In 1782, the British parliamentarian and philosopher, Edmund Burke, identified a question that he called “the touchstone of all theories which regard man and the affairs of men”: “Does it suit his nature in general?”
While policies, interests, and issues matter in politics, ultimately for political parties it is how they connect with a country’s national character that determines their electoral success. When a party feels alien to the country itself, then the country will reject it like a foreign body.
This is where the Liberal Party finds itself after Australia’s federal election over the weekend. Their loss was not simply a repudiation of the platform the party was offering this election; it was something far deeper and more existential. At best, it could be considered a warning, at worst, a sign of the party’s terminal decline.
Australia is a stability-seeking country. While the “fear of abandonment” has been the driving psychological force of its foreign policy, domestically, this has developed into a mentality that no one should “rock the boat.” The role of the government is to simply keep the ship afloat and sailing in a beneficial direction. This is why the most successful Australian governments are usually the most boring: Australians like boring.
While in the United States, there is a significant percentage of the public who lust for chaos, this is an anathema to Australians. The fatal mistake that the Liberal Party made was interpreting the re-election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency as an indication of a cultural shift within the West that they could capitalize on by emulating him. The party thought the general public would be animated by the same narrow – American – culture wars that they obsess over. Instead, the public saw this as an attempt to import U.S. political instability.
Trump’s cultural revolution has driven a stake through what was already an uneasy coalition of ideas within the Liberal Party. Formed in 1944, the Liberal Party’s mission was to create a stable counterforce to the strength of the Labor Party. Broadly, it sought to fuse together both the conservative and liberal traditions in the country, as there was no way each could win elections alone.
It took the name “Liberal” as its founder, Robert Menzies, wanted it to be a forward-looking party, although it also remained the home of those far more enamored with the past.
The alliance worked during the Cold War, when to be conservative meant to be liberal in the classical sense, especially with commitment to liberal democratic institutions. However, the end of the Cold War weakened this unifying mission. Conservative politics developed a suspicion of liberalism – with its emotionally unsatisfying principles, procedures, and restraints. This Cold War conservatism was then completely destroyed with the emergence of Trump as a globally influential figure.
At Australia’s 2022 election, this rupture appeared in the form of a loose movement of independent candidates who won seven of the country’s wealthiest electorates – traditionally the Liberal Party’s firmest territory. This was effectively a party split, with its more liberal-inclined voters abandoning the party for a movement that better reflected their values. With all these independent MPs also being women, their success highlighted how professional women also found the Liberal Party unpalatable – a warning siren in a country with the fourth highest rate of tertiary educated women in the OECD.
The 2025 election saw this trend compounded by an almost wholesale rejection of the party in the country’s urban areas. Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the world, with almost 18 million of the country’s 27 million people living in the metropolitan areas of its five largest cities. This, of course, means that these cities dominate the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives. The Liberal Party now has no seats in Adelaide, probably one in Melbourne (with a close contest still counting), and low single digits in Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth.
Without a considerable presence in these cities, it is impossible for the party to form government. Furthermore, the historical division of labor between the Liberal Party and its coalition partner the National Party has broadly been one of urban and regional seats. If the Liberal Party is now also a regional party, it will put considerable strain on the agreement between the two parties.
The party now stands at a crossroads. There is a risk that the Liberal Party’s resentment will become exaggerated by its loss. It could become a permanent oppositional force – angry and agitated, mired in victimhood, hostile to everything, and devoid of any practical alternatives. It’s a path major financial backers like billionaire Gina Rinehart and the now unwitting Labor Party operatives in the Murdoch Press would love to see. But it’s a path toward further decline.
However, if the Liberal Party does wish to become a responsible party of government again it will need to start by seriously asking themselves some fundamental questions: what are Australians actually like? And why don’t they like us?