After considerable media teasing, the-anticipated report into the Liberal Party’s electoral failure last May has finally been released.

Conducted by former Liberal federal director Brian Loughnane and current federal frontbencher Jane Hume, the report exposes the ugly reality of what the Liberal party has become: a valueless, directionless, rudderless political and ideological ship.

Most of the pre-release commentary focused on the leaked findings: the election was a referendum on Scott Morrison and the Liberals failed to counter Labor and the Broad Left’s defining of him (although, admittedly, on Morrison the Left pretty well got him right); the party is too pale, male, and stale; there are too few women and ‘ethnic’ candidates for preselection and party leadership roles; that state divisions of the party are unfit for purpose and can’t organise a knees-up in a brewery; that targets for greater female representation be set, but not mandatory quotas.

But the really significant recommendations don’t relate to the media fodder.

Instead, they hone in on what is the Liberal Party’s fundamental weakness: it has forgotten what it stands for.

Hume and Loughnane highlight how the Morrison government tossed Liberal values and ideology to the wind in the face of responding to Covid in 2020 and 2021. They stress how important it now is for Liberals to rediscover and return to the party’s intellectual roots – not simply pay lip service to Menzies and his ‘forgotten people’ broadcasts – and once again become a party of the centre-Right. They rightly advocate the Liberals giving Australians a viable and reliable alternative to an increasingly hard-Left Labor.

If anything, however, Hume and Loughnane underestimate the magnitude of the Liberal challenge to resist the Left elite zeitgeist.

The Broad Left – Labor, Greens, Teals, like-minded independents, and loony-Left micro-parties – now constitute a strong and near-permanent electoral majority. That ugly reality is highlighted by Anthony Albanese becoming Prime Minister on a Labor primary vote of 32 per cent. In two-party preferred terms, in the May federal election preferences flowed to Labor two to one, compared to the Coalition. The electoral numbers are stacked against parties of the Right generally.

If the Liberals are ever to be in federal government again, they must do two things above all else. First, they must redefine their traditional liberal-conservative values in a mid-21st century context. Small-c conservative values, notably smaller government, market capitalism, and promoting individual freedoms in exchange for individuals taking personal responsibility for their choices and actions, are timeless and enduring, and remain as relevant now as they were in the time of Burke and Mill. On this, Hume and Loughnane have outlined a path ahead.

Second, and far tougher, is instilling and promoting traditional Liberal values in the generations that will dominate the electoral calculus until mid-century: the Millennials and Generation Z.

Millennials, especially, are the best-educated generation in our history. Until Covid struck, they lives in period of seemingly perpetually prosperity and affluence. They were too young to remember the Keating recession, and near 20 per cent interest rates. They never had it so good, one might say.

Ominously for the Liberals, they are also proving to be the most solidly, and stubbornly, Left generation in our history as well as the best-educated, a contradiction more sensible Boomer minds find hard to fathom.

Instead of growing more conservative as they go through life, as older generations including Boomers have, Millennials are clinging to the Left shibboleths of their youth. On climate change. On trendy social issues like transgenderism. On Big Brother, big taxing, anti-free market government. Demonstrating unabashed admiration for that naïve, Chauncey Gardner-like prophet of doom, Greta Thunberg.

Unless the Liberal party can find a way of translating the traditional and timeless values of the centre-Right into a form that Millennials and later voter generations can embrace, the Liberal goose may well be cooked. This isn’t to say it must accept the Broad Left reality: rather the Liberal challenge is to understand the Millennial mindset, and marry Liberal values to it.

Younger Liberals like new Victorian state MP, Institute of Public Affairs alumnus Evan Mulholland, have put their finger on a possible Millennial touchpoint. Mulholland urges a focus on helping younger voters getting a firm place on the housing ownership ladder, giving them a greater stake in their own lives and their own communities.

But that’s only a start if the Liberal party is to survive long-term as a part of government.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the Hume-Loughnane report is sunlight for the Liberal Party. It is a big step in the right direction, and the Right direction. The risk is, however, that factional warlords, careerists, and blowhards in both the parliamentary party and party organisation do their level best to hang on to their internal influence and shut the window to the sunlight.

They must not be allowed to prosper. If they do, the Broad Left will dominate our politics for a generation or more.

Terry Barnes is a 40-year Liberal party member, former senior ministerial adviser, and Liberal preselection candidate

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