For a special “best of” season we asked long-time Inside Story contributors to choose one of their favourites among the articles they’ve written for us and add a 2026 postscript. This is Mike Steketee’s selection.
Is the Party Over? is the book’s title, and its subtitle is The Future of the Liberals. A topic for our time, you may think, and you would be right. But it was published in 1994 and written by Chris Puplick, a former Liberal senator and shadow minister.
That was the year after John Hewson lost the unlosable election to Paul Keating. Labor had been in power for a decade, Australia had endured a severe recession in 1991 and the popular Bob Hawke had been replaced by the unpopular Keating. And yet the Liberals lost. Twenty-eight years later, the arguments in Is the Party Over? have striking resonances.
Puplick is what was once called a Liberal “wet,” as opposed to the party’s conservative “dries.” (They’re better known these days as small “l” liberals, or moderates.) Among the reasons he cited for Hewson’s loss to Keating was the pledge to opt out of environmental policy by deferring to states’ rights — or, as Puplick put it, “the right of states to butcher the environment.” The Coalition’s advocacy of nuclear power was “plainly stupid.” It had failed to recognise the rights of Aboriginal Australians. Its narrow-minded, penny-pinching approach to the arts and “bizarre threats to all but destroy the great national institution of the ABC” had cost it votes in the arts community. Its “crass homophobia” had alienated the gay and lesbian community.
He argued that the party also had a problem with women dating back to 1987, when the John Howard–led Coalition opposed the Hawke government’s affirmative action legislation for government employees. “Indeed,” wrote Puplick, “John Howard’s problem in the eyes of many feminists was compounded by the fact that the two most ardently pro-feminist members of his shadow cabinet, Peter Baume and Ian Macphee, were both ruthlessly eliminated from it.” Baume had been shadow minister for women’s affairs. Puplick himself lost his seat in the 1990 election after being relegated to third place on the NSW Senate ticket.
Yet the Liberal Party had a proud track record on these issues, Puplick argued, pointing to measures including creating the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and the Kakadu and Uluru national parks, steering through the 1967 referendum that led to Aboriginal people being counted in the census, and legislating in the states to remove discrimination on the basis of sexuality.
In 1989, when Puplick was shadow environment minister, the Coalition adopted a target of a 20 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2000 — well ahead of any commitment by Labor. Who could have imagined that a third of a century later, some Liberals and Nationals are still arguing the toss about human-induced climate change and whether we even need targets? Or that the Liberals would revisit the option of nuclear power, which is no more popular now and makes even less sense given the low cost of renewables.
Of course, more important factors were responsible for the 1993 election loss, including Hewson’s complex and ambitious Fightback! package, which included a GST and significant changes to Medicare. As well, Keating’s formidable political demolition skills exposed Hewson’s limitations as a campaigner.
Nevertheless, Puplick’s key point had force: the Liberals couldn’t afford to write off the voters they had alienated. The same choice, on many of the same or similar issues, faces the party after this year’s election loss.
Despite Howard’s argument that the Liberal Party is a broad church, the moderates lost influence in the years he presided over the party. Now the teals have scythed through their already depleted ranks, defeating moderates Trent Zimmerman, Katie Allen, Dave Sharma, Jason Falinski, Tim Wilson and Celia Hammond, as well as taking out Josh Frydenberg.
Scott Morrison’s election strategy assumed he could find an electoral majority in the outer suburbs and regions, despite the Coalition’s negatives on climate change, women and government integrity. Indeed, he was prepared to alienate small “l” liberal voters by advancing the credentials of his handpicked candidate in the seat of Warringah, Katherine Deves, and endorsing her criticisms of transgender rights. That failed both as a political wedge and as a strategy to attract conservative votes.
“It was a strategic, dog whistle–type manoeuvre to awaken culture war anxieties in outer-suburban seats,” said the Blueprint Institute, a think tank espousing classic liberalism, in its scathing post-election briefing. “Morrison was actively sacrificing the teal for the new dark blue.”
