By Peter Brown
If you’re wondering where the Liberal Party stands in 2025, you’re not alone. Increasingly, the answer seems to be: nowhere in particular.
Once seen as the natural party of government, the Liberals now find themselves caught between two competing visions. On one side are the centrists, who still believe in appealing to middle Australia with a promise of stability, economic management, and cautious reform. On the other side are the populists, eager to import Trump-style culture wars and wedge politics into the Australian landscape.
The result is paralysis. Labor has marched into the centre ground, talking about fairness, wages, housing, and even a possible tax overhaul – areas that once gave the Liberals an easy line of attack. Prime Minister Albanese now sounds more like a careful economic reformer than a union warrior. Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley struggles to decide whether her party should sound like Robert Menzies or Donald Trump.
Labor’s centrist rebrand has flipped the old political map upside down. Where the Liberals once prided themselves on economic discipline, tax reform, and national stability, it is now Albanese and Chalmers who speak that language. The Liberals, instead of leading the conversation, are left heckling from the sidelines – politically stranded, unsure whether to chase the populist right or reclaim the pragmatic centre.
Barnaby Joyce’s latest attempt to tear up Australia’s net-zero target shows where the hard right wants to drag the Coalition. But with voters consistently backing climate action and renewable jobs, it risks leaving the Liberals looking outdated and out of touch.
The centrists, for their part, haven’t put forward much of an alternative vision. They know that doubling down on Trump-lite rhetoric won’t work in a country like Australia, but they’re short on bold policy to win back urban and younger voters.
What we’re left with is a party adrift – not conservative enough for the far right, not progressive enough for the mainstream, and not coherent enough to build trust with swinging voters. The Liberals are stranded in the political wilderness, watching Labor rebrand itself as the safe pair of hands in government.
The question is no longer whether the Liberals can win the next election. The question is whether they still know who they are.
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Identity? What identity? They’re a bunch of unsupervised nasty clueless children let loose in a sandpit endlessly squabbling amongst themselves and plotting the downfall of Annabelle “Clueless” Ley.
Photo from yesterday:
https://static.ffx.io/images/$zoom_0.214%2C$multiply_0.9788%2C$ratio_1.5%2C$width_756%2C$x_0%2C$y_0/t_crop_custom/q_86%2Cf_auto/fa41dda99aa3c547829db1c7aa1fa527403414d5
Ted “Nookalear Fizzicalist” O’Brien looks like he’s dreaming of the loads of cakes and bickies and oodles of fizzy drinks that the kindergarten teachers will be serving at big lunch.
The US had/has the Mafia. what have we got? The Moronia.
Ted O’Brien walked up the steps to Parliament house with a toad on his head. The doorman said “Er, how did you get that?” And the toad said ” Dunno; it started off as a wart on the khyber….”
It is a long time since the liberal party, or the LNP, has had economic discipline, tax reform, and national stability. Equating any of those things to the LNP since the Howard era is just wishful thinking.
Oh and Albanese was never a union rep or part of the union movement or a “union warrior”, dropping that tidbit in is poor commenting.
And so the Loser Nasty Party continues on it’s merry way of tearing itself apart and making sure that they will remain the whining opposition for a lloonngg time.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/canavan-leads-group-of-five-demanding-coalition-debate-now-on-scrapping-net-zero-20250826-p5mpvo.html
One blames rhe LNP’s woes on the late 20thC rise of Howard, Murdoch led RW MSM, fossil fuel faux free market Atlas Koch think tanks and anti-immigrant Tanton Network influencers; ditto US, UK etc.
The ‘great replacement’ is coming for them and their monoculture, with compulsory voting, it’s happennd already?
This pack of intellectual gnats are exactly where their narrow, blinkered,brainless, born to rule attitude has placed them.Of course Ley is clueless, as the back room boys hone their daggers, and the numbskulls of the Nationals (Littleproud,Caravan, Joyce,McCormack,etc.)are stuffed in the pockets of the fossil fuel lobby.The country loses because of it, as Labor can coast on not upsetting the status quo…despite mouthings to the contrary.
Factionalism got them kicked out as well.
The hard right and its sppoky thinking has the rest disrupted. Once they get tired of long term opposition, they will grow out of things like climate change denial?
Fond hope..
Not good for a sitting government when the opposition won’t oppose on legitimate grounds in order to have any wrinkles in real world policy/legislation ironed out. They could have been a useful part of government doing real opposition, but most of what they are up to at the moment is just populist junk..
The Coalition only has itself to blame. They have always been short on policy, always playing the ‘safe hands’ card without explaining how. Always with plenty of form but no substance. Thankfully the young voters have seen through this façade.
You can be sure that they will spend the next three years arguing about who should topple Ley and make a right mess of that as well.
Speaking of “populist junk”, we had 9 years of it with LNP in govt, and before that a decade of it from the LNP via Abbott et al. And generally, since the 80s with the adoption of US-style neoconservative neoliberal bullshit. It seriously wrecked the whole Oz caboodle, as it did for all countries that adopted it.
With the ’roundtable’ and the ensuing deliberations, Albo, Chalmers and ALP as a whole ought be very careful about toadying to populism. In May, the voters seemed to press for a govt that would take the hard decisions of proper structural reform for Oz economic & social robustness – that’s what we want.
Last night (27Aug2025) on ABC’s The Kohler Report at about 01.10 mins in, we were given graphs & narrative revealing the crushing effects of populist governments, trends toward L&R populist govts, and effects on GDP of populist govts.
Populist blather is not only meaningless, it reinforces bullshit in the minds of policy makers, lobbyists, think-tanks and the punters, and the ignoring of real experts. All to devastating effect.
We see that in extremis where T-Rump is taking America. They surely have much worse to come.