The Australian Liberal Party is not in trouble. It is finished. Their demise, years in the making, has been well earned.
For international readers, in the Upside Down World known as Australia, the Liberal Party are the nation’s conservatives.
Repeated warnings from non-woke pundits were once dismissed as the mutterings of reactionary party remnants by the professional political class. But their impending extinction was obvious to anyone still listening to the party’s former voters.
The 2025 election removed the remaining ambiguity. Labor took 94 seats. The Coalition, the traditional conservative power bloc of the Liberals and the Nationals, was reduced to 43.
The Liberal share of that diminished total was smaller still.
By September 2026 Newspoll, regarded as one of the nation’s most reliable polls, had a barnstorming One Nation on 30 per cent, Labor on 27 and the Coalition on 19. Roy Morgan and YouGov readings have repeatedly placed the Liberals alone in the high teens.
Liberal leader, the patrician Angus Taylor, trails both Anthony Albanese and Pauline Hanson in preferred-prime-minister measures. He has no struggle-street story to which the general public can relate.
Internal Liberal polling in New South Wales models a One Nation state government and a Liberal rump in single digits. These are not protest blips. They are the arithmetic of a party that spent a decade explaining to its own base why the base was wrong.
The original breach was moral as much as electoral. Under Malcolm Turnbull the party picked fights with small business, self-funded retirees and anyone who still used the language of self-reliance.
During the Covid era, under Liberal Prime Minister Scott Morrison, it went further. Australia was turned into a patchwork of police states, small firms were shuttered by decree, debt was expanded without embarrassment, and dissent was treated as a public-order problem.
The subsequent tone-deaf insistence that the shocking mismanagement under Covid had been a success – that the ruined businesses, the mandates and the excess deaths were the price of competent government – told former supporters exactly how little their experience counted. A party that will not admit its own mistakes cannot be trusted.
Armed with insider knowledge Paul Collits, one of Australia’s most acerbic observers of the Liberal Party’s decline, describes the Liberal Party’s collapse as an extinction level event.
His larger point is that the old tactics no longer function. Personal denigration of populist rivals, moderate repositioning, and appeals to the “sensible centre” are received by the departing voters as confirmation that nothing has changed.
Last month a News24/YouGov Pulse poll put the Coalition primary at 18 per cent. Paul Collits sketched a path to fewer than 11 seats. The establishment, he noted, still believes the old rules apply. They do not.
In a recent column, “Panic as poll points to Liberal Party Extinction”, Paul Collits wrote: “The establishment and their fellow travellers have thrown the kitchen sink at those who support populism. It has been a team effort. All hands to the pump. They cannot have the people revolting. Hilariously, none of it has worked. The reverse march through the democratic institutions continues apace.”
His columns, published in a range of conservative journals including Politicom and Spectator Australia as well as on his own SubStack page, trace the internal cause: a factional apparatus, particularly in New South Wales, staffed by careerists whose principal skill is pre-selection management rather than argument.
“Dripping wet” is Collits’s phrase on the numbers men who have destroyed the party’s electoral standing. With constant factional infighting, the left within the party, the so-called moderates, did not lose an argument. They prevented one from being held, then expressed surprise when the audience left.
The public has drawn the obvious conclusion and placed the Liberals in the same basket as the current government they now so savagely oppose. Both are seen as instruments of regulation, taxation and elitism.
One Nation’s rise is not an endorsement of every Hanson sentence. It is a refusal to keep subsidising a centre-right party that will not contest the issues – immigration scale, net-zero costs, housing supply choked by planning, the expansion of the welfare state – on which its historic supporters actually vote.
At this point in the electoral cycle, it appears preference flows may just, only just, save the incumbents. Nothing will save the Liberals. A party whose primary vote has halved since 2019, and which now sits third in the states where it once held power, is no longer the vehicle for a constituency. It is a label maintained by incumbency, donor habit and the absence, until recently, of a competitor willing to speak plainly.
Back in the 1940s former Prime Minister Robert Menzies famously built the Liberal Party organisation for the so-called “forgotten people”. The forgotten people have now returned the favour and forgotten the Liberals.
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