Death of the Liberal Party

Why the Australian Liberal Party is in terminal decline. It’s over!

The Liberal Party of Australia is in the midst of its death throes. It’s highly unlikely to recover. The reasons for this are structural and institutional. This is not just about the party suffering an electoral crisis. It has been in bad situations in the past and come back. The current crisis has deep roots that go past personalities, ideas and electoral performances.

Electoral numbers

First, an overview of the party’s obvious current electoral crisis.

The ‘Liberals’ hold government in only three jurisdictions: Northern Territory, Queensland and Tasmania. In the Northern Territory, however, it’s the Country Liberal Party and in Queensland it’s the Liberal National Party. Both are rural/regional/liberal amalgamated parties. They are not Liberal Party, stand-alone entities and quite different ‘creatures’ from the Liberal Party.

In Tasmania the Liberal Party holds just 14 of the 35 lower house seats and is only in government by agreement with the Jacqui Lambie Network (holding 3 seats). The Tasmanian Liberal Party is barely in government. It is not in government anywhere else in Australia.

In Western Australia, the Liberal Party holds just 7 of the 59 lower house seats. In South Australia it’s only 13 of the 47 lower house seats. In Victoria it holds 20 of the 88 lower house seats. In New South Wales it’s only 24 of the 93 lower house seats. In the ACT (Canberra) it holds 9 of the 25 lower house seats. At the federal level, after the 3 May 2025 election, the Liberals hold just 28 of the 150 lower house seats.

Where the Liberal Party functions as a stand-alone party; of the 497 available lower house seats, it holds just 106 seats (21 percent). On this and any other electoral measure the Liberal Party is in crisis. But these electoral statistics are the appearance of the problem not the problem itself.

Liberal Party membership

Party membership is in near free fall and has been for a long time. As an example, membership declines in New South Wales are pretty much reflected across Australia. In 1970 the NSW Liberals had around 70,000 members. In 2022 that had dropped to 13,000 and by 2025 membership halved again to 6,000.

This decline is further locked in due to the rapid ageing of members. It’s quite normal now to have entire branch memberships consisting of seventy- and eighty-year-olds. They are good people, but the problem is obvious. Younger people, anyone under fifty look at this and quickly walk away. Many people in their twenties who are attracted to the idea of what the Liberal Party allegedly stands for, also leave, quickly

This problem has been known and recognised in the Liberal Party for at least two decades but all attempts to address the decline have failed. The reason for failure is structural and institutional.

Liberal Institutional failure

The Liberal Party is near entirely dependent on volunteers for its operations, grass roots campaigning, revenue raising and candidates. There is no structural, financial support base for anyone who works on local campaigns or, in particular, offers themselves as a candidate in an election.

Candidates for state and federal elections are expected to raise campaign funds, pull together volunteer campaign workers and spend vast amounts of time in local campaigning. The act of being a candidate means not only loss of income away from their usual job but invariably means forking out personal dollars to fund the campaign. They are then directed by Liberal campaign HQ to shut up and not say or produce any material that has not been approved by HQ. HQ seeks to micro-manage every word, utterance and movement of a candidate in a process that is invariably inefficient, slow and disrespectful. If a candidate shifts a tiny amount from the HQ script they will be abused for doing so. Candidates are required to declare vast amounts of sensitive, private information including their sexual behaviour activities and history, and sexual partners.

Most candidates enter the process without any knowledge, experience of or on the ground training in the hard realities of political work. They become involved with intentions to contribute to the community. When they fail to be elected to parliament, they’ll receive a ‘thanks,’ a pat on the back but then they are on their own. They then must focus back on earning an income, recover their financial losses from the experience and put their personal life back together.

This is the reason that so many Liberal members of parliament have a work background as a political functionary to a sitting parliamentary member or staffer in the Liberal Party. These work situations give those people political experience, the ability to organise numbers in pre-selection processes and establish political networks and contacts. But it’s also fraught with danger as such jobs are insecure with heavy criticism always nearby.

If a sitting Liberal member of parliament loses their seat in an election their future career/job prospects are pretty much ‘chopped liver.’ Only a few reach a level of influence where doors are opened to business consultancies and other jobs. For most, having been a Liberal parliamentarian is a negative for future jobs. Generally parliamentary pensions, particularly for those with a short parliamentary term, is modest at best. Only very long-term parliamentarians have generous pensions.

Where the idea of being a Liberal is one involving entrepreneurship, individuality, diversity of thought and respect for each other, the reverse is the experience of a Liberal candidate and parliamentary members. The organisation, both at the lay and parliamentary levels is centralised, authoritarian, top driven and expects and seeks to enforce discipline mostly through fear. The extent of this came through in the Four Corners show - Decimated (26 May 2025) that interviewed a wide range of federal Liberal MPs and senior Liberal people on the reasons for the electoral ‘decimation’ on 3 May.

