COALITION TURMOIL, THE LIBERAL PARTY – AFTER THE MAY ELECTION – JOHN ROSKAM

The results of the May 2025 federal election have opened up serious challenges for the Liberal Party opposition – not least of all the end of the coalition arrangements with the National Party. The full impact of what has happened has not yet been fully realised and the way ahead will be full of rebuilding and the need for compromise in an historic shift in political certainties. Both John Howard and Tony Abbott – former Liberal Party prime ministers – have criticised the move to end, even temporarily, the Coalition agreement. On Wednesday 28 May 2025, John Roskam, former executive director and now senior fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs and Parnell McGuinness, policy strategist and commentator addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss what happened and what can be done.

COALITION TURMOIL, THE LIBERAL PARTY – AFTER THE MAY ELECTION

JOHN ROSKAM

It is a pleasure and honour to address The Sydney Institute.  Anne and Gerard Henderson are heroes of mine.  Although, I’m sure they dislike the terms I’m about to use to describe them, as much as I do, these two descriptions are accurate. Anne and Gerard are “thought-leaders” for the nation and truly count among Australia’s “public intellectuals”.

My remarks this evening are about an institution that Gerard, in particular, has spent a lifetime studying and analysing, and to which he is devoted. It’s an institution that over the decades has enjoyed much success and brought him much joy. But in recent years though, it has fallen on hard times and suffered some heavy defeats.  Perhaps the most damning assessments made of it, by both its supporters and its opponents, are that it “lacks an identity” and it “no longer knows what its brand is”.

No. I’m not talking about the Essendon Football Club.

It is the Liberal Party of Australia in the wake of the 2025 federal election that I am referring to. Tonight, I will be discussing the party’s past, present and its future. I stress though that whatever I say is subject to what I call “The Henderson Caveat”.

The highlight of my week is the appearance in my email inbox of Media Watch Dog.  As Gerard often reminds us in his unmissable missive, “predictions are hard, particularly about the future”. Gerard takes as a key exhibit proving that statement an article published in The Age some 30 years ago, on Saturday 17 July 1993. Entitled “The Party on the road to nowhere” it was written by academic Judith Brett. It was accompanied by an illustration from the wonderful John Spooner, who had drawn a cartoon of a dead duck atop a granite column.

The penultimate sentence of the article is now infamous: “The Liberal Party in the 1990s seems doomed.”

Of course, three years later, John Howard would lead the Coalition, of which the Liberal Party was the dominant partner, to the first of his four election victories. Of the eleven federal elections held after Brett’s prediction, seven have been won by the Coalition – results that most certainly don’t meet the definition of the senior party in the Coalition having been “doomed”.

I’ll come back to what was the final sentence of Brett’s article. It’s very important.

Brett was writing in the wake of the Coalition having lost five elections in a row.  But even after all those losses, at the 1993 federal election, the Coalition’s first preference was vote was 44 per cent, and it held 65 seats in the 147-seat House of Representatives. After May 2025 the Coalition will either have 43 or 44 seats out of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives.  (It should be noted that the ALP had a first preference vote of only 35 per cent. But to that number should be added the Greens’ 12 per cent of first preferences. For the Coalition, there is no parallel to the Greens on the right.)

If, according to Brett, 44 per cent of first preferences spelled doom for the Coalition, one can only speculate what she would make of the Coalition’s 2025 election result – 32 per cent of voters (or to be precise 31.8 per cent) gave their first preference vote in the House of Representatives to the Coalition.

On this week’s ABC Four Corners program, Liberal MP Andrew Hastie was not afraid to look into the future.  He said: “There’s no reason to think that we won’t disappear over time if we don’t get our act together.  That’s how serious this challenge is for the Liberal Party.” I agree.

I say that as a 35-year member of the Liberal Party, as an (unsuccessful, sadly..) candidate for Liberal Party preselection at the federal and state level, as a former Executive Director of the Liberal Party’s think tank, The Menzies Research Centre, and as an advisor in both the Kennett Coalition government in Victoria and the Howard Coalition government. And, as Executive Director of the Institute of Public Affairs for 17 years, I was a close observer of the Liberal Party.

Keeping in mind the “Henderson Caveat”, I regard Hastie’s statement not as a prediction. It is a warning. There is nothing inevitable about the continued existence of the Liberal Party – at least in the form it’s been since its founding in 1944.

Political parties don’t always require a great split or electoral annihilation to end. Sometimes, they just dissolve. While they might continue to linger on, they’re a shadow of what they once were. In the UK the Tories are now polling in fourth place. Political parties can continue to be propped up by their legacy and the electoral rules and regulations written by the major parties for the benefit of the major parties.

