Matt Kean, the former Liberal powerbroker and New South Wales state treasurer, despairs at the state of his party. “If people aren’t voting Liberal on economic grounds,” he asks, “then what’s the point of us?”
Kean, who now chairs the Climate Change Authority, is referring to the authoritative Australian Election Study, released this week, which found for the first time that voters trust Labor more than the Coalition on economic management.
The results come after the Coalition’s historic loss at the last election, where they won just 43 seats. Labor won 94. Ten others, many of them former Liberal heartland seats held by party moderates, were won or retained by community independents espousing essentially small-l liberal views.
“It’s a death spiral,” Kean says, “created between moderates being taken out by teals [and] right-wingers becoming more dominant, egged on by the Murdoch media.
“You lose moderate seats, you lose moderate voices in the party room, so it is dominated by right-wingers. That attracts a certain kind of person to the branches. They are watching Sky after dark. It gets worse and worse.
“Structurally, I don’t see how we turn it around.”
A senior Victorian Liberal, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, shares Kean’s concern that the party is stuck in a negative feedback loop.
“The federal Liberal Party has lost 33 seats in two elections, 26 of them urban,” he says. “Generally, urban members tend to be more moderate, so that shifts the balance.”
The Australian Election Study, first conducted in 1987, makes clear just how diabolical is the Coalition’s situation.
As recently as 2016, the study recorded a 27 percentage point advantage to the Coalition over Labor on economic management.
“This declined to 12 percentage points in 2022, and in 2025 this became negative…” the report says.
Indeed, things were grim for the Coalition on almost every policy front. Labor enjoyed commanding leads on health (36 points), education (25 points), climate change (23 points) and the environment (21 points).
Despite the Coalition’s attempts to drum up anger about high immigration numbers, Labor won on that issue, too, albeit by just a single point. On only one of the top 10 policy areas did voters narrowly prefer the Coalition, and that was national security.
As with policy, so with leadership. Voters rated Peter Dutton below Anthony Albanese on every one of nine personal traits. They judged him less intelligent, knowledgeable, sensible, honest, trustworthy and inspiring, and, by the widest of margins, 65 to 28, compassionate. Despite the Coalition’s best efforts to portray Albanese as weak, voters assessed him to be a far stronger leader than Dutton, the hard man of the hard right.
The likely reason for this is that voters saw Dutton’s team as riven. The relevant numbers were not included in this week’s release, but, says Ian McAllister, a chief investigator for the study and distinguished professor of political science at Australian National University, they were dismal.
Only 13 per cent of voters said the Coalition parties were unified, while 57 per cent thought them divided. Consequently, just 29 per cent saw the Coalition parties as being capable of providing strong government, compared with 42 per cent for Labor.
On overall popularity, Dutton came dead last among 28 leaders of the major parties since 1987, well behind the second most unpopular, Scott Morrison.
Much of the media coverage since the release of the study on Wednesday has focused on Dutton’s unpopularity as a cause of the crushing electoral loss. Yet the data shows the seeds of defeat were sprouting long before his ascension to the leadership.
The Coalition’s support base is concentrated among Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, and those even older. This is, self-evidently, a declining cohort.
According to the orthodox political theory of “generational drift”, voters tend more conservative as they age. Thus as older voters die, they are replaced.
“But we’re not seeing that in Australia at the moment,” says Dr Sarah Cameron, a chief investigator on the study and senior lecturer in public policy at the Griffith Business School.
“Millennials, for example, who are now in their 30s and 40s, are not shifting to the right as they get older. They’re actually shifting to the left.
“This is not unique to the 2025 election. Support for the Coalition among Millennials has been declining since 2016.”
This decline is not small. Support has almost halved, from 38 per cent in 2016 to 21 per cent in 2025.
“Also, for the past four federal elections there has been a widening gender gap. In 2025, 9 per cent more men than women voted for the Coalition,” Cameron says. “But there also has been a decline in support among men as well. Just not to the same degree.”
