I Think I Know What the Liberal Party is Doing Wrong - November 2025

A party divided: the struggle between grassroots conservatism and top-down factional control.

We’ve all had those moments where something happens that seemingly makes no sense. Something that makes you shake your head, and try to work out the “why” behind it. Usually the issue de jour bounces around in your head for a while before being shoved to one side by the priorities of real life. The original perplexity becomes a curiosity, then a footnote, then forgotten. But not this time.

A couple of days back, Jess Wilson (who?) suddenly appeared as the new Liberal leader in Victoria. Brad Battin, the former leader, was hardly a conservative powerhouse, but he had finally been making some progress, albeit slow and quiet. He even edged ahead of Jacinta Allan in at least one preferred-Premier poll. After years of the Victorian Liberals wandering in the weeds as an “opposition in name only,” backing the Government on everything from Covid to climate change, they had finally installed a leader with just a hint of spine. Battin had begun nudging the party back from its drift to the left. And yet, overnight, he was replaced by a first-term MP whose positions don’t line up with the direction the party had been taking.

It doesn’t add up. And the more I thought about it, the clearer it became: the real story here isn’t Wilson or Battin. It’s what’s been happening inside the Liberal Party itself.

I’ve been wrestling with the downward spiral of the Liberal Party for nearly twenty years now. (It was 2007 when I started ‘handing out’ for alternative conservative parties). I’ve been trying to figure out what is causing the Liberal (and to a lesser extent, the Nationals) to drift away from their own stated beliefs. But I think I've got it sorted now, at east in my mind. the Liberal Party is no longer democratic.

Leadership decisions, candidate preselection, and policy direction are being dictated by a small circle of factional powerbrokers and strategists, not by the grassroots members. When ordinary members lose their voice, or their voice is not listened to, the party loses its connection to those members, and with it, the very principles it claims to uphold. This is a concern I first wrote about back in 2022 in Are the Liberal and National Parties Lost? Yes, they were lost, and it’s only gotten worse since.

In a truly democratic party, candidates rise from local branches, reflecting their communities’ values and taking those ideas to Parliament. Today, preselection and policy are increasingly imposed from the top down. This inversion of the system silences members, alienates voters, and undermines the Liberal Party’s own stated philosophy of decentralisation and personal responsibility. As I noted after attending the CPAC conference in 2022 What I Learned from CPAC), a party that ignores its members loses those same members, and abandons its very soul.

This top-down control explains why the party consistently drifts left, even as its base remains anchored to the conservative centre. When decisions are made by inner-city factions, consultants or donors, the party naturally mirrors their values: progressive social policies, Net Zero commitments, and Treaty support, to name a few. The disconnect between leadership and grassroots widens, leaving conservative voters like me politically homeless. This is a theme I explored in Two Myths of Australian Politics

.At CPAC 2022, a member of the Liberal Party executive exclaimed:
“The candidates we select are a function of you, it’s a function of the members of the party. We have plebiscites around Australia, we select the candidates and we decide who goes into parliament, and it’s our job as party members to keep them honest, OK?”
Yet at least a dozen of the candidates in the previous election were “Captain’s Picks” supposedly nominated by Mr Morrison. To me, the failure of preselection is the clearest symptom. Local branches can be overridden in favour of factional favourites, parachuted candidates, or first-term MPs who hold views out of step with the electorate. This is how someone like Jess Wilson, with positions on Treaty and Net Zero that contradict the party base, can suddenly rise to leadership.

Viewed through this lens, the removal of Brad Battin becomes predictable rather than inexplicable. In a top-down environment, leaders aren’t judged on popularity with voters or capacity to rebuild the party. They’re evaluated by factional loyalty and donor comfort. Battin’s conservative stance, tentative as it may have been, was finally giving the party a credible oppositional voice. He was a threat to the internal machinery. Wilson’s compliance, by contrast, made her the “safe” choice.

By abandoning bottom-up democracy, the Liberals have also abandoned the values their charter proclaims: freedom, decentralisation, and community representation. A party that claims to defend democratic principles cannot suppress them internally.

And now, here we are. These events in Victoria reflect the party across the nation, including federally, when Mr Abbott was rolled by the leftist Turnbull. The result is obvious: conservative voters aren’t leaving the Liberal Party - the Liberal Party is leaving us. With the party drifting left, abandoning its base, and silencing members, many, like me, are now looking for alternatives that respect principle, local input, and conservative values.

It’s time that we all took a more active interest in politics and the political process. We need to join a party, become active, and help make change from the ground up.