I have been quiet for a week and a half. Now it is time to return to battle, a metaphorical battle at least. If only there were no need…

The events of December 14 will inevitably accelerate a political realignment in Australia. That much is unavoidable. If the Liberal Party is to become a serious party of government again, rather than a temporary vehicle for electoral frustration, it must relearn lessons it has not merely forgotten, but actively sought to erase from its own history. These erasures began in earnest in the second half of the Howard government, after the turn of the millennium.

There is a striking editorial today, improbably, in The Washington Post. It chronicles the slow collapse of the Heritage Foundation in the United States. If you are unfamiliar with Heritage or the internal chaos now engulfing it, that is beside the point. What matters is what Heritage once stood for.

Founded in 1973, Heritage had a clear and unambiguous mission – to build a permanent, policy-driven conservative institution capable of translating free-market and limited-government ideas into immediate political action.

Let me repeat the essential words so there is no confusion. I’ll even bold them – free markets and limited government.

WaPo’s editorial makes an observation that should ring uncomfortably familiar in Australia:

Support for free markets historically has been part of the glue that held the conservative movement together.

And further:

For years now, Heritage has been straying from free-market principles it once championed, causing much consternation among scholars who genuinely believe in those ideals.

Heritage’s founder, Edwin Feulner, put the warning more bluntly in a later essay co-authored with former US Vice President Mike Pence:

Conservatives must resist the temptation to abandon their defence of free enterprise in pursuit of short-term victories.

This is the Australian story too. The Liberal Party story.

For all the rhetoric about the Liberal Party being a ‘broad church’, it was never cultural posturing that bound ‘small-l liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ together. It was markets. It was restraint. It was scepticism of state power. And that settlement was broken, deliberately, in the latter years of John Howard’s prime ministership, when electoral longevity was purchased at the price of principle.

Middle-class welfare.
Mass re-regulation.
Centralisation masquerading as governance.

Those who followed Howard did not reverse the drift; they entrenched it.

The consequences were profound. Once the Liberal Party abandoned economic liberalism, the Labor right no longer needed to maintain match fitness. Its market-oriented wing withered, and was ultimately crushed by a big-government, interventionist left – confident, ideological, and historically illiterate.

A left that believes this time will be different. That the breadlines won’t form. That the gulags will stay theoretical.

Political movements do not survive by forgetting what once made them coherent. They survive by defending their foundations when doing so is unpopular.

Until the Liberal Party rediscovers the economic liberalism it will remain what it is today: a party without a purpose, waiting for voters to tire of the alternative rather than offering one of its own.

First published on Substack. Read it here…