“You can’t tell voters that they’re mugs and expect to be able to get a majority. Facts matter. And silly political games don’t change the physics of climate change.”
One might think, given the electoral drubbing in May, and the evidence accumulated over the previous couple of electoral cycles, that the Coalition parties would make adjustments.
They have to a degree, installing a more centrist figure in Sussan Ley, but this has brought neither unity nor progressive policy change. Speculation is rife about how long it will be before she is cut down and replaced by a right-wing man – either Angus Taylor, the shadow treasurer who failed to produce a coherent economic policy before the election and is seen as an old-school conservative, or the populist from the religious right, Andrew Hastie.
The instability of the leadership is one indicator of disunity. Another is the fact that, since the election, the Coalition has been tearing itself apart over a policy area that the Australian Election Study found was not high among voters’ priorities at this election: climate change.
Just 5 per cent of people mentioned climate change as their most important concern, half as many as at the previous election.
That is not to say people do not care about the issue. A healthy majority do. It simply says that in straitened times they had more pressing concerns – economic concerns that should have played to the Liberal Party’s traditional strengths.
Yet the Coalition parties, says Kean, preferred, and still prefer, to fight culture wars.
Kean cites its climate policy as the stand-out example of how the Coalition is out of touch with reality and with “middle Australia”.
It went to the election promising to construct a raft of nuclear reactors, while slowing the rollout of wind and solar energy and extending the life of coal-fired power stations for a decade or more while the reactors were built.
The plan was to do it with taxpayers’ money, which sat uncomfortably with the Liberals’ claim to be the party of small government and private enterprise. It would also have increased Australia’s total greenhouse emissions.
Since then the federal Liberals have abandoned their previous commitment to achieving net zero emissions by 2050 and have flagged an intention to wind back interim targets for 2030 and 2035.
Kean despairs again.
“You can’t continue to ignore reality and double down on deeply flawed, unpopular initiatives like nuclear and dumping net zero, that fly in the face of the overwhelming majority of voters and expect to improve your position,” he tells The Saturday Paper.
“You can’t tell voters that they’re mugs and expect to be able to get a majority. Facts matter. And silly political games don’t change the physics of climate change…
“The Australian public are not looking for culture wars. They’re looking for people that can come up with genuine solutions to meet these challenges.”
The internecine war between the moderate realists and the right-wing ideologues is not only rendering the Coalition unelectable at the federal level, says Kean, but “the brand damage is just infecting everyone” across the states and territories.
Further evidence of that is expected in March next year, at the South Australian election. If the polls are right, the conservative opposition is headed for disaster.
Several published polls in recent months found the Liberals’ primary vote was just 21 per cent. On those numbers, University of Melbourne psephologist Adrian Beaumont recently told The Australian, the Liberals would win between three and six of 47 lower house seats. SA Liberal Party leader Vincent Tarzia would lose his seat.
Speaking with The Saturday Paper, election analyst and publisher of The Poll Bludger website William Bowe cites reports that internal party polling was slightly better – in the mid to high 20s – but still bad enough to suggest the prospect of a leadership change from Tarzia, as has happened in the past couple of weeks in both NSW and Victoria.
The obvious candidate, says Bowe, is a 34-year-old woman named Ashton Hurn – not least because she holds a rural seat on a good margin “so she’s one of the few people who’s probably going to survive” the expected electoral rout.
She is considered a good performer but has only been in the parliament for one term, which raises questions about her readiness. The other question, says Bowe, is why she would want to be “the bunny” who leads a party to defeat.
Not that it would be her fault, any more than the party’s parlous position is due to the incumbent, Tarzia.
There are two big problems for the SA Liberals, says a senior party source. One is that the incumbent Labor premier, Peter Malinauskas, is a wildly popular figure who has placed his party firmly in the political centre.
The other, he says, “is that the party membership has been taken over by [Alex] Antic and [Tony] Pasin and they’ve recruited people who would be more comfortable in Family First or One Nation – the fringe right”.
