In Part 2 of The Blue Bacillus: An Anatomy of the Liberals’ toxic DNA, the focus shifts to the arithmetic of decline, to borrow a John Howard phrase – and the numbers are shocking. When voters see through the Liberal Party’s facade of serving the “forgotten people” to its unswerving fealty to the business class, outwitted, outmoded, and out of arguments, the party doubles down on negativity, setting themselves up for continuing defeat by the Teals who offer action on climate, integrity, environment, and gender equity; issues the Liberals have openly mocked, sabotaged, trivialised, and denied.
The Liberal Party isn’t just shagged out, to quote the Monty Python sketch. It’s a dead parrot. The only question is who will bury it, and what will rise from its grave. This is the story of a party that once governed a continent, now reduced to 18 MPs, outflanked by the far right, abandoned by women and urban voters, and humiliated by a wave of Teal independents who exposed its hollow core.
The latest Roy Morgan polling tells the tale: the Liberals’ primary vote has collapsed to 24%, while One Nation surges to 21% and the Teals hold the balance of power in the cities. The party’s response? Weaponising the Bondi tragedy. Echoes of Tim Wilson’s weaponised, divisive campaign in Goldstein that backfired spectacularly, proving voters want substance, not slogans and smears.
But the real autopsy isn’t just in the numbers. It’s in the independent media ecosystem – Crikey, The Saturday Paper, New Matilda, Michael West Media, Independent Australia, The AIMN, and The Conversation – where the Liberals’ collapse has been chronicled, dissected, and predicted with a clarity the Murdoch press and the party’s own spin machine couldn’t obscure. These outlets didn’t just report the decline; they explained it: the opaque funding networks, the climate denial, the corporate capture, and the cultural irrelevance of a party still fighting the battles of the 1950s.
The Night Watch: Ley’s Midnight Reckoning
At 3 a.m. on a Tuesday in January 2026, as the rest of Australia slept, Sussan Ley sat in her Parliament House office, staring at the latest polling. The numbers were a death notice: 24% primary support, One Nation at 21%, the Teals entrenched in the cities, and the Nationals walking out of shadow cabinet over her floundering authority. This wasn’t a political party anymore. It was a hospice, and Ley was the night nurse, keeping vigil over a patient that had already flatlined.
The Liberals’ collapse isn’t just about the numbers, though the numbers are damning. It’s about a party that has nothing left to offer but fear, nostalgia, and the fur-lined slippers of a relaxed and comfortable past that never existed for most Australians. The actual Liberal Party of Menzies’ imagination, not the Queensland mongrel cross called the LNP, not the Nationals masquerading under borrowed legitimacy, now holds precisely 18 seats in the House of Representatives. Eighteen.
That number is extraordinary. This is a party that held government for two-thirds of the post-war period, that claimed to speak for the “forgotten people,” that built its mythos on middle-class aspiration, middle-class welfare, and the entrepreneurial spirit, all shrewdly boosted with the divisive politics of racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Now? It has been wiped off the map in South Australia and Tasmania entirely. It holds three seats in Sydney, three in Melbourne, one in Perth, and the rest scattered across WA’s safest enclaves. The Liberals’ corporate DNA – mining giants, opaque donation flows, Business Council proxies – was always a veil for boardroom rule. But voters have seen through it.
The latest Roy Morgan poll puts One Nation at 21%, just three points behind the Liberals, as disillusioned conservatives flee to the “authentic” brand of Hanson’s bigotry. The voter base isn’t shifting; it’s fleeing. Why vote for bigotry-lite when you can buy the original brand?
The Teal Wave: How the Liberals Lost Their Heartland
The Liberals’ collapse isn’t just about One Nation. It’s about the Teal independents, who have systematically dismantled the party’s urban strongholds. In 2022, the Teals stormed six blue-ribbon seats – Goldstein, Kooyong, Mackellar, North Sydney, Wentworth, and Curtin – adding to Indi and Warringah, which had already fallen in 2019. By 2025, they held seven seats, with incumbents like Monique Ryan, Allegra Spender, and Sophie Scamps entrenched. Their success wasn’t a fluke. It was a rejection of the Liberals’ climate denial, their culture wars, their corporate capture.
