From Menzies to nowhere: The Liberals and their disappearing voters

The Liberal Party is falling apart because it’s trying to represent an electorate that no longer exists.

Sussan Ley, Ted O’Brien, with a portrait of Robert Menzies in the background. Photograph by Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images.

The current turmoil inside the Coalition has far less to do with different personalities they currently have in Parliament, and more to do with the unravelling of the electoral foundations of the Liberal Party, which have been falling apart for some time. The Nationals’ rebellions that we see occasionally – like the one we are seeing at the moment – aren’t random: they’re the behaviour of a smaller party whose relative position has drastically improved, while its partner has lost a great deal of electoral support.

After the 2025 election, the Nationals could realistically claim that their model of politics still works in the regions. They held most of their seats, with the sole exception of Calare, which was retained by Andrew Gee who had resigned from the party over the Voice to Parliament and recontested as an independent. That result didn’t represent a regional swing against the politics of the National Party, and nor did it benefit the Liberals – it was more of a personal endorsement of Gee, rather than a repudiation of the regional program of the Nationals. In practical terms, the Nationals could argue that their electoral fortunes held firm, and that their position within the Coalition had strengthened as the Liberals shrank in the cities.

That shift in the internal numbers is producing this current tension. The Liberals still believe and behave like they are the senior partner by far (even though they are no longer in that position) in a conservative arrangement that goes all the back to the time of Menzies. But since the 2025 federal election, they don’t have electorate coverage and seats to justify that assumption. In contrast, the Nationals are now behaving like a party that has its own mandate on the conservative side of politics and, for as long as the Liberals fail to define who they actually represent, they will continue to push through with their advantages.

The immediate flashpoints – votes on hate speech and national security legislation – are symptoms rather than the causes. The Liberals have been trying to project institutional responsibility in opposition by supporting parts of Labor’s security agenda, especially after Bondi, while the Nationals have taken a different reading of their constituency and crossed the floor. The calculation by the Nationals is straightforward: defying the Liberals differentiates them from One Nation, protects their regional vote, and demonstrates to their voters that they are not just an outpost of the Liberal Party. It also reminds the Liberals that the Nationals are not obliged to absorb the costs of their identity crisis.

The deeper problem is that the Liberals no longer have a coherent social base. The party has not simply polled badly, it has watched its traditional constituencies split into three. The professional centre has migrated over to the teal independents, the urban progressive cohort has shifted to the Australian Greens, and the cultural conservatives have moved towards One Nation or, in some cases in the regions, over to the Nationals. None of this looks like a temporary protest vote. These are value-driven and class-driven movements, and the archetypal Liberal voter – economically dry, socially moderate, a belief in institutions – has fractured into parts that are incompatible with each other.

The relatively new phenomenon of the “teal voter” is a grouping that’s financially literate, focused on climate issues and socially liberal. The Green’s voter is urban, educated, and somewhat secular, anxious about the future of housing and the environment, and not wedded to the old models of suburban growth. The One Nation–Nationals voter blends economic protection, cultural suspicion, and a sense that national institutions have ceased to represent them. These groups can’t be reconciled into a single “centre-right” bloc without having internal contradictions.

It’s also worth pointing out that the Liberals aren’t just the victims of changing demographics over time, or a fickle electorate always on the lookout for something new. They are, especially over the past decade, responsible for their own decline. The party spent 30 years advancing an economic program that treated society as a market and the state as a balance sheet. It presided over labour market casualisation, the hollowing out of vocational education, the corporatisation of universities, the privatisation of strategic utilities, and the financialisation of housing. It weakened domestic manufacturing while celebrating abstract “competitiveness”, and treated infrastructure and public services as costs rather than critical processes in nation-building.

Each of these policies made sense to Treasury and the business media, but together they eroded the social contract that once underwrote broad-based Liberal voting: secure work, affordable housing, the prospect of advancement, and a modest confidence in national institutions. When those conditions fall away, voters don’t remain loyal out of sentimentality, they also fall away.

Some go to the Greens because they see climate breakdown, housing insecurity and educational debt as the logical endpoint of an endless growth model. Some go over to the teal independents, because they want integrity, institutional restraint and strong attention to climate change issues. Some go to One Nation because they interpret industrial decline, porous borders and cultural fragmentation as evidence that the country has slipped further away from them. The Liberals essentially built the economic architecture that has produced all of these three electoral reactions, yet seem puzzled now that they find themselves without a viable constituency.