Some would argue that for at least the last decade at the federal level, both in government and opposition, the Liberal Party has existed more in name than substance. It’s a view I have a great deal of sympathy with. The mediocre Coalition governments, which Australia suffered under from 2014, and then three years of lacklustre opposition after 2022, are explicable and almost understandable given the general lack of talent and ability in the Liberal Party room. What’s unforgivable though is the carefree authoritarianism of the Liberal Party’s response to Covid and the destruction of the civil liberties and human rights that Australians once could have taken for granted. More broadly, the Liberal Party has refused to fight for and defend the rights of Australians to freedom of speech from assaults, both domestic and internationally.

Everyone will have their own particular low point of the Coalition government between 2013 and 2022. I have three. The first was Tony Abbott’s cabinet reneging on the Coalition’s election promise to repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. The second was the Turnbull government’s retrospective tax increases on superannuation, which paved the way for policies such as the taxation of unrealised profits, now being pursued by the Labor government. Finally, it was the Coalition under a Liberal prime minister that initiated proposals for the government to censor what citizens can say to each other under the guise of combatting “misinformation and disinformation” – a stain on their record the Liberals will never be able to erase. After the Liberals went into opposition, the party reversed its position and declared it would vote against the plan. The Labor Party responded – quite accurately – “but it was your idea in the first place”.

I won’t even begin on the Liberals’ commitment to the fantasy of net zero.

It might be remarked that I’ve not mentioned the Coalition’s successes. That’s correct – I haven’t. That’s because there were so few. One of them is certainly Tony Abbott’s achievement in securing the control of the country’s borders and the integrity of its immigration program – which he did in the face of bitter opposition from much of the media and the Labor Party and some in his own party.

The result of the Voice referendum and the victory for the principle that all Australians have equal legal and political rights, regardless of their background – I don’t count it as an achievement of the Liberal Party. It was a success built on the leadership of Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who at the time sat as a National, and Nyunggai Warren Mundine, and Advance and the 18,000 volunteers Advance mobilised to fight for equality.

For nearly a year, the Liberal Party refused to take a position on the Voice. When the Liberal shadow ministry eventually declared it was against the Voice, its opposition was based on practical questions about how the Voice would operate, not principle. (Significantly, Peter Dutton said he’d support regional models of the Voice if they were created by legislation. A legislated regional Voice is no different in principle from a national Voice enshrined in the Constitution.) Some Liberal MPs and senators did campaign for No, but most refused to involve themselves in the most important referendum in Australia’s history. Some Liberal MPs actively campaigned for Yes.

Despite the fact that 60 per cent of Australians voted No – and for equality – including 87 per cent of Coalition voters, 37 per cent of Labor voters, and 41 per cent of those between the ages of 18 and 24 (contradicting the claim that all young people are Green and left-wing), the Liberal Party was and remains deeply ambivalent about the outcome of the Voice referendum. Peter Dutton as Liberal leader never spoke about the victory of equality in the referendum and he didn’t celebrate the monumental achievement of mainstream Australians. Perhaps Dutton’s reluctance was grounded in the knowledge that he knew the Liberal Party played only a minor role in what happened. The defeat of the plan to divide Australians by race wasn’t used by the Liberals as a milestone on the path to an election victory. Instead, it became a dead end – something Liberals are almost to be embarrassed about.

The Liberal Party could once have consoled itself that even if it didn’t have many principles – at least it had power. Now, it doesn’t even have that. The Liberal Party doesn’t need a review of its disastrous 2025 election campaign. It needs a reckoning.

A break in the Coalition between the Liberal Party and the Nationals would have signalled both parties were willing to start the process of that reckoning. Instead, the rush to a new Coalition agreement gives every indication that for the new Liberal leadership, it is ‘business as usual’. It is as if the party’s worst election result in its history can be brushed off as just a bad day. Since 2013, the Coalition’s representation in the House of Representatives has more than halved. That’s not one bad day. That’s a disastrous decade.

So, what is to be done? I’m about to suggest a way forward for whatever political party (or parties) represent the centre-right worldview in the Australian political system into the future. That party might be the Liberal Party – or some other party. I used the term “centre-right” deliberately and broadly to avoid turning these comments n into a three-hour seminar on the terminology and differences between “liberal”, “conservative”, and “libertarian”, and new offshoots like “modern Liberal” and “national conservative”.

I should note that John Howard’s conception of the Liberal Party as a “broad church” between “liberals” and “conservatives” is widely misunderstood. In his 1996 Robert Menzies Lecture, when he spoke about the “liberal political tradition that encompassed both Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill”, Howard was referring to how those two traditions were brought together and combined by Menzies into one single variety of political practice and philosophy that Howard termed “Australian Liberalism”. Neither Menzies nor Howard ever conceived of the description of the Liberal Party as a “broad church” as an excuse to avoid reaching a conclusion on contentious subjects or as a way to accommodate diametrically opposed positions within a single political party.If the building is too big and too broad, eventually, the roof will cave in.

