The most damning indictment of the modern Liberal party is not that it loses elections – it is that it deserves to lose them. Once the natural party of government, it has spent two decades as a cringing, apologetic rump, too cowardly to defend its purpose. In Victoria, Queensland, and WA it is a political corpse. Federally, it has won once since Howard – and promptly threw that victory away through sheer incompetence.

The centre of gravity in Australian politics has moved decisively left, not through Labor’s brilliance but through the systematic capture of every institution that shapes public opinion. Schools, universities, media, bureaucracies, and even corporations now transmit progressive orthodoxies as unquestionable truth. The Liberals’ response to this cultural revolution? Surrender and imitation.

This is not electoral misfortune – it is civilisational abdication. The Liberal party has presided over the most comprehensive ideological defeat in Australian political history, watching as the values, traditions, and aspirations that built this country are systematically delegitimised. And rather than fight back, they have joined the demolition crew.

The centre is no longer neutral ground – it has become enemy territory. What once counted as uncontroversially moderate –aspiration, thrift, family stability, national pride – is now coded as extremist. Labor hasn’t moved rightward to capture the centre; the centre has moved leftward to meet Labor, and the Liberals have stumbled along behind like confused tourists.

Consider how completely feminism has been institutionalised as state doctrine. Every policy proposal must now demonstrate its ‘gender impact’. Workplaces operate under diversity tribunals; promotions consider quotas before qualifications. This isn’t equality – it’s a rigged game where merit is a dirty word and competence oppression. The results are visible everywhere: corporate boards stuffed with box-ticking appointments, university courses where dissent from feminist orthodoxy is career suicide, family courts that treat fathers as walking wallets. When Liberals encounter this systematic bias, do they defend merit, competition, and excellence? Or mumble about ‘inclusion’ and hope nobody notices their cowardice.

Even more devastating has been the educational conquest. Schools now teach history as oppression, civics as grievance, and climate as doomsday evangelism. Universities have become finishing schools for activists. An entire generation has been taught that markets are evil, Western civilisation illegitimate and dissent a moral failure.

This is not accidental bias but systematic ideological formation. When these graduates become teachers, journalists, public servants or corporate managers, they reproduce the same assumptions throughout society. The Liberal party watches this happen and responds with… more funding for universities. More ‘diversity’ programs. More apologies for their own existence.

Look at the parade of Liberal leaders since Howard and weep. Tony Abbott – a man with actual convictions, destroyed by his own party for the unforgivable sin of trying to govern as a conservative. Malcolm Turnbull – a Labor politician in expensive suits who spent his entire leadership apologising for his own party. Scott Morrison – a marketing man who confused slogans with substance and still lost to Anthony Albanese.

At the state level, the carnage is worse. Liberal parties are reduced to rumps, led by mediocrities who speak in consultant-speak, think in focus groups, and campaign as if already drafting their concession speeches.

The Liberal party’s cowardice becomes criminal when you consider what it has cost Australia. While Liberal MPs worried about being called names by journalists, every major institution fell to progressive capture. The ABC became a taxpayer-funded propaganda outlet. Universities became indoctrination camps where conservative thought is treated as hate speech. The public service became an activist bureaucracy that sabotages conservative governments.

Even worse, corporate Australia joined the march. Banks fund climate activists while denying loans to farmers. Energy companies promote net-zero fantasies while households freeze in winter. Mining companies apologise for creating the wealth that built the country. Tech giants censor as ‘misinformation’ any fact that challenges progressive narratives. Corporate Australia, once ballast for Liberal values, now parades as activist clergy: rainbow flags in foyers and reconciliation slogans in reports.

Perhaps most pathetically, the Liberal party has allowed tiny minorities to dictate policy to the entire nation. Indigenous activists representing less than 4 per cent of the population veto mining projects that would employ thousands. Climate zealots, perhaps 10 per cent of voters, drive energy policies that impoverish millions. Gender ideologues rewrite biology textbooks. The overuse of Welcome to Country captures the absurdity: once a solemn gesture, now an incantation.

Meanwhile, the actual majority – families struggling with costs, parents frustrated with schools, workers facing unemployment from green policies – are dismissed as ‘deplorables’ if they dare object. The Liberal party, supposedly representing these forgotten Australians, instead competes with Labor to see who can prostrate themselves more abjectly before minority grievance-mongers.

The Liberal party has one final chance to justify its existence. That means cultural courage – the willingness to defend free speech when universities ban conservative speakers, to support parental authority when schools impose gender ideology, to celebrate national achievement when activists teach children to hate their country. It means institutional warfare – taking back the schools from ideologues, defunding universities that suppress free thought, purging activist bureaucrats, and forcing corporations to choose between politics and profits. It means economic credibility – returning to the fundamentals of wealth creation rather than green subsidies and corporate welfare. Tax relief for families, support for small business, policies that reward work and investment rather than virtue-signalling and rent-seeking. Most importantly, it means naming the real constituency – the forgotten people. Suburban families crushed by energy costs, small business owners drowning in regulation, parents horrified by what schools teach their children, workers whose jobs are sacrificed to climate targets, people concerned about immigration called ‘racists’.

Menzies did not win by chasing the centre – he shifted it, by making aspiration and enterprise appear normal and Labor’s socialism dangerous. Howard did not triangulate –he redefined the mainstream, making border control and family values respectable again.

The path back requires the same approach: naming the real Australia beneath the noise and making its values mainstream again. The constituencies are still there –aspirational families, small businesses, regional communities –waiting for leaders brave enough to represent them.

The Liberal party faces extinction or renewal. Down one path lies comfortable irrelevance – the slow fade into obscurity as Labor and the Teals divide its territory. Down the other lies the hard road back: confronting institutional enemies, challenging progressive orthodoxies and fighting cultural battles.

The Liberals can choose to be Menzies and Howard’s successors, or they can choose to be footnotes in the story of how a great political party died of its own cowardice. History will remember which path they took.