More than 20 years after he wrote that the Liberal Party has deserted it roots and become deeply conservative, Greg Barns argues it is well beyond time for a genuine liberal force to enter the fray.

Greg Barns

In 2002 I left the Liberal Party, after being disendorsed as a candidate for the Tasmanian state election that year. A year later I wrote What’s Wrong with the Liberal Party?, which Cambridge University Press published. The argument was, in part, that the party’s name was a misnomer because it had become, under then leader and Prime Minister John Howard, deeply conservative. There was, I wrote, a gap in the political ideas marketplace for a genuine liberal force. It’s taken a while but maybe we are finally getting there.

Splashed around the media today is talk of Teals and centrists like ACT Senator David Pocock forming a new party. A political force that would capture votes from social and economic liberals who are dissatisfied with the increasingly One Nation lite Liberals and the often timid ALP.

Such a political party would do well. As I observed over two decades ago the traditional Liberal electorates in middle and higher socio economic areas - Kooyong in Melbourne, Warringah in Sydney, for example - would back candidates who, in that era, supported asylum seekers and wanted a dynamic, open Australia.

By the way there is a mythology that the Liberal Party of John Howard somehow balanced liberals and conservatives. It is nonsense. Under Mr Howard’s prime ministership the race card was played, marriage was legislatively defined as between a ‘man and woman’ and the possibility of an Australian head of state was killed off (I ran the 1999 Republic Referendum campaign). There was little or no crossing the floor until brave MPs like Petro Georgiou, Judy Moylan and Judith Troeth did, over children in detention centres.

And it has been the same since. With the exception of Malcolm Turnbull, who had two leadership stints (2008-2009 as Opposition Leader and 2015-2018 as Prime Minister), the leaders who have come after Mr Howard have been anything but liberal.

When writing and thinking about a real liberal party after the release of my 2003 book I wondered if the model was the UK Liberal Democrats or the Canadian Liberals. The latter is a powerful political machine that has dominated Canadian politics for decades. The former, once a party of government, is the rational centre, particularly in these days of Reform UK.

I revisited the vision of a liberal force in a 2019 book called The Rise of the Right: The War on Australia’s Liberal Values (Hardie Grant). In that book I was more optimistic about liberal values making inroads, via the election of independents, in that year’s federal election.

I wrote that in that election ‘there are signs that genuine liberals might make real inroads into Liberal Party territory. Already Kerryn Phelps has won in Wentworth in Sydney’s east and Zali Steggall may do the same in former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s northern Sydney seat of Warringah. In Melbourne the Liberal’s Deputy Leader Josh Frydenberg faces a real challenge from liberal candidates such as the Greens’ Julian Burnside and genuine liberal Oliver Yates.’ Interestingly Wentworth, Warringah and Kooyong have all fallen to Teals, albeit in the 2022 election.

So what would a genuine liberal party look like? Firstly it needs to focus on good policy that is formulated according to national interest and which is cognisant of the need to resist or push back against dangerous government policies such as the current fetish for corporate welfare in the guise of ‘industry policy.’ On the table would be: tax reform that cuts out the rorts and middle-class or self-funded retirees give aways, and which examines ‘off the table’ hard topics like lifting the rate of GST while compensating low-wage earners, encouraging states to remove iniquitous stamp duty on property transfers. While on housing, there would be an end to first home-owner schemes which leading economist Saul Eslake says simply lifts house prices. This needs to be allied with the relentless push towards medium-density housing, but which focuses on design and amenity, not the high rise slums of tomorrow.

A liberal party should embrace an independent foreign policy. One that is not afraid to push back against the US in the way New Zealand has done from time to time since David Lange banned US war ships from that nation’s shores in the 1980s.

And a liberal force would, of course, stop pandering to special interests and pursue climate change policy that is based on science and rational economics. The latter meaning a carbon tax, long pushed by the quintessentially liberal Economistnewspaper, for many years.

One other point to make in the context of One Nation. It is not a party and has only one ‘policy’ – the race card. It also has a habit of exploding and its members are not stayers. But even if its popularity does fall between now and the election, the Liberal Party will keep chasing its votes and, in doing so, abandon the cities. Therein likes the political opportunity for a liberal force.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/05/teal-independents-allegra-spender-and-zali-steggall-lead-push-to-form-new-centrist-political-party/

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