Menzies moment?

Dear ,

As a result of the last election the Liberal Party is in what you might call a Menzies moment - that time in 1943 when the Curtin government annihilated the United Australia Party and the non-Labor side looked like it would be out of government for a generation.

Then, “cometh the hour, cometh the man”. Menzies made all the difference. They say that history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. If the Liberal Party needs a Menzies now, then the only man or woman with anything like a similar resumé is Tony Abbott – former prime minister, barrister in the court of public opinion, and a public intellectual. But “you’ll never win with Abbott” and maybe the rhyme doesn’t require a superman or woman but something more broad-based, or maybe it doesn’t.

The results are eerily similar. In 1943 the Coalition had 31.1% of the seats in the Representatives, today it is 32.5%. In the Senate the figures were 31.3% versus 38.2%.

I’m currently agnostic as to whether the Liberal Party is salvageable. The UAP was a new party founded only 13 years before from various antecedents so wouldn’t have had the same institutional stability as today’s Liberal Party which celebrates 81 years of existence this year. But then some of the same problems have reappeared. Just as the UAP became captive to commercial interests, so too the Liberal Party has become captured in at least one state.

This email is my analysis of the last election with some suggestions on the way ahead. There is a longer version attached to this email. Undoubtedly an avalanche of such analyses is heading your way over the next few years.

I should note that one of the AIP’s friends and supporters, Nick Minchin, has been given the task, along with Pru Goward AO, of reviewing the Liberal Party’s election performance. I hope we can prevail on him to address a seminar at some stage. Senator James McGrath is apparently likely to be given the job of conducting a deeper structural review. It’s good to have such influential folk so close at hand in Queensland.

After you’ve read my thoughts please contact me and let me know what you think. The AIP exists to provide ideas and support for the centre-right in Australian politics. Or write something that can be published on our website.

Part of our role should be as a clearing house for discussion on where the non-Labor parties go from here. Not just the Liberal and National Parties, but the flotilla of smaller nationalist parties that make up around 15% of the vote.

As I said above, there are two versions of this email – the long and the short. To read the long, read the attachment, but if you only have time for the Reader’s Digest version keep reading here.

Let’s not exaggerate how bad the result was for the Coalition

A 55% to 45% result is bad, but there have been worse results for both sides, and in each case the rebound has been strong enough to take the loser to government in a few terms of parliament. Labor won 58% of the vote in 1943, but by 1949 the newly formed Liberal party under Sir Robert Menzies won the first of 7 elections. Labor crashed under Caldwell in 1966, but by 1972 they were in government. Fraser handed Labor an historic drubbing in 1975 only to fall to Bob Hawke seven and a half years later.

Let’s not exaggerate how good the result was for the ALP

Labor won not because they were brilliant, but because the Coalition didn’t offer a meaningfully different alternative. Both Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton went into this election with net negative approval ratings, meaning more people disapproved of the job they were doing than approved.

What caused the result?

The Coalition’s reputation was damaged by how it managed the COVID pandemic, particularly with unfunded welfare spending. It also became overconfident that it would win because of a few good polls late in 2024 and early in 2025. As a result, its first preference vote drifted down close to Labor’s and it needed third party preferences to win. It was never going to get them in sufficient numbers.

The quality of politicians from all parties has declined significantly in recent years, along with party memberships. At the same time the number of leaders with a strong understanding of their own parties’ philosophies seems to be declining as well. This led to a campaign where the Coalition was mini-meing the Labor government, and where those few policies that were significantly different blew up during the campaign.

An added factor for the coalition is the disarray of all their state branches, bar Queensland. This is a major problem for a party which is a federation of state organisations.

Convenient but wrong excuses

It wasn’t because they were too right wing. There was very little between the election policies of the two sides. Neither was it because they weren’t modern enough. As the Voice referendum showed, modern Australia is more congruent with the Coalition than with Labor.

More women voted Labor and Greens than Coalition and Nationalist, but more men voted the other way. There is a gender divide, but there doesn’t need to be, and the Coalition should play a part in healing it.

There is also an age divide. There always has been, but non-Labor parties can get a good share of the youth vote if they campaign on the issues that matter to them. There is also a shift occurring in support from richer to poorer suburbs. As Tim Wilson in Goldstein demonstrated, the Coalition can still win rich seats, but as swings in seats like Werriwa also demonstrate, there are enough potential wins in outer suburbs to make up for the loss of some inner-city suburbs populated by wealthy, well-educated urban elites.

Then there’s migration. With many migrants sharing centre-right values, maybe the problem is that no one actually pitches to them for their votes. In the US Donald Trump has increased his Hispanic vote from 29% in 2016 to 48% in 2024 – a 50% increase in just 8 years.

Last, it wasn’t Trump, and Australia needs to deal with its Trump Derangement Syndrome, because it is being leveraged in the service of bad policies, particularly on foreign affairs.

What to do

I’m not going to get too prescriptive here, but there are a few things the centre and right need to pay attention to.

1. Analysing the election result honestly without excuses, and with consequences for those who ran the parts of the campaign that failed
2. Becoming grass roots again. Engaging more voters in activism, not necessarily through the straitjacket of a formal party structure, but in a way that they can be informed and mobilised.
3. Finding better candidates. This might need to involve a rebirth of some sort of republicanism in the Roman sense of the word, noblesse oblige, or patriotic duty so that the best candidates actually show up to preselections. It might also involve a different form of preselection.
4. Developing a policy consensus that confers clear benefits on Australians, born out of principal, but which is practical, not ideological, in its application.
5. Refreshing, or replacing, their organisations so they are fit for purpose. Finding the staff who can deliver victory rather than just managing decline.
6. Developing a deep critique of the federal government consistent with their principles.
7. Pitching to those groups that delivered Labor victory, such as women, young Australians and migrants and telling them why they should change their votes.

Those are my preliminary thoughts. Look forward to hearing yours.

Kind regards,

GRAHAM YOUNG
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE FOR PROGRESS