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Op-eds
October 15, 2025
Wednesday 15 October
Senator James Paterson
The Australian
This is a serious moment for the Liberal Party, but it need not be an existential one. Right now, we face serious intellectual and organisational challenges. We must learn how to campaign and communicate better.
There is nothing defective with our values. 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 self-examination and debate. We need to have these debates, and some of them will be necessarily public and contested. But that does not mean unity and discipline are not important. There is a time limit on this soul-searching process.
Already we can see the Albanese government has not gotten any better in their second term. It is particularly disturbing because Albanese is not above using the power of the state to entrench his party in power.
The Centre for Public Integrity has demonstrated that this government is the least transparent in 30 years, and that’s before the introduction of a retrograde FOI “reform” bill. This behaviour is more befitting of a petty despot than a democratic leader.
If you want to understand what the consequences of an entrenched, long-term Labor government looks like, just examine Victoria. We have a moral duty to prevent the Victorianisation of Australia.
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.
There’s also a risk we misinterpret our election 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 anti-Semitism. I don’t think we lost a single vote on it. But if we did, I don’t care.
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. First, resolve our internal differences about our direction amicably. Second, hold the Albanese government to account and expose its failings. And, third, develop a coherent and compelling alternative policy agenda.
The first of these is the hardest, and the most important. 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.
The Liberal Party’s history wars can be at times tedious and tribal. 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.
Despite the economic and political success of Australian liberalism, there are some marginal voices arguing that the Liberal Party should split. They argue 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. 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 legitimate. Not everything about this era has been good.
A particular concern for today’s conservatives is the decline of 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.
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 party. The first is 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 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. 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. These critics are not completely wrong: the economy must be at the heart of our pitch to modern Australia.
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. I am unconvinced a platform of significantly increasing government spending, in a country where it is already 44 per cent of GDP, and there is a large budget deficit, is fiscally sustainable. Or, for that matter, particularly conservative.
But even if it would work politically in the UK, it doesn’t mean it would work in Australia. What Reform has 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. If we are in a competition of who can best hand out public money with Labor, we will lose every time.
The alternative to these false choices is to maintain, and update the classical liberal-conservative fusion which has served us so well throughout our 81-year history.
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. The best way we can do so is with a ruthless focus on competitiveness and productivity.
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.
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. Only the most extreme elements of the left seek to tear them down.
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. We all agree Labor’s approach to emissions reduction has smashed the energy market. We all agree the budget is unsustainable and spending too high.
We all agree our economy is not productive or competitive enough. We all agree we must do more to defend our country. 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.
The Liberal Party will find its 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.