W ell, well, well. Remember all the so-called Liberal ‘moderates’ (aka Labor-lite types) who told us that the party had to chase the inner-city Teal seats? These were the same geniuses who assured us that immigration, as in promising massive cuts to our current world’s highest per capita legal immigration regime, was not a winning election issue. These were likewise the types fighting tooth-and-nail to keep as big a commitment as possible to net-zero-type policies, including massive renewable energy subsidies that are enriching some well-connected people. This, despite Australia having gone from the democratic world’s cheapest electricity costs when I got here in 2005 to today’s near-highest costs. That, along with a bloated public service, tanking productivity, sky-high taxes and mass immigration, has delivered falling per capita GDP in seven of the last eight quarters. Be clear, Australia has seen the biggest drop in living standards in the OECD. Sure, our insane, thuggish, illiberal and worthless Covid lockdown policies didn’t help. But just about every bad policy setting now in place was first delivered to this country by the Coalition – including renewables, net zero, big immigration, big taxes, big spending, caving in on any commitment to free speech, woeful appointments pretty much across the board, way too low defence spending, the list just goes on and on. All Labor has done is come in and supercharge all these woeful policy settings.

Not surprisingly, the Liberal party has not done well at the polls of late. It can’t even win in Victoria against what might be one of the Anglosphere’s five-worst elected government in history. Meanwhile, there was Scott Morrison, the man who helped knife Tony Abbott, then lied to the voters who gave him his 2019 surprise win by signing us all up to the impoverishing net zero agenda and then played the brutally heavy-handed and economy-destroying thug during Covid. Next came Peter Dutton, who had an election win staring him in the face. All he had to do was demonstrate genuine beliefs, values, convictions, a bit of spine, and run on a promise of a massive cut in immigration and an immediate jettisoning of net zero. Couldn’t do it. Invertebrate-like, he caved in to his advisors and the Labor-lite wing of the party (these days more like three-quarters of the plane, it seems). He ran a Seinfeld campaign about nothing and was deservedly slaughtered, not least for his cowardice and pusillanimity.

Which brings us to the first poll of 2026 by DemosAU. It wasn’t the biggest sample size, but far from the smallest. The results were brutal for Labor but even worse for the Coalition. Team Albo has dropped to 29 per cent primary support. That’s bad. But the Coalition is at 23 per cent. That’s catastrophic. And here’s the kicker. One Nation is also at 23 per cent primary support, the same as the Libs and Nationals combined. That is dire news for Australia’s main, established right-of-centre political party.

Of course, we need to take this with a grain of salt. Another poll also showed tremendous gains for One Nation, though not quite as much as the Demos poll. Plus, if pollsters are honest, no one has a clue whether preference flows will roughly follow past precedents. Will these new One Nation voters preference the Liberal Party they despise? Or play the long game and see their old party decimated? No one knows. When DemosAU ran a hypothetical contest between Labor and One Nation, it used the preference flows from the only seat at the last election where this was the contest. That delivered a 50-50 result. But that is just guesswork wrapped in guesswork inside more guesswork. Nor will One Nation have anything like uniform support across the states. So, seat tallies are unknowable.

All that said, is this, just possibly, the beginning of a long, slow goodbye for a Liberal party that has jettisoned its base, throwing out long-time supporters who detest the lefty, ‘moderate’ direction the party has taken. Our world-unique preferential voting system acts as a protection racket for the two main parties. The value-free advisors around the Liberal leadership have long known this and just assume longtime conservative Liberals are mugs who ‘have nowhere else to go’. Well, they do now. They are going in significant numbers to One Nation because One Nation has made it plain that, first, it thinks the climate change racket and renewables subsidies are a rort and will ditch the lot. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it patently opposes mass immigration and will end it. Voters trust One Nation on this one and rightly don’t trust the Coalition. Third, One Nation is forthrightly against all things woke (DEI, affirmative action quotas, attacks on free speech, pretending all cultures are equal, bizarre Western self-loathing, hatred of Israel, and more, all falling under this rubric). Right now, One Nation is by far the best bet for conservatives (remembering that the ABC defines anyone to the right of Peter Fitzsimons as ‘far right’). No one knows if ONP will hold steady, fall back or continue to rise. In part, that depends on the Libs, who are led by a longtime non-entity from the left of the party room, the faction clearly in charge. Contrary to the attitude of Tony Abbott (whom I like and vociferously supported against Malcolm), we owe loyalty to the country, not to a political party. Right now, the Libs are broken and deserve nothing. They’re unelectable. They still seem to think that winning a few Teal seats is the route to success. That is daft and goes against trends worldwide. Maybe a prompt switch to an obvious conservative leader might win back some support. The problem is we’ve all seen what the Black Hand Gang of Labor Lites in the party can do to a conservative Liberal prime minister. No promise is safe from these cuckoos. So, if there’s a change of leader, that person will have to show us that the so-called moderates have been firmly and (if I may say so) brutally put in their place. Forget any 50-50 doling out of shadow cabinet spots. Stand up to the ABC and its loathsome worldview. And then, any new Coalition leader had better come out hard on immigration, energy and wokery. Otherwise, as Raymond Chandler put it, this could be ‘the long goodbye’ for the Libs. And the continued rise of One Nation. Maybe, just maybe, that would be best for Australia after all.