Liberal Party can't save itself from foundational flaws

The Liberal Party isn’t just in trouble — it’s in denial. A new leader can't fix foundations built to resist progress. Dr Victoria Fielding reports.

WHEN I WAS ABOUT ten years old, I recall asking my mother why the Labor Party did not easily win majorities ahead of the Liberal Party since Labor represented working people and working people were the vast majority of Australian voters.

I remember her replying, “It’s more complicated than that."

It might have taken 30 years, but the result of the 2025 Federal Election makes it feel like this equation is no longer that complicated.

Labor has won 93, probably 94 seats. The Coalition has won 43. Only 18 of these belong to the Liberal Party, 16 to the Liberal National Party and nine to the Nationals. There are 11 Independents, including nine Teals and one Green. Bradfield, yet to be called, could also go to the Teal column.

To say the Liberal Party has some electoral problems is a massive understatement.

Historic election result sees Labor triumph over Liberal catastrophes

Despite a less-than-stellar performance, Labor won the 2025 Election in a landslide due to the Coalition's immense failure to appeal to voters.

Despite this obvious political crisis, the right side of politics – the Liberals, Nationals and their News Corp cheer squad – would like to maintain the delusion that their problems are just a few cracks in the façade. They think these cracks can be papered over with better messaging, a new leader and the hope that if Liberal candidate Tim Wilson can win one seat off a Teal independent – albeit using a grubby News Corp-Advance fear campaign – then not all hope is lost.

My ten-year-old self could see the true source of the Liberals’ electoral woes. The fact is, the Liberals do not represent the interests of a broad cross-section of Australian voters, but only the very wealthiest percentile. It has always been like this way. The entire point of the Liberal Party since its inception was to oppose progressive policies by opposing the formation of a Labor Government — and this mission continues today.

This inalienable truth explains the magnitude of the Liberals’ electoral problems. This is why the Liberals’ woes can’t be fixed with wallpaper. The foundations are rotten.

These rotten foundations have been strategically hidden by the Liberal Party, in coalition with the Nationals, for generations. Their ongoing political war against the Labor Party and any other progressive competitors is a distraction.

This war has seen the Liberal Nationals oppose progress in Australian society across the policy spectrum, whether it be:

bashing workers’ rights;
opposing gender equity;
slashing funding to public services;
slashing funding to health and education;
campaigning against taxes aimed at wealth redistribution;
attacking immigration; or
undermining Aboriginal reconciliation.

The list goes on and on. The Liberal Party exists to mount fear campaigns and wage culture wars against progress on behalf of the interests of the rich and powerful who want to maintain their powerful status quo.

I can’t put it more simply than saying that if the Liberal Party was not waging this war, what would be the point of the Liberal Party?

These political and culture wars have been particularly rabid in the past three years under defeated Opposition Leader Peter Dutton as he continued the hard-right lurch towards MAGAficiation of the Liberal Party, intensifying a trend that former Prime Ministers Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott and John Howard started.

This includes the vicious and unnecessary 'No' campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which was designed to do nothing except produce racial grievance against Aboriginal people, to divide and conquer the nation, cruelly using the lives of Indigenous Australians as a political football.

Leying down the new order with Sussan: A Liberal Party fictional tale

A woman has been voted leader of the Liberal Party, but will Sussan Ley listen to voters and "modernise" the party, and is her appointment a breakthrough for women?

It is telling that even after Dutton sensed that his MAGA-Liberals might need to distance themselves from U.S. President Donald Trump after Trump showed just how dangerous a Dutton-like character is in power, he still managed to be the first Liberal leader to make a preference deal with the far-right Pauline Hanson One Nation (PHON).

Constant and unrelenting fear-mongering from the Liberal Party results from their inability to talk about what they really want to do with power — because what they really want to do is serve an elite minority. This is why the Liberal Party has to rely on grubby fear campaigns, used to mislead, scare and confuse voters, particularly to undermine the Labor Party. The Liberal Party does not represent the interests of the masses and their policies cannot mask this fact.

This reality has been particularly obvious when it comes to the Liberals’ policy obstructionism in opposition to climate action, illustrated by:

Tony Abbott’s axe-the-carbon-tax election win;
Scott Morrison rolling former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull when he threatened to take action;
Morrison’s “electric vehicles will end the weekend” and his refusal to take meaningful climate action, even while Australia experienced climate-driven bushfires and floods; and
Peter Dutton’s attempts to undermine renewables with his ridiculous nuclear policy.

The Liberals have always shown us they’re on the side of fossil fuel billionaires, like their patron Gina Rinehart, and not on the side of the 64 per cent of Australians who are concerned about climate change.

The Liberals would like the public to think that their new shade of wallpaper – Liberals leader Sussan Ley – is their “fresh start”, their “modern face”, proof of their ability to change with the times. Yet, this is the same Sussan Ley who has historically been pro-nuclear, pro-gas, and opposed to renewables. Her deputy, Ted O’Brien, recently used weasel words to dodge questions about the Coalition’s plans to scrap Australia’s Paris climate agreements if the Liberals won government.

Even if Ley was pragmatic enough to see how the Liberals’ anti-climate change stance was responsible for the rise of the teal independents, it is clear that if she tries to support climate action, Liberal candidate Angus Taylor will spill her leadership. The fact is, nothing is going to change the Liberal Party, because the Liberal Party cannot change the reason it exists.

When the foundations are rotten, no matter what you build on top, it will just keep falling down.