The Centre Cannot Hold: Rebuilding 'The Broad Church'

This piece appeared in the 31 May 2025 edition of The Weekend Australian.

A PDF view of the article is here, including how it appeared in print.

 

The new Liberal leadership will have to find a fresh equilibrium for its liberal and conservative wings. Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

 

In the wake of the Liberal Party’s Götterdämmerung at the May 3 election, former senator Simon Birmingham posted a kind of 21st-century epistle on LinkedIn, discerning the electorate’s crisis of faith in “the broad church”. 

“The Liberal Party is not seen as remotely liberal and the brand of conservatism projected is clearly perceived as too harsh and out of touch,” he wrote, echoing Theresa May’s 2002 warning to Britain’s Tories that they were seen as “the nasty party”. 

Who could seriously disagree with this assessment, other than to note that both the liberal and conservative wings of the party bear responsibility for that perception?

Reasonable minds may disagree on the party’s future direction out of the ashes.

Many of Birmingham’s proposed structural and cultural reforms are sound and long overdue, including the need to revitalise membership and community engagement, restore the party’s connection with women and urban voters, and reform its model of liberalism to reclaim the political centre. 

But he was largely silent on the need to reform the party’s conservative tradition, as an indispensable pillar of the “broad church” since its foundation in 1944. If the party is to avoid repeating the prolonged period of opposition in the 1980s and 90s and the internecine wars between its liberal and conservative elements, a rebalancing of the party’s foundational values and policies is needed. Both wings have failed, and neither has the answers alone. This re-anchoring of the party’s shared philosophical centre should include a contemporary compassionate conservatism alongside a community-focused liberalism.

It was John Howard who coined the Liberal Party as a “broad church” and referred to its supporters as the custodians of both the classical liberal and conservative philosophical traditions. This has generally played out as a dynamic equilibrium between a Millian commitment to individual freedoms, smaller government and laissez-faire economics, and a Burkean veneration of the family, small business, incremental change and institutions.

The strength and coherence of the conservative wing of the party is critically important to the success of the Liberal Party as a whole. Only four Liberal leaders have led the party into power from opposition: Robert Menzies in 1949, Malcolm Fraser in 1975, John Howard in 1996 and Tony Abbott in 2013.

Each was firmly rooted in the conservative traditions of the party and maintained good relations with the National Party. The recent Coalition fracture has underscored the critical importance of the Liberal leadership as the nexus of centre-right politics in Australia. If the Liberal Party (and Coalition) is to win government again, it’s more important that its conservative hinterland is reformed and made relevant for the 21st century.

The Liberal Party’s approach to policy, politics and philosophy across the past decade has been at odds with the seismic post-liberal realignment in Western democracies about the role of government and the importance of civil society and community.

Following several economic crises, the Covid-19 pandemic, disenchantment with globalisation and declining living standards, and a discomfort with the atomisation of society, Australians rightly expected their governments to care for them and to be a strong, active and constructive force in society.

The Liberal Party’s brand of values-free market liberalism and anti-government conservatism was not adapted to the times and did not resonate with the Australian ethic.

Too often while in government and opposition, the moderate liberals espoused a hollow “zombie Reaganist” approach to economic and social policy, privileging the free market and the interests of boomers above addressing the housing affordability concerns of young people, tackling inequality and cost-of-living pressures, and fighting for manufacturing industries.

At the same time, the conservatives became associated with cruel immigration policies (even President Donald Trump thought our border policies were harsh), relentless and insensitive culture war rhetoric on social issues and a reflexive opposition to meaningfully including Aboriginal people in Australia’s constitutional compact.

Australian conservatism is fundamentally distinct from its North Atlantic counterparts. The body politic was never formed in the rebellious fervour and anti-government sentiments of the American or French revolutions. The crown and executive have largely been regarded as a responsible and constructive presence in Australian political life – a “helper, not an oppressor”, as barrister and writer Gray Connolly framed it. At its best, Australian conservatism is pragmatic and community oriented, more concerned with looking through the front windscreen than about what’s in the rear-view mirror.

To this end, the Liberal Party needs to reform its right flank into a contemporary, compassionate conservatism, devoted to fostering the common good and Australian national interest through universal human values such as family, community, security and dignity. This aligns with Menzies’ iconographic “Forgotten People” speech of 1942 and its support for “homes material, homes human and homes spiritual”. Despite contestation over the naming of the Liberal Party and the nature of its core ethos, Menzies undoubtedly had strong conservative instincts and policies.

