The Liberal party are now a movement in search of a purpose.
In its halcyon days during the Howard government, the Coalition enjoyed a strong lead over Labor on economic management in all public polling. And while the Howard government also typically held leads over Labor on national security and immigration, the foundation of their electoral success was its differentiation from Labor on economic management which was the most salient issue among swing voters.
In the last Australian Financial Review opinion poll conducted by RedBridge Group and Accent Research in December 2025, only 19% of voters believed the then Coaliton was the best party to deal with cost of living and housing affordability, which are currently the two most important vote drivers in the electorate.
If it’s going to be competitive again, the focus of a reformed Coalition needs to be on repairing its performance numbers on economic management and housing.
A good place to start is by looking at what John Hewson started and John Howard and Peter Costello finished: recovering from its 1980s dysfunction by unifying around a singular organising principle on economic reform.
But that is going to require a significant internal mindset change from both the Liberal and National parties. Over the past decade, the Nationals have increasingly become the tail wagging the dog when it comes to its Liberal party partners. Today’s National party is no longer the party that Tim Fischer once led, which fought for better services and infrastructure in the regions but also recognised that concessions needed to be made in those urban seats where the great majority of Australian voters live.
The modern National party no longer makes those concessions and instead has been playing a zero-sum game that is making both centre-right parties increasingly irrelevant to voters in their respective constituencies.
Some commentators accuse the Liberal party of being Labor-lite but the truth of it is the Liberals have become Nationals-lite.
And because the modern Liberal party is now Nationals-lite, it has limited electoral appeal in urban seats. Indeed, the Liberal party now only holds nine out of 88 urban seats (as defined by the Australian Electoral Commission) in Australia.
So while it’s true the Liberal party can’t win government without the National party, at the moment the Liberal party can’t win government with the National party because their pervasive influence over policy makes them so uncompetitive in urban seats.
Compounding this challenge is that the Liberal and National parties are also currently losing vote share to One Nation. While this particular vote transfer is an emerging trend, it is also symptomatic of a fragmented electorate producing fragmented voting patterns which is turning Australia into a nation of smaller and smaller tribes.
The 2nd of March this year marks the 30th anniversary of John Howard’s win over the Keating Labor government. At that election, the combined non-major party vote was 14%. Over the subsequent 10 federal elections, the non-major party vote has grown to 33.6%, with only two-thirds of the electorate voting for the then two major parties. In our most recent national poll, before the Coalition split, the non-major party vote was at 37% and expanding.
A lot of that non-major party growth is occurring in the One Nation vote segment, which in our last round of our research was at 18% nationally and highest at 26% in the gen X male cohort. In other words, just over one in four male gen X voters at the time of the survey would give their primary vote to One Nation.
The primary component behind the bleeding of this vote to One Nation is not the culture wars (though that is a component for some). The underpinning factor is a broken economic promise. In recent decades the Liberal party were very competitive with male gen X working-class conservatives in particular, on the promise of aspiration – that economic growth would create opportunity for those willing to work.
And for most of the period of the Howard government that promise and its reward was there in these assessment of these voters.
But over the past decade the (then) Coalition, and more recently Labor, steadily lost the confidence of these voters as housing became more unattainable, employment less secure and wage growth anaemic and no longer able to provide the life that work was supposed to provide. At the same time, another cohort of older, non-university-educated voters in regional Australia weren’t just anxious about the risk of falling behind, they knew they had already fallen behind.
For those that were former Coalition voters, in their evaluation in our qualitative research, the Liberal and National parties have nothing material to offer, and while they don’t think One Nation offers real hope, they credit them for at least recognising their grievances. In politics, if no one offers a plausible path to security, you vote on identity and resentment instead.
So how do the Liberal and National parties expand their electoral maps?
Economic anxiety should be fertile ground for the Liberal party in particular.
In both the last and current electoral cycles, our research found a pervasive negative mood sentiment in the electorate, which is typically a good diagnostic indicator of a mood for change.
There is other data that speaks to this entrenched pessimism. In our most recent round of research, 49% of voters believe Australia is heading in the wrong direction. A separate question found that 55% of voters think the next generation will have a worse standard of living than their parents’ generation. This research also found that just 35% of voters believe the Albanese Labor government is focused on the right priorities, while 47% disagree with that proposition.
But despite this protracted negative mood sentiment, the then Coalition had no equity leads on the most salient issues. When we asked voters who is best to manage cost of living and housing affordability, Labor won both contests.
When we ask former Coalition voters why they have changed their voting behaviours, many cite a lack of definition around the Coalition’s values and therefore a lack of confidence in its ability to deliver on economic promise, as well as concerns around behaviours and disunity.
There is simply no way back to government for the conservative parties unless they can unite behind a bold economic reform project that offers persuadable voters a new economic compact underpinned by promise and hope, especially in urban seats, and including the teal seats. It also means a return to the principles and values of the successful Coalition partnership led by Howard and Fischer, where the coalition parties made internal trade-offs and accepted compromise to broaden electoral appeal.
That means the Liberal and National parties need to stop searching for shortcuts and competing with themselves by creating and chasing noise. It also means moving away from the extremities of public debate and unifying as a coalition with an economic reform narrative that is pitched at Coalition-coded voters, particularly the younger professional and urban cohorts. If it fails, Anthony Albanese’s recently stated ambition to make Labor the natural party of government really will become reality.
• Tony Barry is a former Liberal party strategist who has worked for Christopher Pyne and Malcolm Turnbull. He now runs political research company RedBridge Group and is a regular media commentator
