Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has spoken in support of Liberal Party constitutional reform during a powerful speech given to 200 members in Brisbane.
The Liberal-National function was organised by LNP Party grandee Patrice McKay and was a great success. The membership in attendance were left with the impression that Abbott understands the structural failures dismembering Menzies’ dream from within.
And how to fix it.
‘At our best we are the Freedom Party. We are the Tradition Party. But above all, we are the Patriot Party. And that’s why, at our best, we should be the natural party of government,’ said Abbott.
He acknowledged the spiritual malaise dimming Australia’s once bright future, and spoke about wishing to appeal to a broad spectrum of voters and members. The Coalition is ‘not just a country party, we’re not mainly a union party, we’re certainly not a welfare party or just a migrant party’. Abbott insisted that the Coalition are all of these things, but bigger.
‘No one owns us the way the unions own the Labor Party and indeed, a small group of shareholders seem to have a very strong interest in the One Nation Party.’
Abbott marks out the motherhood aspiration of the party, but what of its reality?
He admitted the current LNP is not appealing to its natural voters and that it could have done a better job in its generous years of government. Abbott even went so far as to mention that Sussan Ley, who he admires, ‘was a manager, not a warrior’.
It is at this point that Abbott acknowledges something that we, at The Liberal Reform Association, have been driving home to as many politicians as we can find … the party membership is shrinking and something must be done to save it.
The LNP cannot expect to run a nation if they cannot build a reasonable membership base.
‘We’ve got to have more members…’ said Abbott. ‘We’ve got to have better people putting their hands up for Parliament and there should be more of them who have made a success of life in the community rather than just coming through the ranks of political staffers.’
Real people. Real lives. Real experience.
The message could not have been clearer. The room erupted in applause.
Abbott even managed to throw his support behind ‘new media’ (social media and podcasting), which would be an impressive break from a party that had to be dragged into modernity and still looks awkward on their X videos. They probably heard that those under 40 almost entirely get their news from digital sources.
Here he called out Advance for all the good work they do promoting critical conservative causes such as opposing the Voice and ending Net Zero. But an activist group cannot fix the structural problems within the LNP.
Abbott knows this, saying:
‘I did my best to democratise the Liberal Party in New South Wales. [They] ran on the old system of delegates, which might have been appropriate in the days when hardly anyone had a motorcar, let alone a telephone. Sure, you’d have to go to one meeting and then another meeting and then a meeting after that in order to have the right to go to a fourth meeting and then elect someone as a preselector. But frankly, that was then and this is now.
‘Every single member should be given full authority to participate in all of the decision-making.
‘… at the heart of the revival that the party needs, the revival that this country needs, is trusting the ordinary members of the Liberal National Coalition to know what’s best for our country and to give them the authority that they deserve over our party.’
Tony Abbott could not be clearer.
This is a call for significant party reform. An echo of what we called for here in the pages of this magazine and online at our website.
In answer to a question from a delegate, who raised concerns about delegate accountability, Abbott agreed. ‘It’s too easily manipulated. That’s the basic problem.’
He added:
‘In New South Wales, which I’m much more familiar with, basically the place has become an insider’s club or a closed shop because we did get through a measure of democratisation, but one way or another, the state executive had been manipulated to deny democratic preselections in nearly all of the circumstances where it counts. So you’ve got a state executive, which is elected by delegates, which is elected by delegates… And that’s where you get the manipulation, the factional warlords in charge.’
In case you missed it… A state executive which is elected by delegates, which is elected by delegates. That creates a double disconnect between what the members want and what the party ends up doing.
He rightly repeats our argument that the more members you have voting, the harder that vote is to manipulate. ‘It is a genuine expression of the will of the membership.’
And that, fundamentally, is what we are asking for.
Growing the party from 25,000 to 250,000 members, or roughly 1 per cent of the population, would ensure its survival. Menzies did it. With a leader of Abbott’s calibre, we could do it too.
It has become clear that when a party becomes over-reliant on individuals who have never worked outside its internal ecosystem, a culture of entitlement is created. This is how we end up with insular, self-serving executives who are too far detached from the lives of their members to represent their vote.
In the years before a sizeable chunk of the party membership were decanted to One Nation, several prominent and executive Liberal politicians said that they did not wish to see any substantive constitutional reform.
This view is untenable.
The Liberal membership is rapidly shrinking from age (around half are over 80), centralised control, the exclusion of members from policy and preselection, and no meaningful role for rank-and-file voices.
If people feel they cannot participate in party democracy, they will abandon it.
Tony Abbott has highlighted a broken system, finally mainstreaming the grassroots movement to save the LNP from itself. We do not wish to see embarrassing repeats of the Moira Deeming preselection travesty or the rushed Queensland Senate preselection.
The Liberal Reform Association agrees with Tony Abbott.
Democratisation of the LNP will result in higher quality candidates, better policy, and a firm base from which to stage an attack on the Labor government.
Had this change been made ten years ago, we are confident the LNP would be in power today.
This is why the LNP Constitutional Convention in July matters. Reform is not optional … it is essential. Our constitutional reforms are designed to ensure more leaders like Tony Abbott step forward.
The members will choose the next generation of LNP politicians, not the delegates. If you want that sort of power, back our reforms.
Without a democratic, member-driven party, policy will continue to drift, trust will continue to erode, and voters will continue to look elsewhere.
What do you think? Does the Liberal Party give its members enough say over the party, its candidates, and its policy? Take our poll here!
