Four seats and no future: The Liberal Party’s existential crisis continues

The normal political cycle of defeat and recovery can never be assumed again for the Liberal Party because the conditions that made that cycle possible in the past no longer exist.

After the South Australian election last Saturday, the Liberal Party was reduced to four members. While it could be a few more seats after the counting is completed, this is not just a poor result, it’s a systemic failure. The Liberals have lost their urban base, and that loss is now better understood as further electoral evidence is presented, rather theoretical speculation. It shows what parliament becomes when a major party can no longer convert voter support into seats, and what follows when no other party is able to take its place.

In a Westminster system, the opposition is expected to scrutinise government, create and test its policy offerings, and present a viable alternative to the public. Those are the practical functions of opposition, but it depends on time, numbers and the ability to spread out their responsibilities against the full range of government activity. The Liberal Party is likely to be official opposition in South Australia because it will hold the second-highest number of seats in the lower house – albeit a low tally – but what kind of opposition will it be?

A shadow ministry has to cover the areas of treasury, health, education, infrastructure, police, energy and the other major areas of government, but with just four members – again, with that rider that it could be more – those responsibilities need to be combined to a degree that limits their depth. This leads to the amount of time for policy development being constrained, the scrutiny of legislation becoming less sustainable, and the ability to maintain pressure across multiple portfolios becomes reduced. Of course, the scrutiny continues, but in a much narrower form. It the scrutiny is more easily managed or deflected by the government, and that is what really matters in practice.

This would ordinarily be read as a cyclical failure. Historically, parties have lost heavily, regrouped, and rebuilt across one or two election cycles as political conditions change and their leadership is renewed. But we can’t make that assumption in this case. The problem isn’t simply that the Liberal Party is weak; the conditions under which it would ordinarily recover are no longer available to it. The loss of its urban base isn’t just a temporary electoral setback, it’s a structural shift in where its political support is located and how it’s being expressed. Under these new conditions, recovery is not a matter of time or small adjustment, because the underlying circumstances on which the recovery depends on have already changed: there’s no obvious path back.

The scale of this result and what it means is best understood by looking beyond the result itself. What has occurred is more than a large swing – it’s a change in the location and form of political support. The Liberal Party has lost the modern urban voter – metropolitan Adelaide has shifted towards a form of politics that rewards competence, stability, and credibility, rather than confrontation or the culture wars of identity politics. This isn’t so much a clear ideological shift but more of a preference for a style of governance that appears functional within a complex, service-based environment, and is less about policy detail and more about delivery. And that distinction is very important: the electorate wants governments to do things for them, not argue about whether a woman is a man, or the endless and futile debates about renewal energy.

The modern urban voter looks at the Liberal Party and doesn’t see themselves in it, and this mismatch isn’t just cultural, it’s a structural issue. What they encounter instead is a political language oriented toward an older suburban ideal that departed the scene a long time ago, or towards forms of grievance that rarely appeal to this type of voter. Under these circumstances, a recognition of what the Liberal Party represents is failing, and when recognition fails, the pathway to electoral success doesn’t follow. The connection between the two just doesn’t form.

The problem is not only that the Liberal Party is offering policies that the voters have rejected, it’s just that these policies are no longer credible within the conditions of contemporary urban life, not just in Adelaide but anywhere in Australia. In a dense, service-based economy, voters expect government to operate as a continuous presence, capable of managing systems that are interdependent and complex.

A policy language geared toward a reduction, withdrawal, or just the occasional intervention by government – classic neoliberalist thought that’s still popular within the Liberal Party – doesn’t register as a viable alternative within that environment. And under those electoral conditions, the votes don’t transfer cleanly or consolidate into a single alternative, they disperse across parties and candidates that register dissatisfaction without being able to form a coherent parliamentary force, which is exactly what happened in South Australia.

Mayo: Where it all began

This fracturing of the centre-right didn’t begin with this election. It’s more obvious now, but it can be traced back to the earlier breaks in metropolitan seats that were once held firmly by the Liberal Party in Adelaide. The defeat of Georgina Downer in Mayo by Rebekha Sharkie in 2018 marked a moment in which the link between a party and its policy offerings failed to automatically reassert itself within the electorate. While Sharkie had defeated Jamie Briggs at the 2016 federal election, this byelection (caused by the 2017 citizenship crisis) was meant to be the returning of an establishment figure – both Downer’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather were senior members of parliament for the Liberal Party – to federal politics.

Rebekha Sharkie, Georgina Downer.

The significance of that result was not just the loss of a seat, but what it revealed about the electorate, who chose a candidate running outside the system of the major parties and was able to attract voters who were not prepared to move to Labor, but were also not willing to return to the Liberal Party. And we can see that this development has not been confined to the seat of Mayo, it’s become a broader pattern of electoral behaviour that has since become more visible across Australia, particularly through the emergence of community independent candidates in urban seats who occupy a similar space.

