The Crisis of Australian Conservatism

In May 2025, the Australian Liberals suffered a devastating election loss to the centre-left Australian Labor Party, including the loss of the seat of former Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. Despite the unpopularity of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the incumbent government won 95 seats, while the Liberals have maintained 43 seats. They presumed that Albanese’s incompetence, the cost-of-living crisis, a stalling economy, and a tide of populist right-wing parties elected worldwide would automatically shift the tide back to them. They were proven wrong, with Labor earning 95 seats: the best performance for the party since 1987. Labor’s campaign against the Liberals was demoralizing, but effective in highlighting Dutton’s weak agenda.

Following their defeat, the Liberals made Sussan Ley their new Federal Leader, making her not just the first female leader in the party, but the first female Opposition Leader in Australian history. Ley was the deputy leader under Peter Dutton, and represented the moderates in the party who wished that the Liberals didn’t tilt rightwards on social and cultural issues like gender, immigration, and climate change. She hopes to reshape the party in a way that reflects “modern Australia”.

The Opposition Leader’s interpretation of the phrase reflects the country becoming increasingly left-wing, with more spending on bloated social programs and an aggressive agenda on identity politics. This would mean pandering to left-wing organisations by introducing gender quotas in the party, and holding back on speaking out on controlling immigration to evade the risk of being called “racist”. This issue is considered the Coalition’s biggest strength; whilst immigration was higher when they were in government, they at least have a good reputation for securing the country’s borders. Such tepidness has seen a brief breakup between the Liberals and their rural partners, the Nationals, at the beginning of Ley’s leadership. They actually performed better at the Federal election, over Net Zero and nuclear energy.

Ley’s name was not mentioned throughout CPAC Australia, except her caricature on the cover of The Spectator Australia, where she’s portrayed as Dylan Mulvaney in the ill-advised Bud Light campaign: a souvenir you can own if you’re a ticketholder. Yet at the conference, the message is clear. Ley has little political conviction and is too compromised with Labor’s policies to be the Opposition Leader. Ted O’Brien, the Deputy Opposition Leader, was given the daunting task of persuading a hostile audience that the current leadership remains capable of opposing Albanese’s mandate. It didn’t leave a good impression, as he faced boos and heckles while he pointed at Liberal Party values without specifying what they are and how to apply them.

CPAC Australia, held on the weekend of September 20-21, is one of the biggest events in the Australian political calendar, and a barometer of the Australian centre-right’s mood. Australia’s version of the American conference has been running since 2019 and has seen some of the most prominent political and media heavyweights congregate: former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Liberal Party Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Sky News Australia presenters Rowan Dean and Rita Panahi, as well as international speakers, with this year’s lineup including former Great British Prime Minister Liz Truss and former GB News host Dan Wooton.

The most critical issue at CPAC involves rejecting net zero while promoting affordable and reliable energy. Labor has announced an emissions target of 62% – 70% for 2035. Net zero has split the Liberals, with National Senator Matt Canavan describing pursuing Net Zero as socialism. Andrew Hastie, the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, was not present at the conference, but has stated that he will quit the frontbench if they are willing to pursue the target. More than half of Queensland’s Liberal-National branches have voted to ditch Net Zero at their state convention. The poor performance from the Liberals starkly contrasts with their coalition partner, the Nationals, which has consistently retained most of their rural seats for decades.

The second largest discussion is reducing mass immigration. Senator Price, who is of Aboriginal and Anglo-Celtic descent, was demoted from Ley’s frontbench following an interview with the ABC where she spoke about how Indian migrants are being used as import votes for Labor. Here, she doubled down on her views and talked about reducing mass migration while linking it with declining economic growth, to young people not being able to afford their first home.

Young people don’t make up a significant aspect of the conference’s audience, but that absence is crucial. National Senator Bridget McKenzie acknowledged that young people are left out of civil society: the average age to buy a first home is 36, and young men consume too much porn instead of starting relationships. Whereas conservative parties across the world are finally gaining traction with young voters, particularly men, recent polling has shown the Australian Liberal Party has seen a collapse from that demographic.

The goal of this year’s conference, held in Brisbane, was to energize voters disillusioned with the Coalition’s electoral defeat. In a keynote speech, Abbott implored delegates to give the Liberals “one last chance”, hoping that “we must be a better opposition this time than last time, and we must be a better government next time than last time”. Asking the audience to be united as one doesn’t seem to be an easy task. Abbott and Price are well-loved by the audience for sticking to their convictions and showing courage in Parliament, but during their speeches faced some shouts from the audience who preferred Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party over the Coalition.

There were two kinds of people at CPAC. The first are institutionalists. These are people who believe that the Liberals and Nationals should stick together or that the Liberals, by default of their large size and talent, are worth becoming a member, despite the immense challenges facing the party. The brokenists are, as Alana Newhouse wrote in Tablet Magazine, “people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out”. They are people who prefer the minor parties over the Liberals. These people are represented by figures such as Matt Canavan, Liberal moderate Senator Maria Kovacic, and David Littleproud. Kovacic wants the Liberals to move away from nuclear energy in the party platform, despite the energy being endorsed by the Canadian Liberals and the Democrats in the US, while Canavan wants the Nationals to be more populist by moving away from Net Zero. These people have a clear direction on where they want their parties to go and to disrupt the status quo. Brokenism – factional infighting – is the party’s feature since the heydays of the Howard government. As a result, its state branches in New South Wales and Victoria are poorly administered, resulting in massive losses in local and state elections.

The Australian Liberal Party is similar to the Tories in many ways. Both parties have been in power for most of the 20th and 21st centuries, and have been one of the most successful political institutions in modern history. But in another way, they both lost in a massive electoral landslide, and their place in opposition has led to a dizzying existential crisis.

The Australian centre-right has fewer viable alternatives. Where their British peers see a viable alternative in Reform UK, with many defections from Conservative Party members and Labour under Keir Starmer being deeply unpopular, there is no Australian equivalent. Populist minor parties, such as One Nation, Trumpet of Patriots, and the Libertarians, do not have sufficient infrastructure and high-level talent to beat the Coalition. The preferential voting system, in which voters rank the MPs and parties of their choice from 1 to 8, has also been a natural barrier, as their votes trickle up to favor either Labor or the Liberal-National Coalition.

Yet what’s sorely neglected by the centre-right is the communication of courage. The simple reason why the Liberals lost this year’s election astoundingly is that voters do not know what issues they stand on. Their current leaders follow what is fashionable, rather than moving the Overton Window. That is when voters will come back to you.