Nowhere was this clearer than in Goldstein, where Tim Wilson’s 2025 campaign to win back the seat from Zoe Daniel became a masterclass in what voters don’t want. Wilson, the architect of the Liberals’ franking credits scare, ran a weaponised, hyper-partisan campaign: attacking Daniel as a “fake independent,” leaning into wedge issues, and flooding the electorate with negative ads. It backfired. Daniel’s grassroots “Gen Zoe” movement, targeting younger voters with climate action and integrity, out-organised and out-messaged him. Wilson’s narrow “victory” after a recount and redistribution that handed him friendlier turf wasn’t a mandate. It was a fluke, a statistical anomaly in a seat that had become a knife-edge marginal after decades of Liberal complacency.
The Teals’ rise is a triple threat to the Liberals:
- Policy: They offer action on climate, integrity, and gender equity, issues the Liberals have mocked or sabotaged.
- Demographics: Their candidates are overwhelmingly women, appealing to urban, educated voters repelled by the Liberals’ boorish, blokey culture.
- Tactics: They run hyper-local, volunteer-driven campaigns, while the Liberals rely on tired slogans and Murdoch megaphones.
The result? The Liberals are now a regional party, their urban base eroded by a movement that proved conservatism without compassion is a losing proposition.
The Arithmetic of Annihilation
Every Liberal MP faces an existential question: if this polling holds, how many of those 18 seats survive? A uniform swing of 6–8%, exactly what 24% primary support implies, would render virtually all of them marginal or lost. Even the safest blue-ribbon fortresses, like Perth’s western suburbs, are vulnerable. Analysts estimate 10–12 of the 18 would fall on current numbers.
That leaves six to eight seats. Not six to eight marginal seats. Six to eight seats total. The entire Liberal Party, reduced to the population of a country town council.
You can’t run a shadow ministry with eight MPs. You can’t maintain factional balance. You become a Western Australian protest movement with delusions of national relevance.
The Queensland Confusion and the Nationals’ Cynical Waltz
“But what about Queensland?” the rusted-on supporters cry. “What about the LNP’s seats?”
Here’s the reality: the Liberal National Party of Queensland is not the Liberal Party. It’s a shotgun marriage of convenience, a political chimera created in 2008 when the Queensland Liberals were too weak to survive alone. Those 16 LNP members in Canberra? They caucus with either the Liberal or National party rooms, their allegiance determined by ambition, not philosophy.
When we talk about the Liberal Party as a national institution, we’re talking about those 18 seats. That’s the real number. That’s the actual Liberal Party, stripped of its Queensland costume jewellery and National Party fig leaves.
Now the Nationals have got the hump again. On January 20, 2026, senators Bridget McKenzie, Ross Cadell, and Susan McDonald resigned from the shadow ministry after defying Ley on the hate speech bill. This isn’t principle; it is electoral calculus. They see One Nation’s surge in their own polling and calculate that “freedom” rhetoric plays better in the bush than Ley’s flaky authority.
The Nationals have cheered on decades of executive power mission creep. Ironically, their sudden, novel embrace of individual liberty rebellion highlights the Liberals’ authoritarian drift: even the Coalition’s most rusted-on authoritarians can’t swallow Labor’s hastily compiled hate speech laws.
The Corporate DNA Problem
The Liberals’ collapse is less a sudden implosion than a long, methodical estrangement from the country it once claimed to represent. A party that prided itself on “sound management” and “sensible centrism” has bled relevance by clinging to culture-war reflexes and a nostalgia most voters no longer share. As Paul Keating put it: “The Liberal Party is the party of business in parliament.”
