Classical liberalism was not invented at the Albury Conference. It was inherited. Locke gave us the idea that government exists to protect life, liberty, and property and forfeits its authority the moment it forgets that. Adam Smith gave us the invisible hand, and, more importantly, the rule of law without which the hand becomes a fist.
John Stuart Mill gave us the unanswerable case for free speech: that ‘no idea, however foolish, should be silenced, because truth only survives in open contest’. Hayek, writing in the rubble of two totalitarianisms, reminded the West that decentralised liberty was the thing that had made it great in the first place.
These are the foundational principles of any country that calls itself liberal: free speech, a free press, the rule of law, the right to own what you earn. The Liberal Party of Australia spent the last three decades quietly removing these and selling indulgences as carve-outs.
In my Whitlam & Turnbull, I argued that politics in this country had become a gymkhana – amateur riders, tired horses, no one quite sure which way the next jump was facing. In Why the Merry-Go-Round Can’t Save the Circus I said the crowd had gone home, the merry-go-round was still spinning, and the management was arguing about who should hold the whip.
On Saturday night, the tent came down.
The Liberal-National Coalition, that grand 1949 conception that once carried Menzies, Fraser, and Howard, was finally pronounced dead. Not by Albanese, the Teals, or the Greens.
In the end, the execution was served by Pauline – the Henry VIII of modern politics.
It died of Noblesse Oblige
That is the polite French phrase the European ruling class invented to describe its self-appointed duty to look after the fools beneath them. The peasants couldn’t be trusted with their own lives, so the gentry would think for them, kindly, paternalistically, and with all the smug certainty of people who had never paid a BAS, never run a payroll, never queued at a Centrelink office.
It was always condescension and somewhere in the long, easy years between Howard’s first term and Morrison’s last, the Liberal Party caught it.
How the disease took hold
The Liberal Party was not founded on Noblesse Oblige. It was founded on the opposite. Menzies’ Forgotten People speech is the most under-quoted document in Australian political history, because it pre-emptively answers everything that has gone wrong with the party since.
Menzies trusted the middle class. He did not want to manage them and thought their dignity, their property, their privacy, and their distance from government were the foundations of a free society. That is classical liberalism; the John Stuart Mill kind. Each of us is the best judge of our own lives.
Somewhere along the way, the Liberals stopped believing this. They decided the people were a project. The aspirational families who had been their core were now problems to be solved; vaccinated, regulated, monitored, decarbonised, re-educated, reassured, and protected from themselves.
The roll call of meddling
Consider the litany. Each one is a small treason against the founding creed. Together, they are a party-ending betrayal.
The eSafety Commissioner: a star chamber for the internet, complete with takedown notices and global content orders. Liberals built it. Mill, who literally wrote On Liberty to defend free expression against the well-meaning busybody, would have set fire to it.
Net Zero: a religious commitment to a target without a credible means of getting there, signed up to by a party that once mocked Labor’s faith in central planning. The fatal conceit with a wind turbine on top.
The Covid lockdowns: house arrest by press conference, with conservative premiers competing to see whose curfew could be more humane. The party of individual liberty became the party of QR codes and permission slips.
The Ben Roberts-Smith saga: a soldier the nation decorated, then a soldier the nation disowned, with conservative governments nodding along to every shift in the political wind. Glory and shame, two noble myths corroding under the same management. The party that wrapped itself in the flag could not bring itself to defend the man it had pinned a Victoria Cross on. This is not a comment on guilt or innocence, but rather the process itself.
The social media regulation: protecting the children by banning them from public discourse, while no one in the party asks whether the parents might prefer to make that decision themselves at the kitchen table.
The hate speech laws: drafted with the best of intentions and the worst of consequences, handing the bureaucracy the power to police what ordinary Australians are allowed to think out loud.
That is just the active interference. Now consider the negligence.
The NDIS: left to swell into a cathedral of grift larger than Medicare and defence combined, untouched by a Coalition that was too frightened of the optics to lift the scalpel. Insurance was supposed to be a safety net. It became a banquet for opportunists, and the Liberals held the menu.
Immigration: substituted for productivity, GDP padded with bodies while wages flatlined and housing detonated. The economic con I described in When Immigration Worked for the Nation. Australians were told the country was getting richer while their own children were being priced out of suburbs their grandparents had built.
Nuclear power: still illegal, after the better part of three decades of Coalition government. A party that lectured Labor about energy realism and never once lifted the legislative finger to make a sensible alternative legal.
The Voice referendum: handed to them on a golden platter by the Australian people, who voted no with a clarity that should have given the Liberals a mandate for a generation. Instead, they pocketed the result, mumbled something gracious, and moved on to the next focus group. No follow-through or challenge to the garbage of the culture wars.
The dragon roared and they asked it to keep its voice down.
Gender dysphoria: Swallowed wholesale. A party that once stood for evidence-based medicine and parental authority became too embarrassed to ask the obvious questions about children, hormones and irreversible surgery. Cass inquiry came and went and the Liberals had nothing to say, because saying anything would have been impolite.
This is what Noblesse Oblige looks like in 2026. A ruling class that has confused governing with parenting, and the electorate with toddlers.
The dragon was always going to wake
There is a peculiar feature of the aspirational Australian. They pay their BAS, drop the kids at school, look at the family bills, and grumble.
This is the sound of a dragon dreaming.
The society that catches Noblesse Oblige always makes the same mistake. It assumes that because the dragon has not moved, the dragon is asleep.
It is not. The dragon is feeling the mice nibble at its tail; the lockdowns, the power bill, the gender lecture, the open border, the surge at the school gate, the BAS form three pages longer than last year, the speech laws, the scrutiny on the loan application, the consultant in fluoro at the council meeting, and it is calculating, fuming, moaning, and then…
Last night, the dragon roared.
The Mill in all of us
There is a John Stuart Mill in every classical liberal. He has been silent for a long time, because the official liberal vehicle has found that philosophy inconvenient.
One Nation, for all its rough edges and the easy ridicule it attracts in inner-city wine bars, has become the only major party in this country willing to say the words classical liberals used to say with their eyes closed.
Get the government out of my life. Trust me with my children. Let me speak. Let me build. Let me fail. Let me succeed. Stop helping.
That is Mill, with an Akubra.
The Coalition is finished because the Mill in its base has finally found a microphone. The deserters I described in Merry-Go-Round are not coming back, the hostages have been ransomed, and they are not paying it back.
The funeral arrangements
There will be the usual rituals. A leadership review. A policy review. A listening tour. Some clever person at the IPA or whatever, will write a paper. Whoever dissects this will say the right things about getting back to first principles. Angus Taylor will explain this as a comeback, a low point. The Nationals will threaten to address the issues, the water the…
The result was about the assumption sitting silently behind the leadership contest, that the function of the Liberal Party is to manage the lives of the people who vote for it.
A party that believes that cannot be saved. It can only be replaced.
What dies, what rises
Noblesse Oblige died last night. So did the uniparty pretence. The comforting illusion that the Coalition and Labor were two distinct ideologies, rather than two wings of the same managerial bureaucracy that Hayek warned us would always grow under neoliberal cover.
What rises from the ashes is, for once, an actual argument. Between government as guardian and government as servant. Between the Meddler and Mill. Between the dragon and the mice.
Menzies trusted us. Howard mostly. The party that came after them did not. It thought we needed protecting from ourselves, and it built an apparatus of commissioners, frameworks, regulators, subsidies, lectures and roadmaps to do the protecting.
It is insufferable.
