No matter the spots, the Liberal leopard remains the same

Despite calls for reform, the Liberal Party’s core purpose – serving elite interests through fear and division – remains unchanged, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

THERE IS NO DOUBT that Labor’s historic election victory in May has made some in the Liberal Party accept that if the party is ever going to be electable again, they need to change. Yet, under Sussan Ley’s leadership, nothing seems to be changing. This raises the question: can a leopard change its spots? And why would it want to if a spotless leopard was no longer a leopard?

There has been a lot of analysis post-election about what caused the Liberal Party’s landslide loss, with journalists and former Liberals pointing to the party’s failures to represent diverse Australia. For instance, the ABC reported that young people weren’t connecting with the party’s policies. The Saturday Paper and the ABC also pointed to the problem the Liberal Party has with women voters, particularly due to women being underrepresented amongst the Liberal Party's federal and state ranks. SBS reported that the Liberal Party hasn’t connected with multicultural Australia.

All this focus on how diverse the Liberal Party looks is far less relevant than the policies that the party is willing to deliver to the community. To be frank, what is the point of having more young people, more women and a more multicultural Liberal Party if they continue to do what they’ve always done: to serve the interests of a few at the expense of the many?

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This point gets to the crux of the Liberal Party’s electability problem. Their problem is not how representative they look and is not one of marketing, requiring them to improve how they present themselves to the public. The problem is that their policies need to represent the interests of the mass electorate. Since the Liberal Party leopard exists to serve the interests of the capitalist elite, no tinkering with its spots is going to change that.

The Liberal Party has always existed to serve elite interests at the expense of the masses. It is a historical fact that the Liberal Party was specifically established to compete electorally with the Labor Party, to undermine the labour movement’s political ambitions. Nothing has changed in this respect.

This truth is the reason why the Liberals’ own analysis of their electoral wipeout and the analysis of much of the media is focused on how the Liberals present themselves to the public and not on the reason they exist, the party’s substance, their political raison d'être. They do not want to talk about the fact that they cannot change their purpose, because to admit that is to admit their problems are not spotted skin-deep.

Let’s take the crucial policy of climate action. When former PM Scott Morrison was booted out of office in 2022 and a whole swathe of Liberal moderates lost their metropolitan seats to Teal Independents, it was clear that the electorate was punishing the Liberals for decades of failure to take climate action.

To fix this electoral problem, a simple solution was available to the Liberals. They could change their stance on climate action. So, why did former Leader Peter Dutton’s Liberals not take it? Simple. The Liberals do not represent the interests of the public in protecting the planet from the catastrophic impact of a warming climate. The Liberals defend and protect the interests of big oil and fossil fuel billionaires.

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In the past, where there have been moderate Liberals who have appeared to hold strong convictions on climate action – think Malcolm Turnbull and Matt Kean – ultimately, the advocates for denial and delay on climate have won out. This Liberal opposition to climate action also reflects a need to keep the billionaire-coal-baron-loving Nationals in their voting coalition, because without Nationals seats, they would never win government.

That is why, despite their electoral problems getting worse in 2025, Ley won’t be changing the Liberals’ decades-long opposition to climate action.

When Liberals do present policies that aim to be electorally popular amongst the masses, these are, lo and behold, not to improve the welfare safety net, the health system, or workers’ conditions and wages, but are rather middle-class welfare. These policies are not aimed at addressing wealth inequality, nor solving society’s structural problems, but rather they are electoral bribes such as tax cuts for high-income earners, using super to buy property (a hugely irresponsible policy hurting retirement incomes) and, even more outrageously, a recent suggestion that private school fees should be tax deductible.

The reason the Liberals have to resort to middle-class-welfare-bribery is because they know, deep down, they do not serve the interests of the masses and so can only pretend they do during election periods.

This Liberals’ electoral conundrum – wanting to serve the few but needing the votes of the masses – also explains their historic reliance on campaigns of division, fear, hate, culture warring, anti-intellectualism and anti-science, campaigns often underpinned by misleading and untruthful claims.

These toxic and nasty political fear campaigns represent the Liberal Party doing what they were established to do: undermining Labor’s electoral chances.

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Whether it was the Liberals’ fighting Labor’s Carbon Price (which Sky News host Peta Credlin admitted was not a carbon tax); Dutton’s ugly, aggressive and deceitful No campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament (resplendent with manipulative and false accusations to whip up fear and confusion); the Liberals branding Labor’s franking credit changes as a retirement tax (frightening all retirees into thinking it impacted them when it didn’t); to any time Labor proposes anything progressive provoking a Liberal scare campaign against it, this is what the Liberals exist to do. It is their very point.

The Liberals’ commitment to, indeed, reliance on fear campaigning and culture warring has been reiterated by new Leader Sussan Ley. Amongst all the talk of needing to change the party, Ley was asked by Karen Barlow from The Saturday Paper whether her Liberals would end the culture wars, such as attacks on Welcome to Country ceremonies. Ley steadfastly refused to rule them out, saying they would “always be a feature of the Australian landscape”.

The Liberals’ continued support of this culture war was evident in the first week of Parliament post the election. Ley had the opportunity to show where she stands on such issues when Senator Pauline Hanson and her One Nation extremist senators disrespectfully turned their backs on the Acknowledgement of Country in the Senate. Ley showed her allegiance to One Nation by saying nothing.

The Liberals are not going to change. If the Liberals embraced policies like climate action, which are good for the masses but challenge the profits of billionaire fossil fuel interests, and if they stopped using campaigns of fear and division to undermine the Labor Party, the Liberal Party would no longer have any point.

The Liberals exist to undermine Labor, not to become the Labor Party. That is why the Liberal leopard has no intention of changing its spots, nor its very essence. No matter how unelectable they are, the Liberals can’t change the reason they exist.