Within the next few days there may or may not be a leadership spill in the Liberal party. The contenders to replace Sussan Ley are, apparently, Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie. Perhaps they will combine forces, or perhaps they will slug it out. Perhaps someone unexpected will come through instead. Perhaps Ms Ley will survive. ‘Whatevs,’ as the kids like to say.

Because the tragic reality is that it’s no longer the leadership of the Liberal party that is the problem. It’s the party itself.

The demise of the late great Liberal party began on 14 September 2015, when, after nine months of insidious white-anting of the very prime minister who had astonishingly brought the Coalition back into government with a landslide victory only eighteen months earlier, the Liberal party room decided to tear down Tony Abbott and install Malcolm Turnbull instead. Why? Because – sin of sins! – Mr Abbott was loyal to his staff and because he’d done the Queen’s bidding and awarded a largely meaningless knighthood to Prince Philip. And, er, that’s it.

Mr Turnbull was an utterly ineffectual and hopeless prime minister, who squandered Mr Abbott’s massive majority and only just managed to sneak back into government. Of laudable achievements for his time in high office there are none. Diddly squat. Mr Turnbull was in turn replaced by Scott Morrison. Mr Morrison, to his credit, won the following ‘miracle’ election but then promptly betrayed the electorate by signing Australia up to the insane de-industrialisation policy of ‘net zero by 2050’ (thereby ensuring the party could never, ever be trusted again on sticking to its commitments).

Next, the Libs blew nearly a trillion dollars on Covid madness (thereby ensuring the party could never, ever again be trusted on economic management).

As James Allan writes this week about the Turnbull-Morrison Liberals, ‘…during Covid these Lib “moderates” were amongst the most thuggish, heavy-handed and civil-liberties destroying elected legislators in the democratic world.’

But then – wonder of wonders! – for a brief, glorious nine months in 2023 it appeared that the Liberal party, under new, ‘conservative’ leader Peter Dutton, had rediscovered its strength and its conviction with its aggressive and highly successful opposition to Mr Albanese’s disgraceful, racist Voice proposal. And a solid two-thirds of the Australian electorate agreed. From there, it should have been a fairly easy ride straight into the Lodge with a similar two-thirds parliamentary majority. With momentum going his way, all Mr Dutton needed to do was to follow the same ‘No’ playbook on opposing Labor’s entire agenda. Reject net zero. Slash immigration. Fight woke ideology in all its forms. Even the Sydney Morning Herald were predicting a Coalition victory by late 2024.

Instead… what on earth happened? Mr Dutton abandoned his own conservative principles in favour of listening to his ‘broad church’ (ie the greedy focus group-driven lobbyists and strategists of the Liberal party machine). With the exception of the half-hearted nuclear energy campaign, all Mr Dutton offered the public was more of the rotten Turnbull-Morrison sludge and the public roundly rejected it.

Sussan Ley had until last week made a decent fist of attempting to lead the party following Mr Dutton’s ignominious defeat. Despite tending towards the Labor-lite early on, she found her footing after the Bondi massacre and was impressive in her response to it. But then, inexplicably, or perhaps not so inexplicably, she folded to the whims of the Liberal bedwetters and those within the party who simply cannot bring themselves to recognise that non-discriminatory immigration and radical Islam are what needs to be curtailed in this country, not guns and free speech.

The new hate speech laws are discussed at length in this issue. The tragic reality is that the only Liberal MP to vote against these pernicious new laws was Alex Antic. Laws that turn every Australian into a potential Bill Leak: to be hounded, persecuted and threatened with years in jail for a joke, a comment or an opinion.

The Bondi beach massacre was the murder of Jews by radical Islamists. The parliament had only one job, which it was clearly too scared to do: to criminalise radical Islam. Instead, we have a hodge podge of obtuse, confusing, illiberal laws that shame Australia and, indeed, obfuscate the real problem. To his credit, Mr Morrison has now come out saying what the party refuses to acknowledge: that the problem that needs urgently fixing is radical Islam.

The renewables lobbyists, the leftists and the Turnbullites have eaten away at the once proud Liberal party like a cancer. To repeat: only one member of the entire parliamentary party voted against the most vicious criminalisation of free speech this nation has seen.

It doesn’t really matter who leads the Liberals until they purge themselves of the pernicious, destructive, self-serving ‘moderate’ saboteurs who have destroyed this once great party. But as One Nation surges, it may already be too late.