Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty.
“The answer, however, does not matter. What matters is the successful striving for what seems attainable at each moment. It is not the fruits of past success but the living and striving for the future in which human intelligence proves itself. Progress is movement for movement’s sake.”
There have been over sixty privately funded neoliberal think tanks in Australia since 1979. There was also a rise of the neoliberal Dry faction of the Liberal Party in the 1980s.
What Robert Manne said in April 1993:
“Since the early 1980s, a campaign has been mounted within liberal-conservative quarters, actually to discourage free discussion. This has occurred both within and beyond the Liberal Party. Old small-l liberals have been dismissed as wimps, and bleeding-heart churchmen have been silenced for the temerity of thinking they might contribute to discussions of issues like unemployment or social welfare. Those opposing the economic rationalist New Zealandisation of Australia have been marginalised as snake-oil merchants.”
There is an elite New Right movement in Australia, with about 1,600 people as of 1994. Spokespeople come from the business world, such as the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) or the Tasman Institute. At the same time, their dollars come from corporate donations from large companies such as McDonald’s, Shell, ANZ, Macquarie Bank, the Pratt Foundation, and Philip Morris, as well as from individual donors.
Political historian Dean Jaensch said:
“The heritage of the Liberal Party of Australia, which was divided from the start, included the Fusion Party of Alfred Deakin and the two non-Labor parties in Australian politics: the Right Free Traders led by George Reid. To their left, between the Free Traders and the Labor Party, were the Deakinite liberals.”
The Liberals before 1980 were not ideological or conservative.
Pauline Hanson ran in the 1996 election and went on to win Oxley as an independent with a 19 per cent swing. Hanson said:
“We now have a situation where a type of reverse racism is applied to mainstream Australians by those who promote political correctness and those who control the various taxpayer-funded industries that flourish in our society, servicing Aboriginal multiculturalists and a host of other minority groups. In response to my call for equality for all Australians, the most noisy criticism came from the fat cats, bureaucrats, and the do-gooders. They screamed the loudest because they stand to lose the most: their power, money, and position, all funded by ordinary Australian taxpayers.”
Howard said the Queensland Liberal Party did not mention Hanson by name.
“One of the great changes that has come over Australia in the last six months is that people feel free to speak a little more openly about what they feel. In a sense, the pall of censorship on certain issues has been lifted. I welcomed the fact that people can now talk about certain issues without living in fear of being branded as a bigot or any of the other expressions that have been carelessly flung around in this country whenever somebody disagrees with what somebody has said.”
Young people are more progressive and therefore will support the Greens or the Labor Party (ALP). The Chinese have higher levels of support for the Labor Party than for the Coalition. Indians are split between the major parties.
Who are the Teal independents? They are obviously centrist, ranging from centre-left to centre-right. Kate Chaney and Allegra Spender were associated with former Liberal ministers, while Monique Ryan was a member of the Labor Party. Zoe Daniel and Helen Haines, as Teal independents, have progressive policies toward climate change, anti-corruption, and gender equality.
The Liberal Party has been taken over by the hard right, which is the Sky News After Dark ecosystem. Small believes the Liberals are focused on opposing rather than proposing, to their detriment. He points to the current debate on immigration as an example of the party’s persistent failure to prosecute arguments effectively.
John Howard said that the Liberal Party is a broad church between conservatism and liberalism.
Barnes said:
“Fix anything.”
The former senior adviser to Liberal health ministers Tony Abbott and Michael Wooldridge said:
“We are going to lose the next election. In opposition, we are going to have a cataclysmic and existential fight, and I’m not sure the Liberal Party as we know it will survive. We are at risk of becoming irrelevant.”
In the by-election in the federal seat of Farrer on Saturday, David Farley, the candidate of the One Nation Party, won 39 per cent of the primary vote. A struggle emerged between Farley and independent Michelle Milthorpe, who got 28 per cent of the vote, while the Liberals came third.
Farley offers himself as an outsider to the uniparty system, drawing on dissatisfaction with the cost of living, fuel prices, higher inflation, the consequences of the hard COVID lockdowns, and Trump’s war against Iran.
John Howard squandered the children’s future. The Liberal Party of today is corrupt, short-sighted, and ideologically bankrupt, and it only exists to hold on to power because it is owned by political donors.
Menzies was a conservative. He had an ideology of, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Menzies supported public schools and the independence of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Australia’s religious hard right has infiltrated the Liberal Party. In Australia, there are three major political parties: the Labor Party (centre-left), the Liberal Party (centre-right), and the National Party (right). It is the conservative wing of the Liberal Party that is in coalition.
Angus Taylor is the best-qualified idiot in opposition. He is using the One Nation playbook on immigration policy. Taylor is from a farming background, and he has Jewish descent. While he comes from a conservative, economically dry, free-market faction, the Valder Report raised concerns.
Valder said:
“For the very simple reason that we think John Howard has done something very damaging to the Liberal Party over the last ten years. He has just steadily and progressively moved the party further and further to the right, and a lot of us feel he has stolen the Party from us.”
The Dry faction within the Liberal Party was the free-market lobby, borrowing from Thatcher’s Tories and a radical new philosophy known as neoliberalism.
Andrew Norton said in 2006 that the Howard government was a high-taxing, big-spending state bureaucracy.
Marxism brought in a totalitarian state. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History was published in 1989. Thatcher believed that human progress was not Tory but Whig.
Neoliberalism at the end of the 1980s was a successor ideology to Marxism. John Howard used costly spending programs to support families and social cohesion. This is inconsistent with shrinking the size of government. The argument that the welfare state increases social cohesion is a standard one on the left.
In his words and actions, Howard behaved more like a social democrat than a neoliberal.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, The National Interest, No. 16, Summer 1989:
“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such. That is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
There is a realignment going on in Australian politics. When the Country Party started at the end of the First World War, Australia had a three-party system. By 1923, it had joined in coalition with the Nationalists, creating a two-party system.
Alfred Deakin’s Liberal Protectionists teamed up with Reid’s Free Traders in 1909 to form the Liberal Party to stop the dominance of the Labor Party.
Now the Liberals are squeezed between the Teal independents, the Greens, and One Nation.
References
https://insidestory.org.au/stuck-in-the-middle-2/
https://www.miragenews.com/one-nation-becoming-another-version-of-liberal-1675167/
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/liberal-party-history-australia/eb5cinhj5
https://jacobin.com/2025/04/australia-liberal-party-dutton-trump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal_independents
This Hive article is based on a longer Opinomail analysis examining the internal divisions, leadership tensions, and political challenges facing Australia's Liberal Party.
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Read the full article on https://matthewjlittle.substack.com/p/why-australias-liberal-party-is-struggling
