PAUL MURRAY: The orange crush threatening to suffocate the Libs

I’ve lost count of the number of senior Liberals who have told me over the past five years that their party’s malaise was cyclical and it would soon bounce back.

Despite loss after loss at Federal and State elections as the party’s primary vote progressively shrank, the underlying belief was that the voters would soon wake up.

The results of the South Australian election last weekend should finally put paid to that fantasy.

But it probably won’t. The Liberals still need to be disabused of the notion that bad Labor governments will be enough reason for voters to hand power back to the coalition parties.

Not when the electorate thinks the Liberals would — or even might — be worse. And South Australia’s was far from a “bad” government.

Internal Liberal Party reviews of its electoral catastrophes this decade have been either hopeless or ignored. Which leads to the same result.

Those Liberals who have chosen to stare down voter disinterest in their party as a passing phase now have to accept that One Nation has eaten their lunch.

And those who think the surging One Nation vote might eventually end up supporting a Liberal government either though preferences or some form of coalition also need to think again.

Pauline Hanson — who might dislike Labor more than the Liberals, although no one could ever be certain — is a wrecking ball, knowing she will never be in government.

Regardless of her latest pronouncement about being “happy” to preference the coalition parties in future to oust Labor governments, her track record – as recently as last weekend – is very different. In South Australia, One Nation again ran an open ticket without directing preferences, which helped Labor.

Many of Hanson’s newer supporters are unfortunately of the same anarchic mindset, such is their disillusionment with major party politics and its inability to solve their problems.

Here’s the focal point: A big number of South Australians with a grievance against the Liberals voted for One Nation and helped elect a Labor Government they didn’t like with a much bigger majority. That’s self-harm.

If those voters were trying to “send a message” to the major parties —which is so often said and written in political commentary — they need not have bothered.

Last weekend, that message got the same result as came from the 2025 Federal election when Labor got 34 per cent of the votes and 63 per cent of the seats.

And it’s this: the combination of compulsory voting and compulsory preferences with a crisis of confidence in the coalition parties results in landslide wins for Labor.

By the way, the latest research by political consultancy Wolf+Smith shows 28 per cent of One Nation supporters view their vote as “sending a message”, by far the highest of any party.

Send a message? You elect Labor.

Nationally, Labor with a primary vote below 40 per cent cannot form government without Greens preferences. But as Labor’s vote teeters around 30, One Nation will now get it over the line.

One Nation’s “revolution” in South Australia looks likely to end with the party securing just two seats in the lower house.

But while it depressed Labor’s vote by about two per cent, the Malinauskus Government will gain up to an extra eight seats. The Liberals are reduced to four, likely remaining the Opposition.

So much for Hanson’s threat of leaving One Nation “landmines” behind to keep the Labor government in check. Two MPs against Labor’s likely 35?

And far worse is yet to come in November. On these trends, One Nation voters will save the most incompetent government in Australia from the axe unless it gives its first preferences to the Liberals – and its voters comply.

Otherwise, Victoria’s Labor administration will be saved from electoral justice, hanging on to majority government because the Liberals will be unable to win enough seats as they leak primary votes to One Nation.

This message is unfortunately lost on those angry and disillusioned voters who have joined the One Nation stampede, but have little understanding of how their votes work in practice.

In this way, One Nation neuters the conservative side of politics, particularly if the Liberals remain resistant to making the policy changes that should be obvious to them from Hanson’s gains.

First up, the Liberals need to realise that factionalism is destroying their party. It’s that simple.

The reason the party cannot present a clear message to the public is that it is structurally unable to create one because its moderate wing negates a clear conservative ethos.

For example, just look at the jarring presence of leading Liberal moderate, SA Senator Anne Ruston, on the ABC’s election night panel.

She typifies the sort of dripping wet Liberal that drove people to One Nation.

Was she going to make sense of what was happening that night? Or was she just there to block any resurgence of a conservative message which was obviously needed?

The so-called “broad church” that John Howard boasted has become a bickering chatroom in which there is little common ground on the big challenges facing the nation.

Labor once had a similar problem which kept it in Opposition for long periods all over Australia. No longer. Its factions are essentially under control, allowing Labor to speak with one voice.

Former NSW Labor Treasurer Michael Costa —a sharp political analyst — said on Sky this week that One Nation had now become to the Liberals what the DLP had been to the ALP: a party borne out of grievance but with the ability to achieve nothing other than keep its former host out of government.

The Liberals are so constipated by factionalism that they couldn’t even agree to make public the internal review into the stinking 2025 federal election campaign.

The Nightly’s Aaron Patrick got the leak first —a day after the federal council said it wouldn’t be released — giving voters some idea of why the campaign was so hopeless.

Although the review avoided explicitly nailing the obvious point, former leader Peter Dutton’s ultimately fateful desire to control the campaign was born out of his contempt for the party’s moderates, but led to the strangling of any cogent policy development, strategy or narrative.

It’s another review that will amount to nothing. Just like the one done in WA by Danielle Blain and Mark Trowell KC after the 2021 State election wipeout.

Trowell ruefully revisited that report in an op-ed for this newspaper in January, 2023, noting a review by Brian Loughnane and Jane Hume into the Federal election loss had also sought to break the stranglehold of various factions on the party’s State divisions across Australia.

“The key factor in the demise of the Liberal Party nationally is the decimation of the party’s grassroots while indulging in factionally motivated activity,” Trowell again warned.

“All political parties have lost membership over the last few decades, so it isn’t a recent phenomenon. There are many reasons for that, but there is no doubt that factionalism has contributed to the decline.

“The real problem for the Liberal Party is its dwindling support at the ballot box. Some commentators say the party must move left to attract votes, but that just makes it ‘Labor-lite’. If you do that you lose your traditional base.

“Voters are clearly going to support a political party that is disciplined, with talented candidates and a coherent message. These are things the Liberal Party doesn’t have right now.

“What it needs to do is to stand for something. It needs to improve the brand not in a flashy artificial way . . . but rather to focus on long-held Liberal principles and values to differentiate it from the Teals, Greens and Labor.

“That doesn’t mean moving to the extreme right of politics either. It means promoting the common-sense policies and principles that appeal to average Australians — those who used to be called the Howard battlers.”

That was 2023 and is as relevant today as it was then. If it had been adopted nationally, One Nation would not have risen as it has.

The Liberals need clear, conservative policies on the hot button issues like immigration, housing, energy and defence, aimed squarely at Middle Australia.

They should not waste resources on the so-called Teal seats, the loss of which obsesses many older party strategists. Voters in those seats are generally wealthy enough to indulge themselves politically in “causes”.

The Liberals need to concentrate on Middle Australia and let Teal voters stew as revenue-pressed Labor increasingly advances “eat the rich” policies and debt climbs.

Their vote will change when their wealth is on the line and they realise Teal MPs are powerless to help.

The only way the Liberals will break the Labor-Greens nexus under our outdated compulsory preferential voting system is to replicate it on the other side of the increasingly fragmented new political order.