Yet Peter Dutton sees Morrison’s strategy as the way of the future, at least in broad terms. He says that 200,000 voters deserted the Liberal Party for the teals at the election compared with the 700,000 who switched to right-wing parties such as One Nation and the United Australia Party. His office didn’t respond to repeated requests for an explanation of these figures, which appear difficult to reconcile with the election results. “Our policies will be squarely aimed at the forgotten Australians,” Dutton said at his first news conference as leader, “in the suburbs, across regional Australia, the families and small businesses whose lot the Labor Party will have made more difficult.”
As for the teal seats, Dutton thinks that well-off voters can cope with higher petrol prices, whereas “people are putting $20 and $40 in their car because they can’t afford to fill up” in many of the areas he sees the Liberals representing.
One of Dutton’s predecessors, Tony Abbott, has his own instant history of the election result, perhaps tinged with schadenfreude over the losses by Liberal moderates. “This wasn’t actually a climate change election,” he argues. “The question is do we win so-called teal seats back by trying to be even more zealous on climate or by finding other issues on which to appeal?”
Dutton told his party room that the opposition will announce a new target for emissions reduction before the next election. But he didn’t take what many thought was the obvious step — as advocated by Zimmerman and other moderates — of accepting Labor’s target of 43 per cent and moving on. Colleagues say he believes he will be able to link Labor’s climate policies to the rising cost of living.
Senate opposition leader Simon Birmingham, the senior parliamentary moderate, was reduced to tortuously arguing that he would have supported the 43 per cent target if it hadn’t been put into legislation, given that the legislation was unnecessary. Such is the price of party unity.
But Birmingham and other moderates have a very different interpretation of the election result from Dutton’s. Apart from the teal electorates themselves, Birmingham tells me, many other seats were lost to Labor and the Greens because of the party’s loss of “teal-type” voters. “To win those seats back we are going to have to reconcile with those voters and their concerns on issues of inclusion and climate ambition.”
He draws a contrast with the 2019 election, after parliament had resolved the issue of marriage equality “and there were no particular distractions being run in the culture war space. We were able to keep the focus relentlessly on the economy and tax, with Labor’s help, and we won. By 2022, having had internally divisive debates on religious discrimination and then the distraction of transgender issues, they just compounded a sense of intolerance that is out of step with large parts of Australia, particularly in those seats that we lost.”
Fellow moderate, NSW senator Andrew Bragg, emphasises that the Morrison government lost seats to Labor and the teals rather than to right-wing parties. “It is very clear that the fastest way back to government is to reclaim the Liberal heartland,” he tells me.
Bragg has calculated an average Liberal primary vote of 41 per cent in the (broadly defined) inner-city Sydney seats of Warringah, retained by independent Zali Stegall; North Sydney, Wentworth and Mackellar, all won by teals; Reid and Bennelong, won by Labor; and Bradfield and Berowra, held by Liberals despite significant swings against them. To replace these eight seats, he says, would require winning in areas of western Sydney such as Bankstown, Parramatta and Liverpool, where the average Liberal primary vote was around 23 per cent. “It is a pipedream,” he says. “Our primary vote is simply too low.”
By contrast, lifting the Liberal vote by as little as six percentage points to 47 per cent in seats closer to the city should be enough for a win after preferences. “The idea that we abandon heartland seats and not represent people in the inner cities would be the first time the Liberal Party has sought not to represent a large part of the community. It is a politically innumerate approach.” And the story is similar in Melbourne and Brisbane, he says. “All up, it would be giving up on sixteen current or former Liberal seats.”
An analysis by Ross Stitt, a lawyer and political scientist, supports Bragg’s broad point by using the twenty electorates with the highest Yes vote in 2017 for marriage equality as a proxy for socially liberal values. The Liberals held ten of those seats in the 2016 federal election and eight in 2019 but lost all of them to teals, Labor and the Greens this year.
