them down.
We should find ways to safeguard these institutions as unifying symbols for all patriotic Australians.
The alternative
The alternative to these false choices is to maintain the classical liberal-conservative fusion that Menzies built and make it relevant for the modern world.
It is trite to suggest that the best way forward is the middle path between two warring factions, or that politics is the art of compromise.
But despite some obvious differences, there actually is a high degree of unanimity within the Parliamentary Party on the big questions facing Australia.
There is virtual consensus on the policy problems confronting us.
We all agree immigration is too high.
We all agree housing has become chronically unaffordable.
We all agree young families are struggling to achieve the economic progress of previous generations and we must do more to support them.
We all agree Labor’s approach to emissions reduction has smashed the energy market.
We all agree the budget is unsustainable and driven by spending which is too high.
We all agree our economy is not productive or competitive enough.
We all agree we must do more to defend our country in an age of strategic uncertainty.
There would be few Liberals today that would disagree with Tony Abbott’s invocation that we should be “the freedom party, the tradition party, and the patriot party.”
It should not be beyond us to unite around these simple principles.
Conclusion
My colleague Dave Sharma recently made a powerful point in Canberra.
Living standards in Australia previously doubled roughly every generation.
That’s the Australian dream – confidence knowing that your children will be better off than you were.
But with the stagnation of productivity growth in recent years, especially on this government’s watch, that is no longer true.
If recent trends were to continue, it would take more like three generations for living standards to double, instead of one.
It’s why so many young people are pessimistic about their future – and so are their parents and grandparents.
As Dave argued, this produces a very different sort of politics from what we had in the 1990s and 2000s.
If you’re no longer confident that your children will be better off than you were, you start looking enviously at others.
Politics becomes a zero-sum game of resentment: each group focused on what they can take from others.
Only the Liberal Party, and one that is true to its traditional values, can save Australia from this fate.
A policy agenda based on limited government, free markets and lower taxes is what will get our economy growing again.
It’s the sort of Liberal Party that will be recognisable again to our supporters, who have lost faith in us in recent years.
And it will begin the process of restoring our past brand equities with the broader public, who will vote Liberal when they believe it will make them better off and our country stronger.
At the same time, we must not shy away from important debates about our culture, identity and sovereignty, which are not going away in an age of disruption, and which matter so much to our supporters.
To conclude, I want to share with you excerpts from a searing critique of the Liberal Party’s electoral failure:
“It is enticing, while the wounds still sting, to criticise those who planned and managed the recent-unsuccessful campaign. And it is true that the campaign was bad – from the dull, poorly presented policy speech…”
“It is as well established as anything can be that the main purpose of the campaign policy speech is to re-assure and inspire the faithful that their traditional choice is the right one yet again…party supporters looking for reaffirmation were left with an unappetising diet of give-aways.”
“The campaign period then showed that, if there were major differences between the parties, the Liberals had made it very difficult for themselves to argue this convincingly.”
But this analysis of our failure wasn’t written in 2025. Or 2022. Or even 2007.
It was written in 1972, in a seminal article of Australian political science called “A leader and a philosophy” by a young academic named David Kemp.
It shows that the problems facing the Liberal Party are not new.
Nor are the prescriptions.
Dr Kemp argued then, as I do today, that the Liberal Party will find our way out of the wilderness once we resolve our differences, unite behind our values, align our policies with them, and confidently argue the case to the Australian people.
Thank you.
ENDS