THE LIBERAL PARTY, ANGUS TAYLOR AND A NEW START? – PETER VAN ONSELEN

Dr Peter van Onselen is the Political Editor at Daily Mail Australia and a professor of politics and public policy in the Business School at the University of Western Australia. With the change of leaders for the federal Liberal Party in February, commentators discussed how this might affect the popularity or otherwise of the Coalition, defeated badly in the 2025 federal election. To reflect on what possible scenarios,  Peter Van Onselen addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 2 March 2026.

THE LIBERAL PARTY, ANGUS TAYLOR AND A NEW START?

PETER VAN ONSELEN

Thank you very much, Gerard, and Anne, I appreciate the invitation to speak at the Sydney Institute, it’s always an honour and a pleasure. And thank you also to everyone here in the room, as well as those watching online.

I want to speak tonight about the Liberal Party, about Angus Taylor and about whether this really amounts to a new start. I put that as a question in the title because it is the central issue: is this really a new start for the Liberal Party? Everything else really flows from that.

At the most basic level, Angus Taylor’s elevation to the Liberal leadership is unquestionably a fresh start. By definition, it is also a new start.

And given where the Liberal Party was beforehand, that is a positive, because a circuit breaker had become necessary. But will the change of leader represent the new beginning the opposition needs to again seriously vie for government.

People can debate the wisdom of removing a leader so quickly. They can debate the symbolism of removing the first female leader of the Liberal Party at the federal level so soon after she became leader. All of that is fair enough and not unreasonable. But the more important reality is that the party was performing badly, very badly, and by all indications it was doing even worse in the aftermath of the 2025 election, it’s worst election defeat ever at the federal level.

That matters all the more because this is happening in the context of what I would describe as a fairly unimpressive Labor government. If Labor were being held to account in a more robust and credible way, I doubt it would be as far ahead in the polls as it currently is. I do not believe the Labor vote is anything other than soft.

Now, I do have concerns about Angus Taylor, and I will come to those shortly. But on balance, choosing him was the lesser of evils right now. It was better than persisting with a failing leader, and better than turning to someone like Andrew Hastie at this point in time. I will come back to why I believe that’s the case as well.

The biggest problem the Liberal Party faces right now is actually one that, a few years ago, I thought Labor might end up facing. Back then, it looked as though Labor could be in real trouble because of the rise of the Greens on its left flank. The concern amongst Labor strategists was that the Greens would not just eat into Labor’s vote, but would also drag Labor around in policy terms, forcing it to shift or risk losing chunks of its support.

That looked like a potentially systemic problem for Labor. Instead, the equivalent problem now belongs to the Liberal Party, with One Nation pulling at its right flank. However, its predicament is more complicated than that.

The Liberals are fighting a war on two fronts before even muscling up to the Labor Party. On one side, they have the Teals in inner-city and affluent metropolitan seats to contend with. On the other, they have One Nation eating away at support

on the right, including in outer metropolitan areas as well as the regions. So, the Liberal Party is being squeezed from both directions at once.

And that is before we even consider the Nationals. At times, the Nationals today seem to think they are the senior Coalition partner rather than the junior one. If the Liberal Party cannot get its act together, there is a real risk that this stops sounding absurd and starts sounding plausible. And if that happens, what does it do to the Liberal Party’s longer-term capacity to recapture the centre ground? Of course, if the Liberals are being challenged by One Nation, the Nationals survival is under even greater threat from Pauline Hanson and her team.

This is the strategic mess Angus Taylor has inherited.

In this room, and among those watching online who follow politics closely, everyone knows who Angus Taylor is. But one of the most important things to remember is that, in voter land, most people do not. That cuts both ways.

Some would say that is a good thing for him, because he has had his share of missteps, both as a minister and as shadow treasurer. And I say that as someone who has been a long-term critic of Angus Taylor’s performance in a number of roles. But from the electorate’s point of view, most of that barely registers. What matters is not so much what he has done up to this point, but what he does now.

To Taylor’s credit, since becoming leader, he has done the basics reasonably well. He has kept his messaging simple, identified broad areas of attack, and not tried to do too much too quickly. That is sensible. He hasn’t been in the job long, but there is a limit to how long simplicity without substance can carry you.

In his first Question Time as opposition leader, Taylor zeroed in on issues like the ISIS brides matter. Now, whether or not that is solvable is almost beside the point politically. It’s not his problem; it’s Labor’s problem. So, from the opposition’s point of view, that is fertile ground for criticism.

More importantly, he has signalled that he wants the central battleground to be the economy and reform

. That is where it should be. The trouble is that it is always harder to prosecute an economic argument from opposition than from government. We know that, history supports that reality.

But the Liberal Party is in such a weak position now that it cannot simply rely on attacking Labor. It needs to do something more unusual for an opposition. It needs a serious manifesto, simply to rebuild credibility.