But these candidates don’t draw their support from a single ideological position, they’ve created it from voters who are economically and socially diverse, who share a dissatisfaction with the way the major parties, particularly the Liberal Party, represent contemporary urban life. In that sense, what is now described as the “teal movement” is a continuation of a pattern that was already evident.

Some voters have moved over to Labor because it appears competent and recognisable within many of these urban seats. Others have moved to One Nation or to smaller parties and independents, because those options will at least acknowledge their dissatisfaction more directly. The Liberal Party now sits in between these positions, offering neither reassurance of the normal behaviour of an established political party, nor a clear outlet for electoral discontent. And, as we’ve seen, this is not a temporary problem – it’s a failure of political language and communication, where the Liberal Party no longer speaks effectively to the place in which most of the electorate now lives.

Labor’s parliamentary current dominance is something that follows on from this change. Its primary vote is solid, but it’s low and not overwhelming, yet its seat tally is strong because its support is concentrated in metropolitan electorates, which is where elections are won – in the cities and from the centre. In contrast, a large share of what we’d normally consider to be the centre-right vote has dispersed across regional areas and divided among multiple parties, and in a preferential voting system, this won’t convert into seats won.

It’s this dispersion that prevents a high primary vote – the Liberal Party and One Nation received a combined primary vote of around 41 per cent but will only win about 10 per cent of the seats – from having any meaningful parliamentary power. Of course, conservatives are complaining about the preferencing system now, but they never seemed to be overly concerned when the Australian Greens consistently pick up 14 per cent of the primary vote, but only win less than 1 per cent of seats, or have too many complaints when the Coalition wins seats and government on the back of preferencing deals.

There are many lessons for the Labor Party too

This was a good result for the South Australia Labor Party, but the strength of this result should not be mistaken for uniform support in the electorate. While its primary vote was solid and the number of seats won was substantial, there’s a large number of votes that sit elsewhere within the community, dispersed across minor parties – which the Liberal Party is now one of – and independents.

That distribution changes the way that political capital is acquired, stored and spent. Decisions that would ordinarily generate sustained opposition might not produce immediate reactions, not because they are widely accepted, but because the dissent and opposition against them is not organised in a way that can be acted upon effectively. Because of this, a government can move on its policy platform with less resistance – this seems to have worked reasonably well in Western Australia, which has effectively governed without a function opposition since 2021, but not so well in Victoria, where the Liberal Party has been more intent fighting amongst its own membership, rather than holding the government to account. A tension between governments and oppositions needs to exist within a democratic system and an imbalance between these two can skew the system of governance towards incompetence – not always, but in most cases, it does.

Ambulance ramping was a defining issue at the 2022 state election and still remains unresolved despite the outrage the Labor Party created against the Marshall government at the time, yet it no longer generates sustained political pressure of the kind that would ordinarily be expected. A separate political issue occurred early this year, where political pressure from the opposition was also absent. Premier Peter Malinauskas interfered with due process, when he sent a letter to the board of the Adelaide Festival, which subsequently led to the removal of a pro-Palestine speaker, which then led to other writers withdrawing their support, and the cancellation of the Adelaide Writers Festival. In parliamentary terms, this issue also appeared to have been carefully choreographed, but there was no sustained pressure from the opposition, nor did the government change its position.

While this was a smaller issue when compared to ambulance ramping, the absence of sustained pressure from the opposition suggests a failure of the mechanisms through which dissatisfaction would ordinarily be organised and expressed through parliament, and the consequence is that the government faces less resistance where it is expected to face it, as well as issues related to complacency and a government less willing to do the hard work expected of it, because the pressure is simply not there.

The implications for federal politics after a state election are always played down and, even if the implications are indirect, there are many consistent patterns that are being formed. In metropolitan seats such as Sturt and Boothby, the Liberal position is already weakened and may remain so if urban voters continue to disengage. In regional seats such as Grey and Barker, the more immediate issue is the distribution of conservative votes across multiple parties rather than a direct shift to Labor. The federal parliament continues to operate with a clearer two-sided structure, but the same underlying pressures that have arisen from the state election are present.

South Australia now operates under conditions in which the relationship between votes, seats, and the opposition has broken down. A substantial share of the vote sits outside the winning party that goes on to win government, but it’s not coagulating into a parliamentary force that’s capable of acting on it, and this is resulting in a weak opposition. Of course, our parliamentary system always results in an opposition, but it’s hard to see this one being an effective one.

And this is the big problem: until the Liberal Party – or any other political party – recognises these fundamental and seismic changes that been underway for some time within Australian politics, that normal cycle of defeat and recovery can never be assumed again because the conditions that made that cycle possible no longer exist.