I now return to that Age article of July 1993. Unwittingly, perhaps, Brett, in her concluding sentence, sets out a course for the renewal of the centre-right in Australia. As I agreed earlier with Andrew Hastie, I agree with Brett. This is the final paragraph in full of “The Party on the road to nowhere”:

The Liberal Party in the 1990s seems doomed. 

It is unable to talk coherently about any topic other than economics and, while economics is important, there are many other issues on which a party making a claim for national government needs to have a position with which its supporters are moderately comfortable, not least because people still look to politics for the articulation of moral values as well as the delivery of material rewards.

Brett, as a left-wing academic, understands, as the left does far better than the right, that politics is about everything – morals, culture, society, and yes, economics too. Liberals and conservatives might wish it otherwise, but that’s the reality. I’ve never had to explain to my friends on the left (even those who have never heard of Andrew Breitbart) the meaning of the phrase, “politics is downstream of culture”. I’ve talked to Liberal MPs who have little knowledge and even less interest in such concepts.

The moral values articulated to voters by Anthony Albanese with devastating effect at the 2025 federal election were that in the middle of a cost of living crisis and amid a world of turmoil and uncertainty, the Labor Party will take care of you, and the Liberals won’t. The Labor Party promised to spend money borrowed from future generations – a policy that, according to a Newspoll survey of March 2025, was supported by 83 per cent of voters, including 77 per cent of Coalition voters.

As Andrew Kemp has noted, the old rule of thumb of Australian politics is that Labor won elections when it departed from its philosophy, and Liberals won elections when they stuck with theirs. The 2025 federal election result proved the truth of the second part of that rule and disproved the first part. It is too early to tell whether the 2025 election heralds a permanent shift to the left in the character of economic policy-making in this country.

Brett’s explanation as to why, in the 1990s, the Liberals appeared doomed can be simply put. Menzies had a deep understanding of the role of the Liberal Party in Australian society based on “Protestantism and its ethic of hard work, personal responsibility, thrift and community.  A combination of modest aspiration and moral pride marked the middle class of Menzies’ day”. Liberal leaders after Menzies have had no such appreciation. As Brett wrote the Liberals’ “Fightback!” of 1993 was the culmination of a desiccated liberalism of the 1980s that talked only of money, economic rationalism, and self-interest. She added, “John Hewson was unable to project any convincing vision of the shared values on which Australian life should be based” and “John Hewson and his new wife Caroline – both good-looking, intelligent, healthy and well-heeled – convincingly represented the rewards of success but offered little comfort to the slow, the ill or the down-at-heel”.  According to Brett, the Labor Party on the other hand, has always been able to appeal to its tradition “its stress on the values of human cooperation, equality and social justice for all”.

Brett’s assessment of Fightback! and the image of itself the Liberal Party portrayed at the time was not wrong. Interestingly, she was writing this in 1993, four years after John Howard had finished his first term as Liberal leader, and when many commentators thought Howard would forever wander in the political wilderness. For all that, Brett identified Howard as perhaps the only Liberal leader “prepared to talk about social questions, to stop talking about economics and talk about values”.  However, according to Brett, “The trouble was that he [Howard] could only do it in ways that were divisive.”  For example,

[Howard] introduced the term “One Australia”, stressing the commitment newcomers should make to Australia’s cultural and social values, as well as its laws and political institutions, and alienated many Australians of non-British background, as well as many of the latter who value Australia’s post-war cultural diversity. When the Liberals did stop talking about economics and started talking about their social values, they were in trouble because their values were no longer appropriate to many Australians’ experience.

As history and four election victories demonstrated, John Howard’s values were not quite as divisive as Brett believed them to be.

There have been sixteen leaders of the federal parliamentary Liberal Party. As yet only four of those leaders have delivered the Liberal Party into government from opposition: Robert Menzies, Malcolm Fraser, John Howard and Tony Abbott. Unlike some Liberal leaders, all four possessed a strong set of values. Again, unlike some other leaders, all four were willing to express and explain and defend those values.

In 2025, the Liberal Party is a party currently without values that are expressed either in its actions or its policies.

In conclusion, I will apply the “Henderson Caveat”.  I am not prepared to say the Liberal Party of the 2020s seems doomed. But I will repeat what Andrew Hastie has said: “There’s no reason to think that we won’t disappear over time if we don’t get our act together. That’s how serious this challenge is for the Liberal Party.”