But here’s the rub: Labor is just as captured. Woodside, BHP, and Rio Tinto fund both sides. The difference? Labor still has electoral viability because it retains a threadbare connection to its working-class base. The Liberals never had that ballast. They were always the creatures of corporate Australia – and now that their corporate masters have decided both major parties are easier to control than one effective opposition, the Liberals have become redundant.
What Extinction Looks Like
Political extinction doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a slow-motion car crash, visible in the data long before the final impact.
First, you lose the cities. The Liberals haemorrhaged Adelaide, Sydney, and Melbourne because educated urban voters recognised the emptiness beneath the slogans. The Teals took the blue-ribbon seats not through superior campaigning, but because those seats’ residents finally noticed their party had been hollowed out by mining money and culture-war grifters.
Then you lose the margins. Tasmania, once Liberal heartland, clear-felled. South Australia, gone. The party now exists almost entirely in Western Australia – and even there, it’s on borrowed time.
Finally, you lose internal coherence. When your parliamentary party fits in a minibus, factionalism becomes farce. The moderates, the hard right, the whatever-Angus-Taylor-is crowd – they’ll tear each other apart fighting over eight seats, because that’s all that will be left.
The Final Count
So, of those 18 Liberal MPs, how many are marginal at current polling?
The honest answer? All of them.
When your primary vote is 24% and One Nation is breathing down your neck at 21%, when Labor maintains a big leadand even your safest seats are starting to look shaky, “marginal” becomes a polite fiction. You’re not defending margins anymore. You’re fighting for survival as a federal political entity.
Six to eight seats. That’s the floor. That’s what extinction’s opening act looks like.
And if the next election were held tomorrow? The Liberal Party would wake up as a Western Australian regional party with Canberra ambitions, a political curiosity, a historical footnote, a warning about what happens when you let the boardroom write your principles.
Sussan Ley can talk all she wants about a “strong and functioning opposition.” But when you’re presiding over 18 MPs, with 10 to 12 of them eyeing the lifeboats, you’re not leading an opposition. You’re managing a political hospice.
The Liberal Party isn’t dying. It’s already dead. We’re just waiting for someone to call the time of death.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
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All true, but keep in mind that this train wreck is not restricted to the Oz Libs.
Just look at the circus that Davos became.
This is the liberal world order, without the order.
The liberal world is in disarray because the liberal illusions can no longer be sustained. Confronted by rising powers that operate on a more realistic footing, liberalism is confused, fearful, and rudderless.
This is not a train wreck at the local level, this is global and fraught with danger.
Steve, stirring the tea leaves for a moment, or musing on the wreathes of smoke rising from the censer, or, hell, even dealing the tarot cards, where do you see us in say, ten or twenty years, given your constant references to the failures of the liberal world order – references that I find impossible to disagree with, just to state my position – and what upsides do you envisage potentially emerging from what portends to be the eventual collapse of the dominant economic-slash-political paradigm that currently holds the world in its thrall?
In passing, if you care to, try juxtaposing future emergent positions against what I have repeatedly referenced in these pages: the threat posed to not only mankind but all sentient life-forms due to global warming & climate change – matters that we have been warned about seemingly ad infinitum – habitat collapse, glacier disappearances and the resultant loss of river flows, oceanic warming and its knock-on effects of higher rainfalls, polar ice-cap melts and rising waters, methane clathrates release and gaseous release of CH4 to atmosphere, cyclones (hurricanes, typhoons), along with deforestation, droughts, pestilences, famines, pandemic diseases, commodity crop failures, barrelling extinction rates of macro- & micro-fauna, as well as loss of pollinators, major disruptions in food chain integrity, severe to complete loss of marine food sources and no doubt more.
“A party that once governed a continent, now reduced to 18 MPs”
Eric Bogle’s The Band Played Waltzing Matilda comes to mind, for some reason.
Crikey Kanga, you love to make life hard for me! 🙂
It’s actually a great question, and one that we should all be starting to think about.
Because the writing’s on the wall for the liberal world order.