Ordinarily, oppositions are told not to overdo policy detail. Do not become the issue. Let the government be the issue. There is wisdom in that. But these are not normal circumstances. The Coalition is too far behind, and its credibility is too damaged, for that approach alone to work.

The Liberal Party needs a manifesto, not necessarily to win the next election, but to rebuild credibly, even if that means still losing, but doing so without going further backwards.

That may sound like a brutal way of putting it, but I think it is true. Bill Shorten had a manifesto in 2019 and it helped him lose. John Hewson had one in 1993 and it helped him lose. Angus Taylor needs one so that, even if he loses, he loses well and not in a wipeout. Because what the Liberal Party has to rebuild first is its credibility. Winning looks like a longer term goal once survival is locked in.

At a minimum, the Liberals need to show that they still know what they stand for, especially on the economy. The politics of marketing can come later, once they have something worth selling.

And that brings me to the current state of the polls.

At the moment, we are in genuinely unprecedented territory federally. Poll after poll is telling the same broad story. The Coalition is polling below One Nation, and not just within the margin of error. We are talking about One Nation in the mid-20s in some polling and the Coalition down near 20 per cent, or even below it. That is crisis territory for the Liberal Party, plain and simple.

At the same time, the major party vote continues to fragment. Labor has long relied on compulsory preferential voting, especially with Greens preferences flowing its way, to survive a declining primary vote. But for the Coalition to be collapsing to this extent is extraordinary.

And it raises practical questions too. If One Nation’s polling holds up by the time of the next federal election, do we start talking about three-way leaders’ debates?

Does Pauline Hanson make a case for inclusion? I do not think anyone is about to remove the formal opposition from its place in those debates. But if the polls keep suggesting that One Nation is, in effect, the larger alternative to Labor, the question becomes harder to dismiss.

What would that do to the campaign? Would it help Taylor by broadening the anti-Labor contest, or hurt him by further diminishing the Coalition’s standing as the alternative government? You can make arguments both ways.

I do not believe the current One Nation polling will be reflected on election day federally. The two-party system in Australia is remarkably resilient. Commentators enjoy writing about the demise of the Liberal Party when it is in trouble, just as they love writing about the demise of Labor when Labor is in trouble. Usually those predictions are dramatically overstated.

My sense is that once we get closer to an election, once there is more scrutiny of candidates and more public attention on Pauline Hanson’s team, some of her support will soften. One Nation’s vote is a soft vote. It is built heavily on anger, frustration and disillusionment with both major parties. Some of it can, and probably will, drift back. There are plenty of people parking their votes with One Nation now who don’t genuinely see Hanson as a viable alternative PM.

But even if One Nation’s support falls from where it currently is, it will remain a serious force by the time of the next election. And that creates another challenge for Taylor: what to do about preferences.

Should the Liberals do preference deals with One Nation? Yes, they should.

 Quite frankly, One Nation is treated as though it is uniquely beyond the pale, while Labor’s relationship with the Greens is simply accepted as normal. I do not think that makes much sense intellectually or ideologically. If Labor can preference the Greens without a moral panic at every election cycle, the Liberals should be willing to do business with One Nation where it serves their political interests to do so.

Of course, there is a tension there. In the longer term, closer alignment with One Nation complicates the task of winning back moderate Liberal voters in Teal-held seats. But that is not step one. Step one is getting the Liberal Party back into the contest at all nationally. Step three, four or five is working out how to challenge the teals effectively.

That is why the leadership change had to happen. Whatever Angus Taylor’s faults, there had to be a change. Sussan Ley was not cutting through. You can debate why. First-term opposition leaders usually struggle. Modern political history is not kind to them. But whatever the reason for Ley’s failures, she was plainly not cutting through.

In terms of the team Taylor has built around him, I think there are some sensible frontbench promotions there. Claire Chandler in finance and Tim Wilson as shadow treasurer both point to a deliberate attempt to put economics front and centre. That is exactly what the Liberal Party should be doing.

That said, I would have liked to have seen more of an economic focus in Taylor’s first Question Time as leader. If economics is going to be the core message for the remainder of this parliamentary term, that needs to be visible early and consistently.

Tim Wilson will attract attention. We know that from his role in the franking credits fight ahead of the 2019 election, when he managed to make himself central to that debate even from the backbench. He will have a hard fight to retain his seat at the next election, having won it back from the teals in a tight contest last time. But if he performs strongly in his economic portfolio, that helps both him and the broader Coalition cause.

The real aim here should be modest but important: to restore the Liberal Party’s status as a plausible alternative government before the next election, even if it is not yet in serious contention to win.

As leader Taylor is obviously central to that effort. In some ways he is a paradox. As shadow treasurer at the last election, I thought he performed very poorly. Yet now he is trying to build a leadership agenda around economic seriousness. Perhaps he was constrained by Peter Dutton and those around him in 2025. Shadow treasurers often are constrained by their leaders. But those excuses no longer apply. We will find out soon enough whether Taylor can do better now that he is in charge, without excuses.