The institutional consequences are now becoming more obvious. After the defeat at the 2025 federal election, the party commissioned a post-mortem of its campaign performance, as parties do. What made this one remarkable was former leader Peter Dutton’s response: his objection that parts of the draft might be defamatory, and that publication could expose the party to legal risk.

The review was delayed while lawyers and office-bearers reconsidered how to proceed but the point is that no healthy major party threatens defamation over its own analytical paperwork, especially after such a comprehensive defeat. Parties in good condition, irrespective of how great an electoral defeat might be, abide by their internal protocols, have mechanisms for discipline, and a shared understanding of what can be argued in private without a recourse to the Courts. When a former leader treats the party’s internal review as a potential legal liability, it’s an admission to the public that the organisational structures are falling apart. The Liberals aren’t just simply losing elections; they’re losing the trust that’s required to present themselves as a viable political institution.

This fragmentation explains the extraordinary opinion polling where One Nation has overtaken the Coalition on the primary vote, albeit in just a small number of polls. A generation ago, such an outcome would have been unthinkable: the Liberals were the default vehicle of the suburban middle class and the keeper of the national interest. Today, One Nation – without a single lower-house seat at the last election – has become the repository for voters who once relied on the Liberals to articulate cultural cohesion and national sovereignty.

At the same time, the teal independents have inherited some of those older liberal virtues – integrity, moderation, management of climate – while the Greens have absorbed the moral values of the urban left. The result is that the Liberals occupy a shrinking strip of political territory with that has very little gravitational pull back to the centre. They are cut off from the progressive city, endangered in the professional suburbs, and no longer have the authority in the outer regions. They are seemingly surviving at the moment, mainly on that loyalty from older homeowners, ‘old’ money’ and sections of the business community, even though it seems that those groupings are not as reliable as it once was.

Reversing this decline – or stopping it from declining even further – isn’t impossible, but it’s not going to achieved by making minor adjustments, or assuming that the voting pendulum will swing back the other to them through natural electoral processes or the “it’s time” factor. It seems that too much has been lost for this to happen.

The Liberals could chase the seats they’ve lost to the teal independents, but they’d have to re-establish their credibility of climate issues, public integrity and social liberalism; or they go down the path of nationalist cultural policies and economic protectionism; or they could create a link with urban progressives. And each path that they could choose appears, on the surface, to undermine all the others, and by the time they end up reaching that group, there’s a different political party that’s already arrived and claimed those voters.

The only plausible recovery lies in a deliberate reconstruction of a modern centre – the sort of party that treats climate and institutional integrity as an important part of governing, rather than the nihilism of culture wars and the Sky After Dark brigade – but that would antagonise much of the right and further strain relations with the Nationals.

The Nationals, for their part, will continue to exploit this moment, that’s probably the main reason behind the debacles of last week. Unlike the Liberal Party, they have a clearly defined constituency – they’re regional, economically protective, and highly sceptical of urban liberalism – and this clear definition gives them a certain amount of leverage.

As long as the Liberals remain uncertain about who they’re meant to represent in Parliament and what they actually stand for, the Nationals will continue to act like a small cabal within a larger cabal – where they can choose to be cooperative, they can be adversarial, they can act transactionally, but they will always be autonomous, because the Liberal Party is no longer the more senior player on the conservative side of politics.

The Coalition isn’t falling apart because of a single bill in Parliament, or just because of its leadership. It’s struggling because it’s trying to represent an electorate that either no longer exists or chasing an electorate that has found other political parties that are more in tune with the issues that are relevant to their lives. The Liberal Party likes to talk about Menzies, but he left office 60 years ago, and they can’t just use his name rhetorically and hope that the social classes that once flocked to Menzies, will return en masse to a political party that doesn’t even know itself who it represents.

Survival for both the Liberal Party – and the Coalition, if it come to that – depends on a new level of intellectual rigour and, of course, hard work and discipline. But the real question won’t be answered by current theatrics being played out in Parliament, but by actually going out to the streets, the suburbs and regions, to find who exactly they’re speaking to.