I read a comment earlier today that in the wake of the Maduro kidnapping, China began financial steps to begin a stranglehold on the US economy. The Chinese apparently have commercial interests in Venezuela, and will be anxious to protect those. I have not followed up on that for more detail, and can’t recall where I saw it, but it relates to your question.
It means that the US is no longer the dominant global force in economic terms. If the US does not calm down, China has the economic strength, backed by military strength, to force it to calm down.
But as we all know now, rational thought is not a feature of US policy at the moment. They could react by forcing a major war instead of the proxy wars that they currently employ.
The proxy wars are not working out too well for them at present.
They over-extended in Ukraine, and begged Iran for a cease-fire last year. That in itself has forced reality into US planning, because they pulled out of the recent near-war with Iran, fearful of the consequences.
So my prediction, for what it’s worth, is that we will see 3 more years of chaos, flare-ups everywhere, but no big one.
After three years the US voters will crave peace and quiet, the financial sector will crave peace and quiet, so we might see some normality return. Keeping in mind that normality involves a continuation of the economics of exploitation.
Which brings me to your second question — the problems of climate change etc.
Because the liberal system is based on exploitation that has been the cause of the environmental disasters, those problems will not abate until liberalism is extinguished.
We see that the system has begun to cannibalise itself now, with domestic populations being targeted to maintain profits, but that course is not sustainable.
It will result in revolution at worst, or evolution if we’re lucky.
So it’s important to note that China and Russia are not just paying lip-service to the concept of building on the social good, they actually devote resources to that, unlike the liberal economies.
China even has a policy, a working policy, to raise living standards in other countries.
This is all alien to liberalism, but once the world becomes aware of these global realities, the liberal order will face a choice — fight or surrender.
I’m getting confused again !
Barnaby left the Nationals because he couldn’t work with David Littleproud. Littleproud spat the coalition dummy because he couldn’t work with Sussan Ley.
Sussan says that the door is always open but she’s not focused on open (or closed) doors at the moment when there are Liberal voters being attacked by sharks on the NSW coast and as Bob Katter has noted, crocodiles are chewing their way through punters in north Queensland.
It seems that Pauline is now seen as the saviour of far-right politics in the nation and shortly she will deliver a speech on the subject which will no doubt receive rave reviews but, as with all of Pauline’s speeches I doubt that I will be able to grasp the finer points due to her erratic delivery or perhaps my dyslexia.
Steve:
You really think there will be free and fair elections in USAnia in 2028? I doubt that even the midterms will be permitted to go ahead and, if they are, they certainly won’t be open and above board.
leefe, that’s another good question.
Trump will certainly do all he can to upset the process, but as to how that will work out, well, I’ve already made one prediction today, I should quit while I’m ahead I think. 🙂
Cheers…
Canga, going through the guts of chooks is also said to be a fine way of determining the future.
Put it together and you have one nation, the USA, retreating into some sort of psychosis, jeopardising the rest of humanity while they chase afer illusions and glitz.
Yes, it is funny what a concerted blow ecology has had this century.
What a tawdry action, the stuff over Venezuela, the macabre “diversion over Palestine, the weird gridlock of Russia and Ukraine.
Why do we need so much more oil when climate change is rampant and fossils fuels are identified as the cause. That’s with climate alone.
Terry thx for your comment also, so needed a smile..
Of the Libs own making since Howard allowing the RW MSM and US think tanks guiding, supporting and informing them on e.g. need to denigrate ‘immigrants’ &/or population growth while relying upon an ageing skip cohort (now <50% of electorate).
However, ignoring qualitative demographic change in working age and younger, is not helping when still promoting to an ageing skip demographic…..doesn’t fit 21stC……
Kanga, I finally found the report on China’s response to the Maduro abduction, but have been unable to verify it from a credible source.
It apparently came from a German academic who has contacts in China.
It looks detailed enough to be credible, (as in the individual details can be checked by anyone who has the time and resources) but until China verifies it, it should be a “keep an open mind” situation.
But fascinating.
The following is a composite of two reports.
