The Liberal Party’s plummeting fortunes (down to 24 per cent of the primary vote in recent polls) indicate it has a problem of Darwinian proportions. It can be explained by several factors including an unusual combination of moral idealism and pragmatic self-interest.
That, of course, is not due to the idealism and self-interest on the part of its supporters, rather it is on the part of the people who are not supporting it – youth and women.
One of the keys to the misfortune of the Liberal Party and the bickering within the Coalition generally is that it is suffering from what I call “the survival of the unfittest”.
At the May election the Liberals lost 15 seats – nearly all of them in suburbia. The 43 survivors include nine Nationals and 16 Queensland Liberal-National-Party MPs.
The survivors are “unfit” in the Darwinian sense – just a rump of grumpy, old, rural men who are genetically incapable of doing anything much to ensure the survival of the Liberal species.
The surviving nine Nationals (who lost only one seat) and 16 LNP rural Queenslanders make up more than half the joint party room (58 per cent). They have a blocking vote against anything that would put people before the continued rape of the planet or anything that might get wider voter support in the cities – where most voters live.
In earlier times, a slow recovery could be expected – just as Labor came back from the 1975 loss and the Coalition from the 1983 loss.
But this is significantly different because politics and economics have fundamentally changed.
In March 2007 then Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd declared climate change to be “the great moral challenge of our generation”. The electorate agreed and voted him into office in December that year.
Sure, Rudd squibbed a return to the polls with a double dissolution after the Green-Coalition’s unholy alliance in the Senate rejected his carbon legislation in 2010 and his leadership style cost him the prime ministership. But that did not alter the fact that the great majority of young people agreed with his climate position – and still do.
Women, too, tend to be more environmentally nurturing than men, especially older men.
Younger people have a much greater stake in the issue than older people. It is not only a moral question, but one of self-interest. What sort of planet are you going to leave us?
Until the turn of this century, politics was very much a cake-slicing exercise. Who and how much a government taxes and who and how much it spends on people.
That sort of politics is changing because the economics underpinning it has changed. In earlier times, the theory and practice of economics was predicated upon the price or value of something being the combination of the labour and capital that created it. That sort of economics presumed that planetary inputs such as water, air, minerals, the produce of the oceans, soil and the like were free – there for the taking and there for the despoiling with waste and not to be worried about or accounted for.
Since the turn of the century, however, it has become abundantly clear to the great majority of people, especially the young, that planetary resources are not infinite and they have to be accounted for and conserved sustainably. And they want politics to reflect this.
Putting carbon in the air and plastic in the soil and oceans in ever growing quantities is not sustainable. If it continues, great masses of people will suffer with fires and floods made exponentially worse by global heating and with micro-plastics and other chemicals inducing cancers and ill-health. Species, too, will suffer extermination and extinction.
Only governments can do anything about this. And that is why politics has changed. Even governments have difficulty in the face of corporate and mogul avarice and misinformation, but they are the only hope, especially in the eyes of young people.
Politics is no longer a case of purely service provision and welfare payments by redistributing a bit of wealth. The old left-right cleavage of low taxes and small government, on one hand, against a greater government redistributive role, on the other, is now only part of the story.
It is no longer a question of redistributing some wealth, but to question the way the wealth is being generated, how much is being generated, and at what cost to the broad community. In other words, stop producing some of this short-term wealth if it is doing more long-term harm and damage than it is worth. Because if it is, it is not wealth at all.
Young people have other self-interest points – housing and education. Many are being shut out of home ownership because of the tax concessions and the ramping up of immigration to provide business with cheap labour and to undermine unions begun in the Howard era. Home ownership, higher education, and a steady job used to be the main drivers of people turning more conservative as they get older.
No more. Ironically, the very policies introduced by earlier conservative governments have created conditions under which people no longer become more conservative as they grow older. They remain renters in the gig economy. The Liberal Party needs to tune in to young people, not expect young people to grow older and tune in to them. But it is probably too late for the Liberal Party to do that.
And they have to tune in to women. The party rejected quotas again last week and they are monstering a female leader. This must make every woman who has ever faced workplace misogyny (nearly all) groan in frustration.
The Coalition’s privatisation of aged care, child care, and as much of the health system as they can get away with is repelling the female vote because women do so much of the caring work in society.
Net zero might end the Coalition and/or Sussan Ley’s leadership in the killing time of the year’s final sitting, or later. That might even split the Liberal Party as furious and frustrated moderates, who have seen moderate colleagues lose their seats over National and LNP climate idiocy, decide to go it alone.
And for all the talk about net zero, it is less than a bare minimum. When (or if) we get there, we will still have carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million compared to a pre-industrial level of 280 and average temperatures will be between 1.5 and 3.5 degrees above pre-industrial times.
We will still have the task of getting the excess carbon out of the atmosphere through carbon capture. But what is left of the Coalition cannot even get to net zero, let alone understand the later carbon reduction necessary to stabilise the climate.
Let’s hope they (and others like them in other countries) become extinct before we all do.
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 11 November 2025.