There have been many interesting reactions to the Australian Liberal Party’s catastrophic loss on Saturday. But surely one of the most bizarre has been how leading progressive Liberals have declared that we need “modernization” and a “focus on values and priorities of contemporary Australians”, while at the same time referring, as a guide to the future, a speech given in Britain almost 25 years ago.
With odd uniformity, luminaries such as George Brandis, James McGrath, Simon Birmingham, and others have all pointed to the words of then UK Conservative Party Chairman, Theresa May, at the turn of the last century where she labelled her party the “nasty party”.
They argue that this was a turning point, and it led to David Cameron, “a liberal Tory somewhat resembling Malcolm Turnbull” (in George Brandis’ words), taking control. His agenda fanatically promoted renewable energy regardless of the cost, embraced practically all left-wing social liberal causes, while at the same time implementing an unthinking economic “austerity” which was borne by the less fashionable parts of the country. Organizationally, James McGrath talks of the need for David Cameron-style reform where progressive A-list candidates are selected by an elite group, like him. Apparently, all of this is what we need now.
The most obvious response to such grand theorizing is to ask – have any of these people picked up a British newspaper lately?
No one sensible in Westminster believes that David Cameron-style politics is the future for the centre-right there. Indeed, it seems the only people in the entire world talking like this now are some provincial Aussie Liberals.
News flash: last year the British Conservative Party suffered one of their worst ever defeats.
It is widely recognized that this was overwhelming due to their failure to do anything about mass immigration. They had for years promised to “take back control” but instead let numbers get completely out of hand with more people migrating to the UK in the last 20 years than in the last 1000 years.
The UK Tories are now dramatically changing course on this and other issues.
They have now said “net zero” is “impossible” and would “bankrupt the country”. Their leader, a woman, has no difficulty defining one – unlike Liberals in Australia. Across the board their leadership are talking about cutting immigration drastically, not just trimming the sides.
If progressives in the Australian Liberal Party want to use examples from the United Kingdom as their model for the future, then they really need to get with the times. The advice they are providing is about as delusional as saying the royals need to become more like Megan Markle to save the monarchy.
They also need to look out the window. Currently the largest jurisdiction in the entire Anglo Commonwealth with the centre-right government is Queensland. But Premier David Crisafulli did not ultimately owe his electoral success to using David Cameron-style slogans like “hug a hoodie”. He won by promising “adult time for adult crime”.
Progressive Liberals love to talk about the need to reach out to women, but if they summed up the courage to talk to some of them in real-life, rather than fumbling around in the dark trying to work out what one is, they would discover some interesting things.
Even “teal yoga mums” (and, yes, I know my inner-city female friends love to be called that) if you push them are surprisingly receptive to cuts to immigration. The ridiculous scenes in the Sydney Eastern suburbs where the riot squad was called in to restore order in selective school exams most view with dismay. They worry what mass immigration is going to mean for their kids’ ability to afford houses. Australian women, like those in Europe and elsewhere, also have growing concerns about their personal safety in increasingly “diverse” neighbourhoods. Simply saying the answer to this is more female candidates is patronizing in the extreme.
Now they don’t want to hear these issues discussed by yahoos or from those simply looking for cheap social media likes. But they will listen to reasonable arguments on immigration and other subjects if delivered by professional people in a mature adult way.
The wannabe teal liberals, while they cite her name, also do a great disservice to Theresa May. She was about more than cosmetic window dressing. By the time she became Prime Minister she recognized that politics had changed. She knew that what was required was more than a Thatcherite revival or creating a Team Blue version of Tony Blair.
While she is criticized for the way she handled the difficult politics of Brexit, it is often overlooked that she won more former Labor “red wall” seats than Boris Johnson did. She did this with a more “Red Tory” economic nationalist agenda, one focused far less on financial trading in the city of London and more on building real world industry in the regions. Philosophically she urged people to look more at the thinking of people like Benjamin Disraeli and Joseph Chamberlain rather than just Milton Friedman.
Her key advisor was Nick Timothy, who is now a member of the British parliament. If the Australian centre-right are genuinely looking to Britian for models for the future they could do far worse than focus on what he and others like Danny Kruger, Miriam Cates, Suella Braverman, and Robert Jenrick, who often label themselves “new conservatives” or “national conservatives”, are saying. It is not only immigration but trade, foreign policy, family policy, and the entire economic model of modern western countries that need to be radically re-examined.
All politics is, of course, local and there are limits to the extent what is going on in other countries can be transplanted here. But there are trends and new ideas to be aware of.
Australians don’t like Trump’s bombastic style. They also find the over-the-top rhetorical Oxbridge performances of Boris Johnson a bit silly. But they are up for a genuine discussion on how to repair our country delivered in a plainly worded down-to-earth Australian way.
At some level most people recognize that a dramatic restructuring of the existing bipartisan policy framework needs to happen. What is in place now is not working.
The future of the Liberal Party is not teal progressivism pushed by those from yesteryear. Nor is it some open-borders market-above-all utopia which sees Australia as nothing more than an economic zone. The future is a thoughtful new conservatism.
First published The Australian 9 June 2025 as “The Liberal Party’s Future Can’t be Teal Progressivism” © Dan Ryan 2025. All Rights Reserved.
