They won’t act on it and anyway it wouldn’t save the Liberal party in 2023 from suffering yet another disastrous year. In a few months the Liberals face the prospect of adding the loss of a faction-riven government in NSW to 2022’s federal disaster, even replicating the feds’ last-minute pre-selection changes from ‘on high’. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the Liberal party to undertake the essential structural reforms urged in the perceptive and damning (the party is currently ‘not fit for purpose’) pre-Christmas official post-mortem into last May’s electoral humiliation.

This was the party’s worst result for three-quarters of a century, including losing 13 inner-metropolitan seats (six to Teals that the review seeks to reclaim), to leave it with only four out of 44, along with a Senate drubbing and an overwhelmingly negative female vote that the review plans to reverse

As the review’s authors, former federal director Brian Loughnane and senior front-bencher Jane Hume, readily concede, many of the problems raised in this review were also in the reviews of the two previous federal elections and have been identified as constants for a decade or more. So this time is there really the will, or even the capacity, to reform the party?

The odds are that not even the prospect of many years in opposition (waiting for Labor governments eventually to fall over rather than becoming a viable potential occupant of the Treasury benches) will deter the still-dominant rampant factions from continuing to use the Liberal party to further their own objectives, particularly in the coming internal war over the party’s future policy directions.

As long as factions predominate, with their controlled branches, lobbying links and provision of a career path into parliament through the parliamentary staff route (the review seeks better candidates, more representative of the community), there is no prospect of achieving the review’s most pressing requirement – a significant increase in the sagging grass-roots membership (and campaigning troops) of the Liberal party. It warns: ‘the party has not been attracting new members in the numbers necessary to campaign effectively in local communities, particularly members who are ethnically diverse, female and under 40 years old. The decline in the party’s volunteer base is a major concern and must be addressed as quickly as possible’.

With record low primary votes confirming that both the Labor and Liberal parties are on the nose electorally (although the Nationals half of the coalition is holding up well), there is a prospect that the era of the two-party system in Australia is in decline, with local or specific issues like climate change increasingly significant. In such a changing political environment of fraying tribal loyalties, Liberals face a struggle to remain relevant without undertaking major reforms not simply of the nuts and bolts of political activity where so much damage has been done to the Liberal brand, but also to provide clarity on what the Liberal party really stands for – if anything – beyond what the latest focus-group survey dictates.

But don’t discount the urgent need for fixing the nuts and bolts. Apart from recommendations on party discipline and campaigning methods, the Loughnane-Hume attack on the role of factionalism is a crucial element in the reform process, particularly relating to pre-selection of Liberal candidates to contest parliamentary seats. Slamming the factional disputes that delayed pre-selections and discouraged ‘potentially attractive candidates’, so ‘narrowing the options available to the party’, the review noted that in in an unacceptable number of cases these delays resulted in the party not selecting a candidate with a reasonable prospect of winning the seat.

Its criticism that ‘this matter was a particular problem in NSW’ relates to what the ABC has referred to as ‘a bitter factional dispute’ in which former immigration minister Alex Hawke, a close ally and Hillsong colleague of former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, was accused by grass-roots party members of delaying preselections in key seats by failing to attend meetings as the prime minister’s nominee for many months and so preventing the necessary quorum.

This deliberately frustrated the constitutional requirement that Liberal party members choose their MPs with the intention of allowing Mr Morrison to hand-pick 12 candidates (including three sitting members, one being Hawke who suffered a large 9 per cent negative swing in Mitchell, while Trent Zimmerman lost his ‘safe’ seat of North Sydney. Bennelong was also lost while eight others were beaten in ‘winnable’ Labor seats, with worse than average swings in what ended up as a fiasco. Hawke’s response when asked by the ABC whether his actions harmed the Liberals’ chances was, ‘Everyone has to take responsibility for what’s happened; for everything I did, I do.’ Whether or not this would be penalised as unacceptable behaviour under the review’s reform proposals, Hawke’s punishment, as reported by the ABC, was to be ‘punted to the backbench’ in opposition.

Beyond proposals to correct these political life-threatening nuts and bolts problems, the review gives little guidance on how to resolve the potential for internal conflict on policy directions. It acknowledges that, ‘The lack of a clear forward agenda, the lack of a cut-through political message and policy programme’ meant voters ‘did not have a clear view of the coalition’s priorities for another term. It noted that the coalition has been in government for two thirds of its almost 80-year life by ‘building on our core principles’.

But there is no policy proposal to win back the key voters whose disillusion with the Liberal party, largely over its ambivalence on these core principles (particularly individual freedom, fiscal responsibility and  ‘small government’), ‘provided record support to the multiple parties and independents who could broadly be considered conservative, libertarian or right-wing and who clearly impacted on the coalition’s primary vote’ which fell to a record low 35 per cent. As a blogger in the Australian newspaper complained, the review says not a word on policy, values or ideas. ‘What is the product they are trying to sell? No one knows or cares. Managers talk about people and process; leaders talk about ideas’.