The MPs made comments such as ‘we stopped listening to the electorate’ and so on. But when talking about the election campaign itself they were cautious and circumspect about how they expressed criticism of the central campaign HQ. But they all made it quite clear that they were all muzzled, had their developed policies ignored and suppressed, and to what purpose, no one was sure.

Newly re-elected Liberal Tim Wilson did not, however, hold back in the interview. Wilson lost his Melbourne suburban seat of Goldstein in 2022 but regained it at the 3 May 2025 election defying the national swing against Liberals. Wilson was blunt. He explained that Liberal campaign HQ had written off Goldstein and had made it clear that they would not help. In fact, he viewed any potential involvement of HQ as an interfering hinderance to his re-election prospects. He ran a focused local campaign as he saw fit and essentially ignored anything emanating from Liberal HQ. Wilson had the parliamentary background, experience and fortitude to defy Liberal HQ.

The Four Corners interviews drew out a Liberal Party that institutionally, in its structures, culture and behaviours is top heavy, centralised and aggressively and even nastily authoritarian. This is reflected in the parliamentarians’ behaviours when they had formed government over the last few decades. This is not what a Liberal government or the Liberal Party is supposed to be about.

The ‘brand’ of the Liberal Party is supposedly for ‘the individual’ and against authoritarianism.

But the fact is that the most common thread between both the ALP and Liberals is that as organisations, they apply iron internal discipline. And when in government they both utilise the massive ‘dictatorial’ powers of the state over the individual that is the primary feature of Australian public sector bureaucracies.

What is different with the ALP as opposed to the Liberals is that the ALP has massive resources to nurture, train, support and look after their aspiring and retiring parliamentarians. It’s this difference that is behind the death of the Liberal Party.

Labor’s institutional supremacy

Last week (25 May) I posted what has proven to be a widely read Substack. In Socialism/capitalism with Australian characteristics I gave a glimpse into how the Labor movement has captured primary institutions of Australia in particular the finance sector (through the superannuation system) and lots of others. I said that “…when this jigsaw puzzle of institutional control is put together, the picture that is revealed is that the Australian Labor movement is the Australian ‘establishment’ of this century.”

As the ALP is the political arm of the Labor establishment, it’s their access to the massive resources of the establishment that makes the ALP so dominant. The Labor movement is tough, even brutal on the people who are on the ‘inside’ and have political ambition. But for the people who rise through the brutal internal processes they end up being political survivalists, well versed in the ‘kill or be killed’ nature of politics. But whether aspiring or current or retired/defeated as a politician, the Labor establishment/machine looks after it’s own.

If someone identified with political talent is rising through the Labor ranks hoping to be a politician, they invariably will land themself a job with a reasonable income. It might be working in a union, a political staffer, inside a Labor orientated law firm, a Labor ‘friendly’ consultancy firm, a large union ‘friendly’ construction firm or in the extended and large Labor networks around the finance sector. While the person plays and learns the game of politics they have an income.

If standing for parliament or a local council, their ‘employer’ will be supportive. If someone has become a politician and is say, ‘thrown under the bus’ to be the fall person in a Labor political scandal (think the Victorian Dan Andrews scandal plagued government) they will normally be looked after. The fall person will be placed on a board, a committee of a government funded NGO, in academia, a ‘consultant’ to a construction firm or other. The same happens to a Labor politician who retires or loses their seat in an election.

In the Liberal Party such integrated support only happens with politicians of very high profile and only haphazardly. Zero support is available for aspiring and defeated politicians. This is the essential structural and institutional weakness of the Liberal Party, meaning it cannot compete with Labor.

Pity the Liberal Party

And further, don’t be fooled by the election spend. On some raw figures the Liberal Party appears to outspend and out revenue raise the Labor Party. At the 2022 federal election the Liberal party spent $131 million to the Labor Party’s $116 million. In 2019 public funding for the Liberal Party was $27.6 million and for Labor $24.7 million. In 2023-24 the Coalition (Libs and Nats) raised $74 million and Labor $68 million.

What appears to be a Liberal Party matching and slightly leading the Labor Party on resources is misleading. Such declared revenue raising and election spending figures mask the reality of what I’ve discussed above. The Liberal Party is dwarfed by the Labor Party, or more accurately the dominant Labor establishment machine. It’s an institutional thing.

The Labor machine has built and secured an all-powerful, wealthy establishment that is institutionalised within the fabric of Australian politics, business and more. The dollar value of this to Labor is impossible to assess but is certainly in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. And this has been created by Labor even while the Liberal Party has been in government for significant periods of the last few decades.

This is the reason that the Liberal Party is suffering terminal death. It could be said that the Liberal Party is effectively now a rotting political corpse the stench of which is yet to become fully smellable.

Read also : The new establishment running Australia (25 May 2025)