The Liberal Party has discovered a new theory of renewal: if the roof caves in on Wednesday, replace the beams on Thursday and pray no one notices the house was already condemned.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you – these state-level Liberals are the worst rabble we’ve ever seen, a collection of earnest staffers and soft-progressive moderates drifting steadily toward the United Australia Party’s electoral oblivion while insisting they’re on the path back to government.
Victoria struck first.
On the November 19, the party elevated Jess Wilson – a first-term MP but one whose daddy had been there before. Ron Wilson, bless him, achieved almost nothing in politics, held Bennettswood for a single term, and spent the following decade curating Menzies like a church relic. Fifteen years chairing the Sir Robert Menzies Lecture Trust – a role so dry and thankless that even Jeff Kennett might politely decline. And this is a man who has taken on some punishing gigs in his time. Beyond Blue, for instance, is a perfectly worthy cause; nobody begrudges the mission. But even Dame Edna might wonder at the way it sometimes feels more like a cultural franchise than a charity – and at the way its patron saint of resilience can still barrel into public life like the nation’s head-smacking prefect.
That the placeholder, Ms Wilson, is 35 and ideologically closer to the Teals than Menzies is just the garnish. A gung-ho Jane Fonda for the Voice, Jess Wilson is dead-set your girl-power version of Philby, Burgess, or Maclean. Take your pick. The point is not the gender. The point is not the youth. The point is that she has been in Parliament for under two years and walks into the leadership like a cadet journalist suddenly appointed foreign editor. No scars, no battles, no record. Just a clean LinkedIn profile and a political class desperate for something – anything – that looks like renewal.
New South Wales answered on the November 20, and with even less dignity. Mark Speakman resigned – all bathos, no pathos – and Kellie Sloane materialised before the dust settled. A veritable Lucretia Borgia riding down Old South Head Road carrying the head of Speakman, cackling insane reasons: he doesn’t cut it with Gen Z, he wears a suit, he doesn’t drive an EV. The speed of it alone suggested choreography, not leadership – a party confusing velocity with judgement. Speakman appeared in front of the media with the misplaced dignity of Bukharin at a Stalin show trial. He didn’t realise he was at fault, but he was sorry for any mistakes he had made.
Labor vampires thrive on this stuff.
And then we get to Sloane herself: the former ABC cadet and Nine presenter who has since reinvented herself as the protector of Sydney’s most expensive postcodes. A Sloan Ranger by any measure – and yes, many of us remember being told Lady Di was one – only this one hails from Patrick White’s old stomping ground in Centennial Park. She is, quite literally, a creature of the harbourside: Rose Bay, Vaucluse, Point Piper, Double Bay. Her idea of hardship is a Woolworths opening within sight of a yacht club.
Her record speaks for itself. Sloane has opposed development everywhere, always, at every scale – derelict service stations, townhouses in Rose Bay, modest apartment blocks, even the Woollahra station precinct. New housing in her electorate is a ‘punishment’, density is ‘confronting’, and increased supply is ‘unfair’. She held a housing forum where locals complained about immigrants, clogged roads, sailing conditions, and pressure on landlords to charge less rent. This is not conservatism. It is gentrified protectionism with a Pilates mat.
Nothing personal, but anyone who thinks this woman can speak to Penrith, Newcastle, Blacktown, or Wagga is dreaming. You may as well send a French aristocrat to negotiate a shearing dispute. Her entire political instinct – aesthetic, economic, cultural – is coded for the harbourside. When the Liberal Party elevates someone like that, it’s not trying to win the state; it’s trying to protect its last three seats.
Put Wilson and Sloane together and you get a picture of a party that keeps mistaking staffers for leaders, managers for fighters, and professional-class fluency for conservative conviction. These are not conservatives. They are merely polite. They are fluent in all the cultural niceties of the age: progressive symbolism, ESG reflexes, the Voice, Net Zero, gentle admonitions about kindness, and the ABC dialect spoken softly into the national ear.
None of this means they can’t win. Any opposition can win if the government self-immolates. But nothing about this duo makes victory likely. They’re Labor-lite: offering all the symbolism and none of the spoils, all the moral vocabulary and none of the transactional muscle. Labor gives its base grievance, redistribution and reward. These two give mood lighting and moral sentiment. Why pick the imitation when the original still prints the free-money cheques?
And that’s the structural problem. The Liberal Party is no longer anchored to anything. No class, no region, no moral centre, no economic base. It mouths conservative slogans but lives a soft-left cultural life. It campaigns like Labor’s conscientious niece. It elevates leaders who would be more comfortable on Q&A than in cabinet. It is becoming the political equivalent of a heritage-listed building: nice to look at, impossible to live in.
And if the Liberals are serious about ever smelling government again, they may as well confront the obvious: the party is too hollow to stand alone. Merge with the Nationals, stitch up a pact with One Nation, call it a coalition of the willing – anything more coherent than this genteel decline-management project masquerading as an opposition. The alternative is becoming a minor Sydney-centric boutique party, a Teal-adjacent furniture showroom with a blue logo.
And if you want to know who to blame for the cultural drift – for producing a generation of Liberals who sound like they’re auditioning for Q&A rather than leading an opposition – well, shove a camera at Maxine McKew, Tony Jones, and Kerry O’Brien. Albanese’s favourite Trotskyists turned performance artists masquerading as political journalists. The ones who taught a generation of politicians that politics is not about representing the country, but about performing for the ABC.
