Building the Post-Liberal Party

It’s official: the 2025 federal election was the worst ever for the Liberal Party.

While much of the political and media class is crowing that this is proof of a “progressive majority” in Australia, the real implications of this election may not be so palatable to our rulers.

What is beyond dispute is that the Liberal Party is dead, and there is no obvious replacement for it. This is not just a case of one bad election result. WA and Victoria are now virtually one party states in which the ALP has an unassailable lead over the Liberals, due to the latter badly losing multiple elections in a row.

The main reason for the Liberal Party’s death, however, has not been the strength of the Labor Party, but its own internal incoherence. The liberal and conservative wings of the party are playing tug of war over policy and candidate selection, and as a result it appeals to no one.

Dutton was supposed to be the “hard right” conservative candidate, yet most of his time was spent backing down from his own policies, apologising for his language, and removing candidates who espoused any opinion to the right of Anthony Albanese.

The liberal base of the party have largely drifted off to the Teal movement, which promises feel-good progressivism without the associated tax increases.

Meanwhile the conservatives have been left politically homeless, given the choice of either staying with a party that openly despises them or voting for novelty minor parties of the right like One Nation or whatever political vehicle Clive Palmer has most recently constructed for his own amusement.

The good news is that this is an historic opportunity to prise the Australian right away from liberalism towards a nationalist vision.

As Levitsky and Ziblatt famously noted in How Democracies Die, the main protection that the liberal establishment has against illiberal challengers has been the presence of a strong centre-right party. These centre-right parties act as controlled opposition to steer discontent away from ideologies that challenge liberal hegemony.

Australia currently has no credible centre-right party, and doesn’t even have a credible populist right. The field is wide open for anyone who wants to capture the 10-20% of the Australian electorate (at minimum) who are currently totally excluded from the political conversation.

There is no chance of the Liberal Party repositioning itself to win these voters back.

In the aftermath of the election loss, the conversation has immediately turned to how the party can win back “urban Australia”, which seems to be code for doubling down on trying to win votes from braindead inner city progressives who will never vote for them anyway.

Any new party of the nationalist right must have a coherent ideology and set of policies if it is to avoid falling into the personality-driven clown show that has typified minor parties of the right until now.

It must be based on those issues that are most important in ensuring the survival of the Australian nation into the next century, while still appealing to the immediate needs of the voter. It must contain none of the dead wood that has kept the Australian right squarely stuck in the Howard years.

I would recommend the following core policies as a basic minimum:

1. Nationalist economics. Australia needs to start taking economics lessons from Friedrich List and not Milton Friedman. Neo-Liberal economics has destroyed our manufacturing capability and turned us into a low-value added raw resources economy more akin to Argentina and Chile than a developed First World country. We need to build up our infant industries and climb the value chain no matter what the cost. Targeted tariffs, subsidies and economic planning all need to be implemented if we are to avoid being forever enslaved to the whims of the international commodities markets. All essential war industries must be nationalised, and expanded to the point where Australia could fight a war of survival if necessary.
2. Immigration control. Mass immigration needs to be stopped immediately, as its impact on the Australian worker has been disastrous. This means cuts to permanent immigration of at least 80%-90% of current levels, and the total abolition of temporary worker visas. We must withdraw from any treaty which compels us to accept migrants, including bilateral “labour mobility” agreements and the UN Refugee Convention. Mass immigration has proven to be the direct cause of the current housing crisis, and has kept both productivity and wages artificially low for over 20 years. It has also created dangerous ethnic tensions within Australia through its destabilising effect on the nation’s demographics. It has bred racial hatred, religious intolerance and the importation of foreign conflicts onto our streets. The only people who have benefitted have been a tiny class of plutocrats who have reaped the rewards of infinite cheap labour with no thought to the permanent damage that they have done to the country.
3. Ending speculation on the housing market. We’re going to need to deliberately tank property prices if Australians are going to have affordable housing again. Cutting immigration and reducing population growth will do most of the job, but further restrictions are needed to prevent our housing market from ever again becoming a casino. The temporary ban on foreigners buying existing properties needs to be made permanent, and universities should be obliged to house the foreign students that they bring in. If the private sector is unable to build dwellings in sufficient numbers, then the state must step in and build the required number itself.
4. An independent foreign policy. Australia needs to be able to independently defend itself, without the assistance of any outside power. We must reject the servile mentality that has infected our defence and foreign policy establishment since 1945, and pursue our own interests. Those interests have now irreparably diverged from that of the US, which wants to involve Australia in its endless global war against the “alliance of autocracies” and to destroy China’s economy, on which our ongoing prosperity depends. Both the US and China would take us far more seriously if we become a regional military power with an independent foreign policy, rather than a crippled liability of a client state.
5. Censorship of harmful foreign social movements. Right-wingers are going to have to drop their traditional support for free speech, as they are in a war with enemies intent on using it against them. Free speech should only apply to good faith political speech, and not subversive alien cultural movements such as LGBT, transsexualism, feminism and the antiwhite agenda. The level of censorship of Australian social media that is currently applied to nationalists should be applied to these movements, with accounts banned and content blocked on all platforms as soon as it is spotted. Any government support currently provided to these movements should be permanently withdrawn, and the ABC should be broken up into several smaller, independent news organisations. ISPs should be obliged to block pornography of all kinds, due to its proven negative impact on the psychological and sexual health of viewers.

This is just a brief sketch, intended to provide a starting point for what a real nationalist policy agenda might look like.

What’s important is that nationalists seize this rare moment to influence the future course of the Australian right by creating a credible alternative to the failed politics of the Liberal Party.

We cannot allow this opportunity to go to waste.