Comment

Chris Wallace
Happy birthday, Liberal Party of Australia

On Monday, the Liberal Party turns 81.

Of several possible birthday options, the Liberals observe October 13, 1944, the date on which a conference of anti-Labor parties called by founder Robert Menzies began in a Masonic hall near Parliament House in Canberra.

Menzies would likely be rolling his eyes at the party’s antics this week. He had seen it all before. The disintegration and remaking of the centre-right of politics was routine in his lifetime. He was a part of it.

Menzies entered Victorian state politics as a Nationalist Party MP in 1928. The Nationalists were a merger of the Deakinite Liberal Party with Billy Hughes’s breakaway National Labor Party.

Menzies switched to federal politics in 1934 as a member of the United Australia Party. The UAP was a merger of the Nationalists with Hughes’s Australian Party and Labor breakaways including Joe Lyons.

When the UAP foundered, Menzies led the merger of it with a pastiche of other anti-Labor groups, including the conservative Australian Women’s National League, which for 40 years had pressed politicians hard on issues affecting women and children.

Menzies was unusual in choosing the time and place of his ultimate departure from politics himself, retiring as prime minister in 1966. Every Liberal leadership since has ended in tears.

Harold Holt drowned. John Gorton walked the plank. Billy McMahon resigned as leader after losing the only election in which he led the party. Billy Snedden was white-anted and ousted by Malcolm Fraser. Fraser left the job literally in tears after losing the 1983 election.

Andrew Peacock and John Howard were locked in internecine battle for more than a decade, both leading losing election campaigns. Howard eventually became prime minister but ignominiously lost his own seat when voters finally turfed him out. Then came Brendan Nelson, dispatched before even leading the party to a poll.

Malcolm Turnbull came and went as opposition leader. Later as prime minister he fluffed his destiny by failing to press decisively for liberal policies from the outset. He was felled by right-wingers over later, tentative efforts to do so.

Tony Abbott flamed out before getting to a second election as prime minister. Scott Morrison got found out by voters at his second outing and became a virtual political untouchable after his 2022 election loss. Peter Dutton lost his own seat at his first election as leader in 2025.

Dutton was replaced in the worst job in politics by Sussan Ley. Already her term is being marred by current and former Liberal frontbenchers intent on making life difficult. Principal among them are fractious Western Australian Liberal MP Andrew Hastie and Northern Territory Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.

Hastie’s harrumphing off to the back bench, and Price’s gratuitous letter to Ley complaining about “juvenile” leaks making the Coalition look like a “clown show”, are part of life for Ley.

The long arm of the mad uncles – former senior politicians who can’t resist getting involved in political business that is no longer theirs – was evident in the Liberals’ turmoil this week.

Behind the scenes lurk the ghosts of former Liberal leaders – Tony Abbott in Hastie and Price’s corner, and Peter Dutton in the other.

Abbott is an Olympic-grade destabiliser – witness his destruction of the Gillard government – and Hastie and Price will have learnt lessons at his knee.

Dutton won’t be relishing the attention Hastie is getting, including media descriptions of him as the “divisive star of the Liberal party’s internal political theatre”.

Hastie starts drawing attention to himself, then prominently resigns from the front bench to the perceived detriment of Ley.

The next thing you know, Dutton’s unflattering assessment of Hastie’s performance as a shadow frontbencher under Dutton, made confidentially to the Liberals’ internal election review, is all over the media.

Deidre Chambers, what a coincidence!

Next an exculpation of Hastie appeared in the Nine newspapers via an excerpt from Niki Savva’s forthcoming book on the Coalition’s election loss. Rather than running dead under Dutton, Savva reports that Hastie was cut out by him, with the two barely on speaking terms.

The Dutton–Hastie tensions were broadly missed by commentators during the previous parliament but are on prominent display now.

As the stoush unfolded, Ley remained serene. Liberal masculinities are not her immediate concern. As a cattle farmer, she’s had to manage tetchy bulls in paddocks before. Provided you’ve got strong fences, ignoring them can work.

In any case, Ley had a mad uncle of her own weigh in supportively this week. Former prime minister Scott Morrison urged Liberals to focus on Ley’s goal of making economic policy, and government spending in particular, an issue on which they could unite.

In a speech to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) last month, Ley called for more means-testing of government assistance and said high-income households should not get cost-of-living help.

It was a politically “brave” speech given that, from opposition, political parties generally don’t win elections by promising to take things away from people.

“Australians have big choices to make,” Morrison told Sky News on Monday. “And I think Sussan’s laying those out very well.”

The former prime minister’s support is an equivocal plus, given his aforementioned untouchable status.

Nor may the opposition’s robotic shadow treasurer, Ted O’Brien, be the best wingman for Ley in the Coalition’s quest for economic credibility.

He was fearmongering in the financial press on Wednesday, alleging a future risk of Australia losing its AAA credit rating. S&P Global Ratings confirmed the AAA rating, in fact, less than a fortnight ago.

O’Brien promised “we are already working on a plan that offers lower spending, lower taxes and lower debt than Labor”. Said plan is as big a fantasy as the nuclear mirage he tried to foist on voters at the May election.

That won’t stop Robot Ted repeating this line ad nauseam between now and election day in 2028. Some may even believe it. As Trump’s America shows, disaffected voters will believe almost anything if it means they can give incumbents a kick.

When Monday comes it will not be so much a happy birthday for the Liberals as a day of wonderment that the party has lasted so long.

Political genealogists look to the Labor Party and see a strong tree that, despite branches dropping off now and then, has endured since before Federation and looks set to keep doing so.

They see the centre-right of Australian politics as a variegated thicket, the latest iteration of which looks overdue for change, having been pruned hard by voters who didn’t like the look of it at the last election.

Far-sighted Liberals might need to start thinking about doing for centre-right politics in Australia today what Menzies did in 1944. They need to look at the moderate teal and orange crossbenchers, who occupy formerly blue riband Liberal seats, and work out what new vehicle can be built with them.

If Ley wants to be part of that, or in time even do a Menzies and lead it, she has to avoid being dragged to the right as the Liberal man-cave dwellers brawl in pursuit of her job.

Centre-right politics is being bent out of shape by the far-flung states of Hastie’s WA and Dutton’s Queensland, fuelled by the Murdoch and Stokes media.

Elections can’t be won without mainstream support in the populous south-east of Australia, however. To become competitive again it might take a contemporary new centre-right party that welcomes rather than grudgingly tolerates women, embraces science-based climate policies and has high integrity standards.

It will be interesting to see if this task falls to Ley who, on the surface at least, resembles a crossbench teal more than the knuckle draggers causing trouble this week.

Paul Bongiorno is on leave.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 10, 2025 as "Happy birthday, Liberal Party of Australia".

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