To become electorally viable, the conservative flank of the Liberal Party cannot afford to descend into a reactionary conservative movement, dedicated to taking Australia “back down the time tunnel to the future”, as Paul Keating once joked of Howard. Nor can it drift into MAGA-lite populism, with all the ugliness, polarisation and isolationism of the grievance-driven right that has emerged in the US.

It also must reject the ideological anti-government strain that has undermined the party across the past decade. Australians value effective, well-run public services. The party should be pro-good government, not anti-government.

The Liberal Party’s fundamental purpose should be to protect and advance the dignity, security and opportunity of every individual and community across Australia.

In broad strokes, this nation-building compassionate conservative and community-focused liberal vision can be realised by:

● Ensuring home ownership and liveability are central to the Liberal Party’s ethos. Young people will not vote for a conservative party if they have nothing of their own to conserve. Embark on bold supply-side reforms, connect urban centres to major cities with high-speed rail funded through land value capture uplift, and wield the commonwealth’s legal and financial powers over the states to incentivise homebuilding for the good of the body politic.

● Making Australia a technology-neutral energy superpower. Develop a pragmatic mix of strategic renewables, gas and nuclear energy to secure reliable, scalable and low-emissions baseload power to meet Australia’s energy and industrial needs while ending outdated restrictions on nuclear and gas exploration and development to support the energy transition. We should be as wealthy as the Gulf states with our mineral and energy reserves.

● Growing and diversifying the economy to benefit all Australians. Australian living standards are declining the fastest in the OECD and we rank 105th in the world for economic complexity. Bold economic reforms are needed to increase aspiration and opportunity: index income tax brackets; increase productivity through skills, technology and AI; reduce regulatory burdens on small and medium businesses; curb unsustainable spending to reduce inflation, debt and deficit; and rebalance the economy’s dependence on government spending in favour of private enterprise. Economic growth is necessary to ensure the sustainability of our generous social services.

● Strengthening national security and resilience. Recalibrate and increase defence spending to improve the sovereignty and lethality of our armed forces; build supply chain and fuel security; and establish a voluntary national service program to address the ADF’s recruitment and retention issues and support natural disaster resilience organisations.

● Managing responsible and nation-building immigration. Ensure immigration serves a nation-building purpose; that is, filling genuine skills shortages, developing the regions and encouraging innovation; that it does not overwhelm housing and infrastructure capacity; that there are civic integration initiatives such as English language programs and community supports to foster social cohesion; and maintain a generous refugee and humanitarian program.

● Advancing reconciliation with Indigenous Australia. Meaningful, realistic and safe constitutional reform is critical to strengthen our shared nationhood, uphold the “honour of the crown” owed to Indigenous peoples and to promote Aboriginal-led approaches to close the gap.

● Ending the grievance politics and rhetoric. Foster a politics of respect and dignity, and encourage inclusive engagement with all Australians, especially vulnerable groups. How the Liberal Party speaks to Australians matters, almost as much as the substance of its policies. Disagree with the left where necessary, but appropriating the language of the US’s culture war rhetoric and its “war on woke” doesn’t work in Australia. 

The Liberal Party struggled for traction on each of these major issues at the election, where Labor is nonetheless vulnerable and doesn’t have realistic solutions to the nation’s problems. Failure to address these challenges has fuelled political fragmentation and polarisation in Britain, Europe and the US.

The intellectual and policy foundations of “the broad church” will need to be rebuilt to win government and meet these national challenges.

To do so, the new Liberal leadership will have to find a new equilibrium for its liberal and conservative wings centred on compassionate conservatism and community-focused liberalism, fashion a kinder political movement, and reconnect with urban Australia, women and multicultural communities.

Whether Sussan Ley and Ted O’Brien are up to the challenge remains to be seen.

Aussie rules: Democracy sausages, budgie smugglers, and electoral integrity

 

This article was originally published on The Interpreter, a publication by The Lowy Institute, an independent, nonpartisan international policy think tank located in Sydney, Australia.

Election Day at Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia - 3 May, 2025

 

I emerged from the voting booths at Bondi Surf Lifesaving Club last Saturday clad in red budgie smugglers – a pale imitation of former prime minister Tony Abbott in his political (and physical) prime. Before I could reach the barbecue to tuck into a “democracy sausage”, the only thing which has the universal support of the electorate on polling day, a Reuters journalist approached me for an interview. She was hoping to write a story for her international audience on why Australians are so often seen voting in their bathers, and how the democracy sausage had become both a national dish and a symbol of Australian democracy.

