Australia’s political right is fracturing, but not because conservatives suddenly discovered a dozen new philosophies. The truth is far simpler, and far more damning: the Liberal Party abandoned almost every foundational conservative principle, and the principles didn’t disappear. They simply migrated elsewhere.

Look across the political landscape. Every minor right-of-centre party in Australia carries the mantle for a single principle, usually one that was once the beating heart of the Liberal Party. These parties are not strange hobby groups or disgruntled side-projects. They are the natural by-product of a vacuum. When a mainstream party refuses to defend the values it was created to uphold, those values don’t die. They scatter.

People First defends the principle that government derives its legitimacy from the people.

One Nation defends national sovereignty.

The Libertarians champion individual liberty.

Katter champions subsidiarity and local autonomy.

Family First fights for the primacy of the family.

The Shooters defend property rights and self-defence.

Christian movements defend moral truth.

Even the United Australia Party, sometimes dismissed as eccentric, stands against the rise of managerial overreach.

Each is holding one conservative torch that the Liberal Party dropped.

This is why the right is fragmented, not because conservatism has splintered, but because the Liberal Party has. The battlefield of conservative ideas has not disappeared from Australia. It has simply vacated the Parliament.

Conservative principles are not whims or consumer preferences. They aren’t a menu. They are the civilisational scaffolding that made the West flourish in the first place. And they are not endlessly negotiable. Break one and you eventually break all.

Take subsidiarity, a biblical and philosophical principle stating that decisions should be made as close as possible to the people they affect. Small government is not just an ideological flavour; it is the political expression of subsidiarity. Abandon it and government expands by necessity. Ignore it and bureaucracy fills the vacuum.

Consider freedom. A free people require individuals who shoulder responsibility. Once a population hands its responsibilities to the state, it loses its claim to freedom. This is political physics. Yet the Liberals have spent years trying to compromise responsibility and freedom simultaneously, a contradiction that always resolves in favour of state control.

Family First exists because the family is the first unit of subsidiarity, the first training ground for responsibility, meaning, and moral formation. No government department can outperform the family in raising healthy citizens. Without strong families, there is no society, and no nation. That should be obvious, but it is apparently too controversial for the modern Liberal Party to stake their identity on it.

Even the right to self-defence is rooted in a conservative understanding of human nature. The state is not sacred. It can go astray, and history shows it often does. A free people must be able to defend itself, not only from criminals but, in the worst cases, from the state itself. But instead of articulating this principle, what do we get? A government banning machetes because a handful of ‘naughty individuals’ misbehaved. This isn’t governance. It’s theatre, and it’s rapidly turning into nannying.

Borders? They’re not just lines on a map. They’re the political expression of a deeper moral truth: that a community is responsible for its people and its land. Without borders, you cannot have subsidiarity, justice, hospitality, or sovereignty. One Nation didn’t invent this principle. They simply refused to forget it.

These are not boutique ideas, nor are they the personal preferences of scattered political clubs. They are the unshakeable logic of a coherent worldview. Conservative principles arise from human nature itself, from our universal need for order, meaning, responsibility, belonging, and moral truth. Ignore one and you inevitably undermine the others.

That is what the Liberal Party has done. In its desperation to appeal to everyone, it stands for nothing. And when a party stands for nothing, people go looking for the principles elsewhere.

But we have run out of time to pretend this is fine. Australia cannot afford a decade-long civil war on the right. The country is drifting into managed decline. We are becoming numb, nihilistic, forgetful of the very purpose of living. We are forgetting the meaning of words, unable to distinguish good from evil, unable to recognise the sacred, losing the very civilisational confidence that once defined us.

If the Liberal Party continues this path, the right will remain splintered, and the left will rule by default. Not because their ideas are better, but because their opponents are divided.

The Liberal Party can become relevant again, but only by rediscovering itself. It must apologise to the Australian people for losing its way and re-anchor itself in the principles it abandoned. Not fashionable ideas. Not focus-group slogans. Principles.

Otherwise, the right must form a new coalition, urgently. The conservative torchbearers must gather, not scatter. Because if we lose more time, we may lose the country forever.