The Liberal Party: What has gone wrong?

Date: Tuesday, 22 July 

Time: 5pm 

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By general agreement, the performance of the Liberal Party in the May federal election was the worst in the party’s history. 

Was the poor performance attributable to mistakes made in the campaign and the quality of the Party’s leadership or do the problems go deeper? 

Was it a mistake for the party to concentrate on the outer suburbs at the expense of the inner metropolitan seats? How well has the party responded to the challenge of the Teal independents?  

Some supporters of the Liberal Party think that the party has abandoned the mainstream “centre” and moved too far to the Right. Others think that the party has lacked conservative courage and moved too far to the Left. Which assessment is more accurate? 

How has the Liberal Party responded to the challenge of the new style of aggressive populist conservatism, associated with the Presidency of Donald Trump? Is it true that the Party has alienated women, multicultural Australians, Indigenous Australians and the young? 

The Ideas and Society Program has assembled a stellar panel to analyse the past, present and future of the Liberal Party of Australia. 

Panellists: 

Host: Professor Andrea Carson 
Associate Dean (Research, Industry and Engagement) for Humanities and Social Sciences and a Professor of Political Communication at La Trobe University 

Professor Carson is an internationally recognised scholar in journalism and political science, with a distinguished career spanning both academia and professional journalism. Her academic expertise is on political communication in election campaigns and Australian politics. Her studies also examine how quality of information, particularly misinformation, affects democratic health. Professor Carson is the author of several books and journal articles about politics and the media, public trust, election campaigns and misinformation.  

Tom Switzer 
Executive Director, The Centre for Independent Studies 

Tom is Executive Director of the Centre for Independent Studies, a Sydney-based classical liberal public-policy research organisation. He’s previously worked at the ABC’s Radio National, Spectator magazine, The Australian, The Australian Financial Review and the American Enterprise Institute. He’s been published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Foreign Affairs. He graduated with First–Class Honours in Modern History and holds a Masters of International Relations from the University of Sydney. 

Professor George Brandis, KC 
Former Attorney-General and Liberal Party Senator 

George Brandis has been Professor in the Practice of National Security at the ANU’s National Security College since 2022. From 2018 to 2022, he was Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. A barrister by profession, George served as a Liberal Senator for Queensland from 2000 to 2018 and was a minister in the Howard, Abbott and Turnbull governments. George was the Attorney-General in the Abbott and Turnbull governments and Leader of the Government in the Senate under Turnbull. George has published extensively on legal and political topics and writes a fortnightly column for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. 

Sean Kelly 
Political columnist and former political advisor 

Sean is the author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, an award-winning columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, a regular contributor to The Monthly and a former adviser to Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.  

Cathy McGowan 
La Trobe University Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow and former Independent member for the federal seat of Indi 

Cathy came to national attention when she won the federal seat of Indi as an independent in 2013.  The community backed her again in 2016.  During her time as a politician Cathy actively worked in Parliament to develop policy around regional development, constitutional change for Aboriginal people and a solution to the indefinite detention of asylum seekers. In 2019, Cathy was awarded the Accountability Round Table Award for Political Integrity. She retired before the 2019 election. 

After politics, Cathy was appointed Chair of AgriFutures Australia, a leading agricultural research and development corporation.  She has taken a particular interest in the impact on rural and regional communities of the transition to net zero. She is an Officer of the Order of Australia, a Churchill fellow and lives happily on her farm in north-east Victoria’s Indigo Valley. 

Convenor: 

Emeritus Professor Robert Manne AO 
La Trobe University Emeritus Professor of Politics and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow 

Professor Manne is the author or editor of 27 books, including The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage; The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust; In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right; Left, Right, Left: Political Essays 1977-2005; Making Trouble; Cypherpunk Revolutionary-On Julian Assange; The Mind of the Islamic State; and, most recently, On Borrowed Time. 

Professor Manne was editor of Quadrant between 1990 and 1997 and has been chair of the boards of both The Australian Book Review and The Monthly. He has been a regular public affairs columnist for several Australian newspapers and magazines since the mid-1980s and a frequent commentator on ABC radio and television. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.