Within hours, the content and footage from my interview had been syndicated internationally and re-published across multiple articles and media outlets, racking up millions of views on the social media accounts of NBC News in the US, Channel News Asia and The Straits Times in Singapore and Asia, and Reuters in the UK and India.

 
 

The international interest in how Australians do democracy was both fascinating and humbling to behold. Singaporeans commented that the democracy sausage tradition made “the environment light-hearted and fun”, and that they should make a “Demokrasi Lemak” tradition. Americans asked where one keeps Voter ID in budgie smugglers (we don’t need it to vote!) and remarked on how relaxed and widely trusted the voting process seemed.

The fascination with how Australia does democracy says something more profound about the state of representative democracy around the world. At a time when news headlines are dominated by examples of democratic backsliding across the United States, Europe, and Asia, Australia’s quirky traditions stand out as hopeful symbols of electoral integrity and a unique political and civic culture.

State and Federal election days are celebrations of what it means to be Australian, and everything good about our society and democracy. The festive atmosphere of the barbecue at polling stations shows that we are an inclusive and socially cohesive society. First generation citizens line up alongside First Nations Australians, as voting lines become a peaceful mix of party colours. Nothing says trust in the political system like being comfortable voting alongside your fellow citizens in your bathers. It makes you proud of the society we’ve built together.

Aside from the cultural features, Australian democratic innovations have created our peaceful, effective, and trusted electoral system. In this sense, the Australian-made institutional architecture shapes the substance of our democracy. Ours is an important example for a world lacking both trust and pride in democracy. It’s akin to the scenes of voters abroad proudly holding an ink-stained finger to the camera to mark a vote, yet celebrated for having held stable in Australia for more than a century.

Compulsory voting and enrolment drive high levels of turnout and moderate our politics and policies. Preferential voting in the House and the Single Transferable Vote system in the Senate lead to more representative outcomes. Saturday elections ensure that more working people can have a say in the electoral process. The Australian Electoral Commission’s independent, effective, and efficient management of the system means that results are widely trusted, with unsuccessful candidates accepting outcomes in good faith, leading to the peaceful transfer of power. As the Lowy Institute Poll has shown over the past 20 years, Australians increasingly regard “democracy is preferable to any other kind of government”.

Although Australia hasn’t always lived up to its ideals, egalitarianism is deeply embedded in our national character and political inclination to expand the franchise. Following the sustained advocacy of suffragists such as Vida Goldstein, one of Australia’s first acts of nationhood after Federation was the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act, which gave (white) women both the right to vote and to stand for parliament. Australia was the first nation in history to enact both rights, leading the world in advancing representative democracy and universal suffrage, even as First Nations Australians were excluded from those rights for decades to come.

Compare our democratic mechanisms and processes with those of United States and its presidential elections. Namely the tradition of Tuesday voting, the history of political gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement, the recent need for armed guards and increased security at voting booths, the patchwork of different voting systems and electoral laws in every jurisdiction leading to inconsistencies and delays in outcomes, and the widespread mistrust in the electoral system amid weaponised allegations of electoral improprieties. Worst of all, President Donald Trump’s normalisation of election denialism, culminating in the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Australians should be proud of the integrity of our electoral system and the values which underpin it, and more willing to influence other nations through our example, just as Goldstein and the suffragists did. Perhaps our national tendency to modesty (or tall poppy syndrome) prevents us from doing so. As a result, we miss out on significant soft-power influence in the region and beyond. The Australian example is a model for the world, at a time when democratic norms are eroding across the United States, Europe, and Asia. The humble democracy sausage and budgie smugglers might be the perfect starting point for a discussion about wider democratic reform. As Jack Karlson said, “this is democracy manifest”. Even if he was a crook.

Oscar Jenkins and Ukraine

 

“Drink to me, guys, I’m going to deal with these bloody Russians” - Viktor Yatsunyk, 2022. Picture taken at 7 Rifles, A-Coy, Oxfordshire

 

This article was originally published in The Australian. A PDF version can be found here for those without paywall access.

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A few days before Christmas, a journalist friend messaged me to ask whether I knew Oscar Jenkins, having seen we were mutual connections on LinkedIn.