According to the report, Beijing treated the aggression against Venezuela as an attack on the BRICS countries and on the very idea of a multipolar world, and within hours of the news of the kidnapping, President Xi Jinping convened an emergency meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee that lasted 120 minutes, with no public statements afterwards.
Instead, China activated what its strategists call an “integrated asymmetric response,” designed to counter the aggression against its partners in the Western Hemisphere, including Venezuela, viewed as China’s strategic gateway to Latin America, which Washington considers its own backyard.
The first phase began on January 4, when the People’s Bank of China discreetly suspended all US dollar transactions with companies linked to the US defense sector, with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics seeing their China-related transactions frozen without warning.
Later that day, State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) announced technical reviews of contracts with US suppliers of electrical equipment, signaling a deliberate decoupling from American technology as China National Petroleum Corporation reorganized its global supply routes, canceling oil delivery contracts to US refineries worth $47 billion annually and redirecting supplies to India, Brazil, South Africa, and other Global South partners.
As a result, oil prices surged 23 percent in a single trading session, underscoring the message that China can strangle US energy security without firing a shot.
China then targeted global logistics, with China Ocean Shipping Company, which controls roughly 40 percent of global shipping capacity, rerouting operations away from US ports, causing Long Beach, Los Angeles, New York, and Miami to lose 35 percent of their container traffic almost instantly.
The disruption rippled through US retail giants such as Walmart, Amazon, and Target, whose China-dependent supply chains partially collapsed within hours. The synchronized timing of these measures produced a systemic shock, overwhelming Washington’s ability to respond.
That same day, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi offered immediate preferential trade terms to dozens of countries willing to refuse recognition of any Venezuelan government installed by US coercion. Within 24 hours, 19 countries – including Brazil, India, South Africa, and Mexico -accepted, forming an instant anti-US bloc driven by economic incentives.
The final escalation came on January 5, when China expanded its cross-border interbank payment system to fully accommodate transactions seeking to bypass the US-controlled SWIFT network. This created a functional alternative to the Western financial system that is 97 percent cheaper and faster.
In the first 48 hours, $89 billion in transactions were processed, and central banks from 34 countries opened operational accounts, accelerating de-dollarization and weakening a key pillar of US power.
Simultaneously, China imposed temporary export restrictions on rare earths on countries that supported Maduro’s abduction, alarming US tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Intel. China is the largest producer of these rare-earth metals, as it accounts for at least 60 percent of them globally.
Every step China has taken strikes at the economic heart of the US empire, the report concluded. The most important message, however, is the strategic one: China can strangle the US in the energy sector without firing a single shot.
If the details are largely correct, it’s unlikely that China will verify the total package. That’s not how they do diplomacy.
We will have to watch as events unfold to establish the facts.
The Chinese, known for playing the very long game,are capable of playing the very quick game when necessary.They run rings around the fools in Washington,including those in the shadows working the puppet,the sad deteriorating puppet with the ridiculous wig.
@ Steve; I am reminded that PRC CHINA owns about $8 TRILLION of the US NATIONAL DEBT OF $38 TRILLION, and it remains to be seen if, and when, China chooses to put this US government Treasury bond debt back on the market to exploit the increasing difference in rising bond interest rates.
I am reminded that Mark Carney in Canada has taken other financial steps that will have a long term adverse effect on US economy.
When you play chess with the Chinese you had better understand the rules.
Fascinating stuff, Steve, thanks for posting.
I was just earlier watching video of David Attenborough in the Rwandan jungles in the late 1970s, the famous footage of his encounter with the Mountain Gorillas, where one of the kids of the pack climbed aboard Attenborough’s body as he lay surrounded by these magnificent creatures. I don’t think he reciprocated by actually touching the young gorilla, but per your significant post regarding the Chinese response to the abduction of Maduro and confiscation of oil shipments, the very clear corollary is… don’t poke the Panda.
I think it’s very revealing; those in the know, know that China is outstripping America in most areas of strategic, economic, military significance. The RAND think tank has consistently shown when war-gaming that China beats the USA in every scenario. Yet the suits behind the scenes, the puppeteers pulling The Bloat’s strings amongst others, continue to maintain the facade of unassailable American hegemonic dominance. It won’t end well.
