Tony Abbott’s 2013 landslide victory marked the high-water mark of Liberal electoral power. The Coalition secured 45.5 per cent of the primary vote and 53.4 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, a commanding mandate.

The secret plotting by the party’s left faction to remove Abbott just two years after his landslide win triggered the Liberal party train wreck.

In 2016, the Coalition’s primary vote fell from 45.6 per cent to 42 per cent, a collapse borne almost entirely by the Liberals.

Around one-third of that loss flowed straight to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, which rose from electoral irrelevance (0.17 per cent) to 1.2 per cent.

The parliamentary consequences were brutal and immediate. The Coalition plunged from 90 seats in 2013 to a bare majority of 76 in 2016.

The geography tells the story. The seats were lost not in the leafy inner-city but in the mortgage belt and regional cities. These were economically pressured, culturally conservative voters who rejected Malcolm Turnbull’s elite liberalism long before the Teals appeared.

Scott Morrison’s 2019 victory showed that reversing Turnbull’s Labor-lite drift would stabilise the Coalition. The Liberal party still suffered a decline in its primary vote from 28.6 per cent to 27.9 per cent, and the One Nation vote increased again by 1.7 per cent to 3.08 per cent, but the Nationals’ vote held up.

The reprieve, however, was short-lived. Morrison’s embrace of net zero in 2021, coupled with pandemic overreach, triggered a second collapse of the Liberal vote. What had been distinctive about the 2019 election was the defeat of Abbott himself by climate poseur Zali Steggall. Her strategy became the template for the Teals in the 2022 election, where they won 10 seats in the House of Representatives from Liberals or, in the case of Indi, from a previously Liberal seat captured by an independent in 2013.

For the first time, the Liberals lost votes both on the left to the Teals and on the right to One Nation and others. Their primary vote fell from 27.9 per cent to 23.8 per cent, a drop of 4.1 per cent, out of an overall Coalition fall of 5.6 per cent. One Nation’s vote rose again by 1.8 to 4.9 per cent, and the Teals captured some 2.6 per cent.

The Liberal collapse continued under Dutton. Although he is a conservative, he made the fatal mistake of retaining the left’s net-zero policies, which were not helped by Ted O’Brien’s uncosted nuclear policy and his failure to address the high cost of renewables. Labor successfully turned these flaws into a hugely expensive energy policy that went down like a lead balloon in an election fought on the cost-of-living crisis. The Liberal primary vote fell by another 3.2 per cent. This went to Labor in the mortgage belt, not to the Teals, who still held only 10 seats after 2025.

Post the 2025 election, the Liberal party, recently joined the Nationals, has been haemorrhaging to One Nation, which is now the notional opposition.

The Liberals now face a structural dilemma. The seats lost in 2016 drifted right toward One Nation; those lost in 2022 defected left to the Teals. The policies required to win back each group pull in opposite directions and are tearing apart the Liberal party, and the Coalition.

Yet electoral arithmetic is clear. The Coalition does not need Teal seats to govern. In 2013, the Abbott-led Coalition won 90 seats. If they had lost ten Teal seats, they would still have a majority of 80 seats. The Coalition, however, cannot govern without reclaiming the mortgage belt and provincial Australia.

Moreover, it should be possible to win back Teal seats by campaigning on hip-pocket nerve issues relevant to wealthy electorates rather than energy issues.

The good news for conservative Liberals is that Albanese and Chalmers are alienating the very mortgage-belt voters the party needs to win back — with big spending driving up interest rates, rising energy prices, relentless population pressure and reckless courting of the Islamist vote.

The two contenders to lead the party, Andrew Hastie and Angus Taylor, are both staunch conservatives. The main difference between them is that Taylor is more experienced and a Liberal in the Howard/Abbott mould, whereas Hastie is less experienced and a populist in the Trumpian mould. The battle has been resolved for now, with Hastie recognising he doesn’t, at present, have the numbers.

For Taylor, the route back to government is obvious. It is not the progressive mimicry of the Turnbull elitists but the economic realism that won over the Howard battlers and the patriotic determination of Abbott and Howard to control the borders. In short, sharply lower immigration, unapologetic national pride and confidence, a renewed emphasis on Australian values, a refusal to import or tolerate Islamist extremism, and a return to the fiscal discipline that defined the Howard government’s first term.

Yet Taylor has his work cut out for him, even to become the leader. He has been relentlessly maligned by commentators on the left and right.

Part of the problem is his refusal to trumpet his successes. Few recognise that it was Taylor who proposed commissioning Brian Fisher to cost the Shorten opposition’s renewable policies, thereby showing how economically damaging they were. The Fisher report played a crucial role in exposing the huge cost of Shorten’s renewable energy policies and in Labor’s loss of the 2019 election, which commentators said was impossible for Morrison to win.

The bigger problem is one that also confronted Abbott when he attempted to break the grip of factional organisers and lobbyists on the NSW Liberal party. The key lobbyist backed the renewables industry and controlled the party machine. So, the same factional structures that fought against Abbott’s party reforms backed the spill that ended his prime ministership. Today, similar resistance greets those — such as Angus Taylor — who argue for curbing machine control and restoring grassroots authority. The whispering campaigns against Taylor that end up in the mouths of right and left-wing pundits start within the party machine controlled by the renewables lobby.

The Liberal party’s collapse began when its base walked out in 2016, and it will only be reversed when that base is won back. Until then, the machine will keep humming, the lobbyists will keep paying, the voters will keep leaving – and the soundtrack to conservative politics will not be ‘Advance Australia Fair’, but ‘Rage Against the Machine’.