The Strange Death of the Liberal Party of Australia

The 2025 Australian federal election has been run and won by the Australian Labor Party. The crushing victory has pushed what remains of the conservative coalition to the brink. Labor’s 2022 victory turned out not to be a one-term blip, as commentators and a complacent Opposition had assumed. As recently as January this year, the consensus, dare I say vibe, painted Labor’s defeat as all but in the bag. The right wing Murdoch media were exultant. Liberal and coalition leader Peter Dutton was already rearranging the furniture in Kirribilli House, domicile of the Prime Minister overlooking Sydney Harbour. What went wrong?

It's not as if the task of unseating Labor was onerous. Sitting on a small majority in the House of Representatives, Labor could only afford to lose two seats or would otherwise be forced into forming a minority government with support from a hodge podge combination of Greens, small-l liberal ‘teals’ and independents who ranged across the political spectrum. As it turned out, Labor held almost all its seats and picked up an extra seventeen members. Most of the gains came from Liberal Party losses.

However, the picture is complicated by the unusual history and make-up of the conservative Opposition in Australia. Since Federation at the beginning of the twentieth century, conservative interests in politics have been unable to form majority governments in their own right. This followed in part due to the early and strong growth of the labour movement and the early adoption of universal suffrage. The highly urbanised nature of post white settlement and the strong influence of Irish immigration have also proved bulwarks against conservative ascendency. Hence, from the 1920s when the Country Party was created, conservative governments have relied on a coalition of city business and rural interests to keep Labor out of power. This business model proved remarkably successful. Labor has been in opposition for all but 35 years over the past 100 years. For most of that time, the two non-Labor parties have been in formal coalition, with well-established processes for pre-selecting candidates and dividing the spoils of office. There has rarely been any doubt that the Liberal Party of Australia, formed by Robert Menzies in 1944, was the senior and the Country (now renamed National) Party the junior members of the coalition.

The exception occurred in the late 1980s when the Queensland National Party premier, Johannes Bjelke Petersen, mounted an independent attempt to become Prime Minister. In the fallout from his failure, the two parties in Queensland merged to form the Liberal National Party of Queensland (LNP). Ostensibly, the two parties remain separate at the federal level, a messy arrangement that hides the strong residual influence of the old national party in Queensland. Although the LNP members sit in the Liberal Party caucus, the spirit of Joh lives on. This reality is reflected in the way that the Australian electoral Commission provides separate results for the LNP and Liberal Party in federal elections.

In an earlier post (https://www.mikeberrywriting.com/mike-berry-blog/2022/6/5/stop-press-red-sea-refuses-to-open) I argued that the 2022 election saw the beginning of a rearrangement of the coalition. At that election, the National Party and LNP won a combined 31 seats, compared to 27 held by the Liberal Party. I commented then that this made the latter the third party in the nation and the junior member of the coalition. I further suggested that the coalition, under the likely leadership of two Queenslanders would be dragged further to the right as Labor moved to firmly hold the centre ground. The 2025 election has apparently borne out these speculations. Labor picked up a net 17 seats, mostly from the coalition. The Liberal Party was the big loser. Down by 8 or 9 (depending on final recounts), compared to six by the LNP and Nationals. This abysmal showing was reinforced by the coalition losses across the nation in the Senate. The Liberal Party was virtually evicted from the large cities housing sixty percent of the populations and generating three quarters of the nation’s national income. Internationally, there are many countries with long-stablished rural-agrarian political parties exerting influence at the national level. Australia is now in the unique situation of having not one but two such beasts. The Greens were almost wiped out in the Lower House and lost a senator jumping ship to Labor, while the crossbench maintains a healthy but arithmetically impotent presence. In essence, Australia has followed Canada and the United Kingdom in bucking the trend towards the electoral triumph of right wing populism in western democracies.

However, this can hardly be claimed as a decisive victory for social democracy, since the administrations in all three countries can at best be seen to be centre-left-light, constrained by the geoeconomic threats posed by the imminent ‘polycrisis’ of global recession, climate change, war and pandemics. Australia, like Canada and the UK might actually be described as leaning slightly centre-right as the far right pulls the centre-right further away from the centre ground they have vacated. In other words, Australia’s two party system is beginning to invalidate the central tendency theorem of political science and resemble the USA which has always lacked a genuine major centre-left political party. ‘The radical centre’ is repositioning rightward dragged by alt-right and libertarian concerns around economic inequality, cultural wars and immigration.

It didn’t take long for the Nationals’ leader Littleproud to blow up the coalition in an attempt to gouge greater gains in the establishment of policy priorities and shadow ministerial positions in the new Australian Parliament. His coup failed in the face of concerted criticism from within and without, by conservative interest and grandees. The idea that the tail with 9 seats out of 150 in the Lower House and even smaller numbers in the Senate could wag the dog was quickly consigned to the bin. A forced reconciliation barely obscures the deep divisions and personal animosities bubbling below the surface.

However, this was a pyrrhic victory for the newly elected and first female leader of the Liberal Party, who must now preside over a postmortem as to what went wrong and how to fix it. She is faced with a deeply divided party and fractious coalition partner, both dominated by right wing hardliners who wish to double down on the policies that delivered their crushing defeat. Egged on by the ultra-right commentariat, the decimated coalition risks permanently losing the voters in urban seats, women and the young that they need to get back into the game.

Labor can hardly believe their luck. Given the changed composition of the Senate, Labor will be able to pass its legislation with the support of either the 11 Green Senators or the reduced Coalition numbers. And yet, not all is rosy for the government. Apart from dealing with the challenges posed in a Trump2.0 world, the Australian electorate is also fractious. The much-touted cost of living crisis, housing unaffordability and lagging progress on climate change are ratcheting up demands on governments to move beyond ‘aspirational’ policies. Rising economic inequality and polarisation continues to fuel populist demands, in Australia as elsewhere. The recent election may have dumped cold water on the idea that the culture wars from America can be imported Down Under, but the populist fire still smoulders. As I signed off in my 2022 post – Good luck Albo.