I confirmed I did and that we were classmates at primary and secondary school in 2003-10, although I hadn’t seen him in years.

I was gently informed Oscar had been captured by Russian soldiers while fighting for Ukrainian forces, and a video of him being interrogated was spreading online.

I confirmed his identity in the video and spent the afternoon in a state of disbelief. It was surreal and traumatic to see my old friend in the hostage video, his familiar face looking back at me from my ­mobile phone screen. Exposure to this sort of content is an increasingly common aspect of modern conflict due to the rise of digital technologies and social media, giving disturbing new meaning to Susan Sontag’s essay Regarding the Pain of ­Others.

Despite our culture’s growing desensitisation to and normalisation of such content, it was nauseating to see someone I had grown up with in that situation. It personalised the horrors of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict in a profound way. I felt sick seeing the fear in his expression and hearing his voice quiver, his confusion at being yelled at in a foreign language and violently struck by his captors, and his horror at the vulnerability of his position as a prisoner of war with his hands painfully bound by duct tape, his fate uncertain.

Perhaps even more unsettling were the online reactions and comments to the video and news stories as I searched for information. Telegram, Reddit, and X are largely unmoderated sewers of racism, negativity, anonymity and harmful content, especially as it ­relates to modern conflict and warfare. Yet the hateful and sadistic views expressed even extended to mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.

Users, some Australian, gloated at Oscar’s situation and celebrated Russia’s military actions and illegal invasion of Ukraine. It made me deeply uncomfortable to think there were people among us who so readily delighted in the suffering of others, especially the suffering of those who had sacrificed their ­liberty to join a just war in support of Ukraine.

As I watched the video and read the toxic online commentary, I remembered Oscar as the gentle 11-year-old I sat next to in class after moving to Melbourne.

I thought of the talented Latin and science student with a dry sense of humour. The loyal, kind and big-hearted friend to so many.

He was a great athlete, and I vividly recall our dramatic contest in the annual cross-country race around Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens where he pipped me for third place in the last few hundred ­metres.

We hadn’t seen much of each other since finishing high school in 2010. As is the way with our modern social networks and digital selves, I’d kept up with his adventures on Facebook over the years: teaching in China; cycling north through Australia and then across Asia; and his animal rights advocacy. We last messaged earlier this year about plant-based diets, with him encouraging me to go vegetarian again.

Just as the story broke in the media early last Monday morning, I was attending Christmas carols with some friends in a warm church near Oxford’s city centre. I shed a tear as we began to sing The First Noel and other familiar songs. It pained me to think where he might be at that very moment: terrified, cold, hungry, and alone in the wintry darkness of a foreign land, in the hands of brutal forces, in a conflict in which Australia is not directly engaged.

After the service, we prayed for Oscar and lit candles as symbols of hope.

The war in Ukraine has loomed large during my time in Britain. I have been fortunate to study alongside three brilliant young Ukrainians, who will assume responsibility for rebuilding their country when the war is over. They have each lost friends and extended family in the war, and the daily updates from home weighed heavily on them throughout the course.

I am also serving part-time as a rifleman in the British Army on exchange from the Australian Army Reserve. A Ukrainian-British member of my unit, Viktor Yatsunyk, was killed in September 2022 after he stepped on a landmine while rescuing injured soldiers near Izyum. He had left his family and life in the UK to join the war effort, never to return. In the soldier’s mess, there is a framed £20 note Viktor left behind to buy a round for his colleagues, superimposed over a Ukrainian flag. The text below the note reads in Ukrainian: “Drink to me, guys, I’m going to deal with these bloody Russians.”

In the days since news of Oscar’s capture broke, many have openly wondered why an Australian would seek to join an intense foreign conflict in what the historian Timothy Snyder called the eastern European “bloodlands”.

Scores of young Australians have done so since the outbreak of the conflict, with seven dying in combat to date. Wars can feel faraway and even abstract in Australia, secure as we are in our peaceful corner of the planet and in our society largely free of the ancient hatreds of Europe and the Middle East.

When interrogated by Russian soldiers as to why he was in the Donbas region, Oscar candidly answered that he was there “to help Ukraine”. That’s the measure of the man. For now, all we can do is hope and pray that Oscar will be treated humanely and in accordance with international law, and that our diligent and effective diplomatic staff will be able to arrange his safe return to Australia.

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Nick Fabbri is a policy analyst, writer, podcaster and reservist soldier based in Britain.