Despite Bragg’s figures, winning back teal seats is likely to be a challenge. Independent MPs in recent periods generally have increased their margins at subsequent elections. Labor has an interest in encouraging its supporters to vote strategically, as it did at this year’s election, to help the teals get re-elected, since it has no prospect of winning those seats itself. Ultimately, events over the next few years, including the performance of the Albanese government, the Dutton opposition and the teals themselves, will determine the future of these seats.
Bragg sees opportunities. “The first thing you need is a philosophy of live and let live,” he says. “Most people aren’t into weirdo culture war issues.” Another requirement is a distinctive economic policy — and this is where he sees openings, given Labor’s “vested interests” through its links with trade unions. He cites the Albanese government’s likely reintroduction of collective bargaining and steps to reduce the transparency of superannuation funds. “So we have to be bold in industrial relations, superannuation and tax. I don’t think we did enough on economic policy in the last election.”
Bragg’s views are echoed by influential Liberals outside parliament. David Cross, chief executive of the Blueprint Institute and a former head of policy and chief-of-staff to NSW Liberal education ministers, makes the point that Tony Abbott seems to have missed: every one of the teals ran campaigns attacking the Coalition’s weak position on climate change. “They pitched themselves as disaffected small ‘l’ liberals,” he says, “and the electorate responded.”
Cross believes that Liberals, “as friends of the free market,” know that liberalism is best placed to enable conservation and climate action. “They know we should be supporting the private sector’s desire to speed up the exit of coal from the grid rather than forcing energy companies to keep open loss-making coal-fired power stations — a perfect example of government overreach if there ever was one.”
Not facing the restraints applying to federal MPs, the Blueprint chief makes another point: there is no alternative. “Even in an alternate reality where Matt Canavan is prime minister, you are going to end up with net zero because you will be dragged there by the global economy. There is no conceivable world where in fifty years from now we won’t be in a net zero economy. That being the case, do we want to get the wooden spoon or take the opportunities?”
The concern of small “l” liberals like Cross is that the party has broken away from its moorings to become reactionary rather than liberal. “Whether you look at the treatment of LGBTQI students at school or the environment or even tax and fiscal reform, which policies in the party’s platform can you point to as being consistent with the philosophy on which the party was founded?” he asks. “You can see why the party has bled votes — to the teals because it is not a liberal party and in some other seats because it is not a conservative party.”
Rather than shifting to the populist right, says Cross, the party “must re-engage with classical liberalism and stop listening to those who bastardise their party’s philosophy to shroud Luddite attitudes towards progress and veil naked bigotry towards people that make them uncomfortable.”
As for the outer-suburban strategy, Cross calls it the “mythical base.” The idea that the party needn’t focus on winning back teal seats is “ludicrously misguided.” These are areas where people have voted for the Liberals all their lives, he points out — until May this year. “As recently as three or four years ago, the Coalition was holding these seats by massive margins. The idea that this [loss of support] has suddenly become a long-term trend, I don’t buy at all. What it does show is that the federal party, particularly under Morrison, has just diverted so far from these voters’ policy priorities. It shows the extent to which they have abandoned liberalism.”
The moderates’ arguments find support in the re-election in May of Tasmanian Liberal Bridget Archer, who defied the national voting trend to secure a small positive swing in the ultra-marginal seat of Bass. Archer stood up to Morrison and crossed the floor in support of an integrity commission and LGBTQI rights, and since the election has voted in favour of Labor’s legislation for the 43 per cent emissions reduction target.
Might the NSW Coalition government be the model for the federal party to follow? True, it has become mired in all sorts of scandals this year. And premier Dominic Perrottet hails from the conservative wing of the party, though the moderates say he shares many of their concerns, particularly over the federal party’s resort to populism.
