Andrew Hastie’s bid for the leadership isn’t just another chapter in the party’s factional saga. It is the Liberals’ Last Lifeline, the last chance to adapt to a changing political landscape before, overwhelmed with despair, conservatives break away and build something new.
Liberalism, as an organising political philosophy, is reaching its end. Across the Western world, from Britain to Germany, the United States to France, parties clinging to a merely conservative form of liberalism are sliding toward electoral oblivion. Meanwhile, those willing to embrace the principles of National Conservatism, principles of cultural cohesion, strategic migration, industrial revival, and a renewed emphasis on national sovereignty, are emerging as the natural heirs to the political right in their respective nations.
Like most global trends, this shift is reaching Australia more slowly, but it is coming. Institutional decay, a fraying social contract and collapsing trust in legacy parties will inevitably lead to populist insurgency here as well. The real question is whether we will mirror the United States, where the establishment adapted to the populist revolt, or Britain, where a new party had to emerge to replace the old.
For Liberals of the ‘Moderate’ persuasion, the choice should therefore be obvious: it is far better for the party to remake itself as a national-conservative force than to be swept aside and replaced. In a reformed Liberal Party, Moderates would still hold influence on policy direction, personnel, and parliamentary processes. But if a new right-wing party emerges and cannibalises the Liberals, Moderate forces will be politically homeless. Their fate would resemble that of the David Cameron-era Tories in Britain: relics of a collapsed order, reduced to commentary rather than governance, politically irrelevant.
Speak to almost any conservative Liberal supporter, activist, or staffer, and you hear the same refrain: despair. Despair about the direction of the country, despair about the state of the party, and despair about the health of the Australian conservative movement itself. It feels like many of the professional political class, those who staff MPs’ offices, run campaigns, and organise party infrastructure are standing on a knife-edge. That one great shove, one more electoral humiliation, could cleave them from the Liberal party forever.
But the true yardstick the firing gun that would finally send conservatives sprinting from the party would be the loss of Hastie himself. If he is incapacitated, if it becomes clear he will never have the numbers to win the leadership, or if he were to leave the party altogether, that would mark the decisive moment. Without Hastie, the Liberals would lose the one resource capable of driving a populist pivot and heading off the momentum of any emerging alternative on the right.
For decades, one of the great strategic advantages of the Liberals when competing within the right, has been the total disorganisation and unprofessionalism of other forces. Many who call the Liberal Party home do so not out of love and loyalty but because no professional, viable alternative exists. But that advantage is evaporating.
Groups are identifying the Liberal Party’s structural weaknesses and quietly building alternatives. One Nation’s reform of its branch structure and deeper establishment in conservative regions – New England among them – is only the most visible example of an increasingly coordinated effort to exploit the Liberals’ drift.
If the party goes to the 2028 election with a warmed-over liberal moderatism that ‘reflects and respects modern Australia’, or with a stale, pre-2010 version of conservatism that ignores shifting public sentiment on migration, domestic industry, and free trade, it will face stagnation at best and oblivion at worst. And an unsuccessful campaign at what is almost certain to be a ‘migration election’ would likely be the final rupture, the moment when thousands of conservative Liberal activists and organisers conclude the party cannot be saved.
The Coalition must also be able win over young people if it wishes to survive into the future. But young people are deeply allergic to a campaign of Liberal managerialism. A technocratic insistence that the system works, we just need more competent management is a recipe for electoral suicide. The party needs leadership that can honestly reassess long-held policy positions, recognise where we have made mistakes and put forward reforms that are both bold and radical enough to convince young people that something will change.
This is why the leadership question matters. And why Hastie is not merely another contender, but the last plausible chance to transform the Liberal Party into a vehicle capable of surviving the political realignment now rolling across the West.
His emerging social media presence already signals a willingness to speak to issues others avoid. The alternatives for the Liberal Party are brutally simple: Evolve or be replaced.