That has brought conflict between the moderate-dominated parliamentary party and the right-wing party organisation. As in the federal sphere, the key battleground has been climate policy and net zero.
The Liberal state council voted in June to abandon net zero. So far, the parliamentary party has defied the vote, and is sticking with it. If, as the old political maxim goes, disunity is death, the SA Liberals’ hopes for March are pretty much extinct.
In Western Australia, things don’t look any better for the Liberals. In this year’s state election, Labor won 46 of 59 lower house seats, the Liberals just seven, and Nationals six. This was an improvement for the Liberals, who in the 2021 election won just two and the Nationals four.
On the upside, Basil Zempilas, the party’s sixth leader since 2017, appears secure in the thankless job of opposing an overwhelmingly popular Labor government.
There too, however, the party’s right wing is making his job harder. In June, Andrew Hastie led a successful push by the state council to dump net zero. Zempilas chose to ignore it.
Hastie and Zempilas, the two dominant Liberal figures in the west, have been feuding ever since. Hastie insists that the views of membership should be heeded, while Zempilas argues that after two catastrophic election results the party should focus on the priorities of the WA electorate, instead of an issue of little concern to voters.
The picture is brighter for the conservatives in the Northern Territory, where the Country Liberal Party rode a huge swing into government last year. It won more than 58 per cent of the vote, after preferences, and 17 of 25 seats in parliament.
Before the election, the CLP committed to a 43 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Afterwards, it abandoned the target.
Aside from the NT, the most successful conservative government in the country is Queensland’s.
In the 2024 election, the Liberal National Party crushed the incumbent Labor government, picking up 17 seats – 15 from Labor, one from the Greens and one from Katter’s Australian Party.
The interesting thing about its success is that the state’s leader, David Crisafulli, has firmly resisted the temptation to engage in several culture war issues.
He personally opposed the Indigenous Voice referendum, for example, but did not campaign against it. He also shut down debate on abortion when party conservatives wanted to revisit state legislation legalising it.
His record on climate is not so strong: he remains notionally committed to net zero and has opposed nuclear power but has extended the life of some of the state’s coal-fired power stations.
Still, says a senior Liberal source, Crisafulli presents as “the gold standard for what a successful leader should be. He focuses on the economy, doesn’t scare people with culture war stuff, is competent and normal. That’s what people want: competence, decency and not being weird.”
Arguably, the past leader of the Liberal Party in NSW, Mark Speakman, was all those things. It didn’t save him from bad poll numbers and last week he was forced to resign.
He was replaced by Kellie Sloane, a former television journalist more notable for her presentation skills than her approach to policy.
Almost simultaneously, the Liberals’ Victorian leader, Brad Battin, was dumped by his party room. Changing leaders is not unusual for the Victorians: there have been six since they lost the 2014 election, and three in the past year. Battin was replaced by another woman, Jess Wilson, 35, a first term MP, albeit with some serious policy credentials as a staffer and former executive at the Business Council of Australia.
Matt Kean knows Sloane and Wilson well.
“You’ll note that they haven’t changed policies,” he says, “but they’ve changed the tone and the way they communicate. Get the right salespeople in the job and it does make a difference.”
In Tasmania, the story for the Liberals is better but only slightly. This year’s early election resulted in a second hung parliament and the minority Liberal government is secure but only as much as any government can be given the state’s unique proportional electoral system.
In the final jurisdiction, the ACT, the Liberals have a negligible chance of ever forming government.
What are the lessons of this Cook’s tour? If the party doesn’t shift its focus to issues people care about, and present with greater competence and unity, it is doomed to irrelevance. This story repeats at the federal level and across the states and territories. It has moderates desolate at what lies ahead.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
November 29, 2025 as “Moderates despair as the Liberals enter a ‘death spiral’ egged on by Murdoch”.
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Exclusive: ‘They have an unlimited appetite for stupidity’
Karen Barlow
Sussan Ley has reasserted her position as Liberal leader, although moderates in the party are worried she may cave in to extreme rhetoric on immigration.