But when it comes to policies, the government in Macquarie Street arguably does set a positive example. “The policy platform of the NSW government has been really successful,” argues Cross, citing moves on climate change and other issues that make it less likely to be threatened by a teal wave.
One answer to the question in the title of Puplick’s book, Is the Party Over?, came two years after its publication with John Howard’s landslide win against the Keating government — the start of four terms in office. Howard didn’t win by embracing moderate policies; rather, he focused on neutralising negatives, including his party’s hostility towards Medicare and his own fears about Asian immigration. By offering the smallest possible target, he got out of the way of voters who, in the words of Queensland Labor premier Wayne Goss, were waiting on their verandas with baseball bats to deal with the Keating government. Howard exploited the sentiment by aiming, he said, for an Australia that was “comfortable and relaxed.”
When the electoral pendulum swings, it can knock over everything in its path, including perceptions of electoral vulnerabilities. But a vote overwhelmingly against a government does not mean an opposition should forget about adopting policies that appeal to voters.
Despite preaching the gospel of the Liberal Party as a broad church, Howard often acted as though he didn’t mean it. But he was pragmatic enough to sway with the electoral wind. As opposition leader he appointed Puplick shadow environment minister because he saw the traction the issue was gaining with voters. He allowed a conscience vote to overturn health minister Tony Abbott’s ban on the RU486 abortion pill — an issue that had split the Coalition parties. In his last term of government he endorsed an emissions trading scheme to tackle climate change. It was the ideologues in the party, led by Abbott, who took a different path.
Puplick’s basic point remains clear and valid: a party seeking government can’t afford policies that put so many voters offside. As another prominent Liberal put it to me, “Will we win an election on reframing these issues? Perhaps not, but we have to stop losing votes on them.” •
POSTSCRIPT, MARCH 2026
Perhaps it’s time for a sequel to Chris Puplick’s book, with a title along the lines of “When Will They Ever Learn?”
Remarkably, the questions he raised in 1994 remain as relevant in 2026 as they were in 2022. Nuclear power remains a losing, dead-end issue. The Liberals are still campaigning against recognition of Aboriginal rights and the ABC. The party’s “women problem” persists, as does climate change scepticism and ambivalence towards immigration.
That was certainly Puplick’s view when I contacted him recently. “In terms of what I was attempting to say thirty years ago,” he said, “I just think I could update the book with a series of anecdotes without in any sense altering those core arguments.”
Some of the problems were analysed in the Liberal Party’s review of the 2025 election, conducted by former Howard minister Nick Minchin (a former federal director of the party) and former NSW minister Pru Goward — the document the party decided was too hot for the media and public to handle, with the result that it was promptly leaked.
Not that the findings would have shocked anyone who was following the public debate. Concerns were expressed to the review that the party might collapse or disappear. “Is the party over?” as Puplick asked three decades ago.
Could these concerns have anything to do with Minchin and Goward’s observation that reviews since 1983 “have contained several common features and similar recommendations with, we note, indifferent take up by the party”? Those words in turn echoed a passage in the party’s 2022 election review: “Many of the matters raised in this review were also discussed in the reviews of the 2016 and 2019 federal elections. Many of the problems identified have been constants for a decade or more.”
The women’s vote, for instance. As the latest review put it, “the combination of a leader unattractive to women and policies or messaging that alienated women was a major factor in 2025. Further research to understand the loss of the female vote over the past decade must be undertaken urgently.”
You have to wonder what such research would turn up that isn’t already self-evident. In the words of the latest post-mortem: “Despite previous reviews having identified a problem with the female vote, there is no women’s officer or senior female official in the [party] secretariat with direct input into strategy, campaign materials and communications.”
The 2022 review’s recommended target of 50 per cent female representation in parliament within ten years or three terms wasn’t repeated in the latest review. Has it all become too hard? Last year’s election saw women, including the retiring Sussan Ley, make up just 28 per cent of Liberal MPs and senators (excluding those Queensland LNP representatives who sit in the National party room). Labor’s figure was 56 per cent.