The budget reply speech will be his first major test. It needs to be built on substance, not just Labor attacks. It must be step one in building an alternative manifesto for government.

Most voters do not know much about Angus Taylor as I already mentioned. They are not following internal opposition dynamics. But they will start to form an impression of him through key moments like that, and through how those moments are reported and interpreted.

My own view is that Taylor has the tools to succeed, on paper at least. He has the background. He has the training. He should have the capacity to do this job competently. And behind the scenes, people who deal with him often say he is much more impressive in person than he appears in the media. They describe him as engaged, sharp and serious about problem-solving. He must find a way to transfer those impressions publicly. The challenge is getting that version of Angus Taylor to come through in public politics.

Some historical perspective is worth bearing in mind as we consider the challenges the opposition faces under new leadership.

It is easy to say Angus Taylor is no John Howard. Of course he is not. But John Howard before the 1996 election was not yet the John Howard people later remembered

either. At that point, many thought his time had come and gone. He looked dated to some. Then he grew into the role and went on to define an era.

The same applies, in a different less aggrandising way, to Tony Abbott. Angus Taylor does not look nearly as politically alarming to mainstream voters as Abbott once did. Abbott still won convincingly in 2013 despite that, because he had discipline, message repetition and an enormous work rate.

Taylor needs to follow that script, but with something extra. Because he is starting from further back, he cannot rely on simple anti-government politics alone. He needs a substantive agenda of his own. That brings us back to the electorate itself. The Liberal Party’s problem is not just national polling. It is where the vote is shifting.

One Nation is not just strong in regional seats. It is finding support in outer suburban Australia as well. At the same time, the Teals continue to hold former Liberal seats in inner metropolitan areas. Some Liberals say they do not need to win those Teal seats back to form government. I think that is too optimistic. It assumes the Coalition can make up the difference elsewhere without difficulty, and I do not think that is a safe assumption. It’s hard to see any Liberal leader securing a majority of seats in the House of Representatives without winning back Teal seats.

Still, in the short term, Taylor’s team is clearly focused more on stopping the drift to One Nation than on reclaiming Teal seats

. Strategically, that makes sense. Regain your footing first. Then broaden the contest later, if you can, when you can.

Much, though, will come back to Anthony Albanese. His personal standing matters. A minus-15 net approval rating is not good for a Prime Minister. If the opposition were more credible, that would be a much bigger political problem for him than it currently is.

Taylor’s own rating is better, but that is hardly conclusive. There is a large pool of voters who simply have not formed a view yet, understandably. What those undecided voters do over time will shape the story around Taylor. If he starts to look plausible, that large open field becomes an opportunity. If he does not, it becomes irrelevance as his disapproval ratings increase.

Before I conclude, one final point about the media. There is, in my view, a real disconnect between what the commentariat obsesses over and what large parts of mainstream Australia are actually thinking about. You can see it in the polling. Labor is not on a commanding primary vote. The Coalition is in deep trouble. One Nation is surging. A lot of voters are clearly rejecting the existing political offerings.

There is also a hardening scepticism in parts of the electorate towards the excesses of progressive politics. The media rarely reflects this, if anything much of the commentariat sneers at it. But I do not think the Liberal Party should respond by making social conservatism its defining pitch. It should dead-bat most of those issues where it can and focus relentlessly on the economy.

Taylor’s biggest mistake as shadow treasurer was opposing Labor’s modest income tax cut package. However underwhelming that package was, opposing it allowed Labor to turn the argument into one about the Coalition opposing lower taxes. That was politically foolish.

The Liberal Party’s case for a return to power should be built around reducing the size of government, cutting recurrent spending, pursuing serious tax reform and returning more money to taxpayers. That is where it should plant its flag.

I am open to serious discussion about the structure of tax concessions and investment settings, but only if the objective is a better and lower-tax system, not simply a more complicated and higher-taxing one. And that is why I do worry about Andrew Hastie being placed in the industry portfolio. If that becomes a platform for flirtation with protectionist ideas such as reviving car manufacturing, and hitch he’s talked about on social media posts, it cuts directly against the sort of economically liberal message Taylor should be trying to build.

So let me end on this.

When the next federal election is called, as I expect at the end of next year, I hope we have an opposition leader in Angus Taylor whose primary focus has been on fighting Labor over economic management and on rebuilding the Liberal Party’s lost credibility in that space. Not with glib lines. Not with a handful of one-off announcements. But with a coherent alternative package.

I do not think the Coalition will win the next election, let me state that clearly. But that is not the only test that matters for the conservative side of politics right now.

The more important question is whether Taylor can make the Liberal Party look like a credible alternative again, ensuring its survival as a major political party.

If he can do that, then even a loss can become the foundation for something more serious later on. If Taylor fails, then this new start will not amount to much at all.