“The Chinese, known for playing the very long game,…”
Exactly Harry.
From UBS investment bank — By the time the People’s Republic of China celebrates its 100th Anniversary in 2049, it plans to have evolved into what President Xi describes as a ‘great modern socialist country’.
From CSGEF — By 2049, China aims to lead global manufacturing and innovation with a competitive position in advanced technology and industrial systems. It plans to become “an innovative country in all respects.”
From little snippets I’ve seen here and there, China is almost at that point now.
This highlights the disadvantage the liberal order has in competing with a planned economy.
Planning is alien to liberal theory.
Hence the decay of the liberal order.
NEC, thanks for your interest, and while I’m at it can I say how much I enjoy all your comments. We are of one mind.
“…the puppeteers pulling The Bloat’s strings amongst others, continue to maintain the facade of unassailable American hegemonic dominance. It won’t end well.”
Kanga, that’s a topic all of its own isn’t it?
How can intelligent people have this huge blind spot?
They are not fools.
There are definitely fools in the entourage, but I think it was just a few days ago that David Tyler explained the significant and worrying credentials of the real movers and shakers in the circus.
The only explanation I can come up with, and even I’m not wholly convinced of it, is that they have been infected with the virus of US exceptionalism.
As you say, it won’t end well.
Speaking of dead parrots, the literal kind, real parrots, dead, I can’t for the life of me understand why Australians, en masse, aren’t rioting in the streets over these issues. That we can have a federal government, ALP, ostensibly on the side of the people, ostensibly committed to the public good, for the health & welfare of the nation, and having a man named Murray Watt, the minister for the environment, amongst its cabinet members, and this man, since assuming that role, granting licence to mining and energy companies that will in time wreak disastrous outcomes for fauna and flora and public confidence and emission rates and pollution and the likely extinction of species and more.
It seems we’ve tripped over from a somewhat understandable socio-political ecosystem into uncharted territory; the land of the zombie killers, those hugely well-paid mindless & conscienceless apparatchiks whose sole mission is to provide succour to global industrial behemoths and lay waste to the lands, fish & fowl and four-legged creatures along the way.
I cannot comprehend this cruelty, this mindlessness, this disregard for the sanctity of the natural world and its wealth that was this country until the white man saw only dollars to be reaped and to hell with the consequences. Murray Watt ought to be tarred & feathered and paraded through the streets, if ever justice existed in any natural sense.
Yes Steve and Kanga, I’m with you both.
Oz folk largely seem to be complacent and lazy regarding the nature of Oz ‘democracy’, and politics, the economy and environment. Responsibilities abdicated by ritual of a BBQ sausage, ignoring the rest as banter. Leaving Oz as utter laggards regarding the tech/industrial realities/futures of our economy and almost every aspect of our environment/ecology.
It’s the colonialists way of extraction. Just ask King Charlie.
As for the EPBC Act (reform), I’ve read a number of techo/legal reviews, and whilst it seems to reasonably comply with Samuel’s recommendations, which were gathering dust, there seems to be a concerning amount of Ministerial discretion, but not without strings & rationale attached, including a ‘no regression principle’ and ‘net gains for nature’. There’s 7 different Bills / Acts comprising 607 pages, all passed by both Houses of Parliament up to Nov 30 last year. But there’s a long way to go yet, as the devil in the detail has yet to come, as those details are assigned to Regulation (and frameworks) both State & Federal yet to be resolved and incorporated. YIKES
Not to worry, Murray’the talking fire hydrant’ Watt is leading us into the abyss, with the imprimatur of pea heart Abalone.
Oh yes, now, even though the (reformed) EPBC Act(s) Regulations haven’t been set, we see the devil’s excrement being deposited by Murray Watt in Tassie. We now see the unalloyed intentions of ‘Ministerial discretion’ – wanton designer killing being okayed.