The 2022 review pointed out the swing against the Liberals in the top fifteen seats by Chinese ancestry was 6.6 per cent, compared to 3.7 per cent in other seats. The trend continued last year. In the words of the latest review: “The party’s capacity to thoughtlessly offend groups, including the Chinese, was, as others have observed, a widespread problem.”
And then there were the teals, who first won big in 2022. The Liberals’ 2022 review stated the obvious: “The party must concede no seat and must vigorously contest the teal seats at the next election.” Yet Peter Dutton saw the main threat on the other flank of his party: 700,000 voters had switched from the Liberals to parties such as One Nation and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, he claimed, compared to 200,000 who had moved to the teals.
Just how he arrived at those figures was never made clear. But his intent was clear enough: the remedy was to move further to the right.
Both Scott Morrison and Dutton envisaged a path to government via outer-metropolitan seats. That was a pipedream, as Senator Andrew Bragg correctly predicted in 2022, and the Liberals are now close to being wiped out in metropolitan areas.
Conceivably, there could be an argument that Dutton held back the surge in One Nation support that we have seen since the election. But if the 2025 election result was the cost of neutralising One Nation, it was surely not a price worth paying. It brings to mind a Vietnam war analogy: “We had to destroy the village to save it.”
As for the teals, Puplick thinks their brand of “local selfishness” makes them vulnerable. But they will be hard to dislodge while they continue to support the views of their affluent constituents on issues such as climate change and the role of women — the very issues on which these voters find the Liberal Party so unappealing.
The Liberals’ Tim Wilson did regain the seat of Goldstein from the teals’ Zoe Daniel at the last election — though only just — but other teals increased their support. Zali Steggall now holds the Sydney seat of Warringah, formerly Tony Abbott’s safe Liberal seat, with 61 per cent of the vote after preferences.
Puplick is still a member of the party he joined in 1965. (“Force of habit” he calls it.) But the “remarkable thing,” he says, “is just how many of my friends — Ian Macphee, Fred Chaney, Peter Baume — have given up their party membership.” Like Puplick, all three were prominent small “l” Liberals campaigning on environmental issues, support for women and the arts, non-discriminatory immigration and Aboriginal issues during the years in opposition under the Hawke and Keating governments.
Yet, while John Howard preached the virtues of a “broad church” Liberal Party, each of them found themselves on the outer under his leadership. According to Puplick, “Howard’s broad church was one in which the approved took communion at the altar and the disapproved got a glass of water in the crypt.”
For a time, Puplick was among the anointed. Howard appointed him shadow minister for the environment and the arts after the 1987 election. “That environment policy of mine and similarly the arts policy at the same election [1990] was the last time the party put out policies in these areas,” says Puplick.
Current betting is that the Liberals remain in the wilderness for a long time. Still, in politics it pays to expect the unexpected. Two years after Puplick’s book questioning the survival of the Liberal party, Howard won the 1996 election in a landslide. And in 2013, Tony Abbott won from opposition with another sizeable swing.
But neither won on the appeal of their distinctive or positive policies. Howard’s strategy was to minimise the Coalition’s negatives and focus maximum attention on the failings of a thirteen-year old Labor government. Abbott set the standard for negative campaigning and exploited the chronic divisions of the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd governments.
The 2025 election review reminds us that only five months before the election, the Coalition was leading Labor by 52–48 per cent in one opinion poll, while Dutton was the preferred prime minister by a margin of 39–34 per cent three months before polling day.
All of which goes to show that whatever negatives a party may be suffering, it can prevail for other reasons. Say a recession, even stronger concerns about the cost of living, or a scandal or two. As British prime minister Harold Macmillan is reputed to have said when asked what concerned him most: “Events, dear boy, events.”
In the meantime, though, it would help the Liberals if they stopped advancing policies that lose them votes. •
