A Broad Church Requires a Faith: Reviving the Liberal Identity

By Andrew Kemp

The old rule of thumb in Australian politics always was that Labor won elections by departing from its philosophy, and Liberals won elections by sticking with theirs.

At least at the federal level, Australians tend to vote conservatively – in the literal meaning of the word; happy to maintain the broadly liberal society they have enjoyed, suspicious of the socialist dogma or any overt ideology that might upset the social contract.

It’s a rare thing for a national centre-right political party to be torn apart by the electorate. It has happened only twice in the twentieth century, in 1929 and 1943; the former was a routing of Stanley Melbourne Bruce’s Nationalists on the eve of the Great Depression, and the latter was a thrashing of the sclerotic and identity-less United Australia Party during the Second World War.

Those two elections have something in common. They were the final election each party fought. In 1932, the Nationalists folded and made way for the United Australia Party. In 1944, the United Australia Party dissolved, paving the way for the formation of the Liberal Party.

The 2025 federal election is the third devastating defeat for a centre-right political party in Australia. However, unlike the Nationalists or the United Australia Party, the Liberal Party has a safety net strung over the abyss. Electoral laws protect the major parties in ways that did not exist before the war. Organisationally, the Liberals have a national political organisation that’s decades-old and well-established, which the Nationalists and UAP did not have. In the wake of the 2025 election, many Liberals feel that the campaign was a historic outlier of bad decisions and bad luck; that a better-run campaign could have produced a different result, if not a victory, then a more honourable defeat.

Yet more troubling structural trends persist. The state divisions show signs of decay. Following the 2024 council nomination debacle, the NSW division was placed under federal administration. Victorian Liberals have been out of office for 21 of the past 25 years. The Western Australian Labor Government holds the second-largest seat tally in the state’s history, surpassed only by its previous term. Most divisions lack a clear identity beyond reacting to the mistakes of the other side.

All these symptoms point to a central problem. The party is unsure of its identity. Neither the Nationalists nor the United Australia Party could overcome the hurdle that every mass volunteer party must face: how to survive without a sectional interest upon which to build. Labor’s branding derives from its core base, the labour movement, and all that follows from that foundation. The Liberal Party’s branding rests on its ideas, and if it has none, the Liberal brand withers.

Last year, while researching the Liberal Party’s founding, I came across a letter dated 12 November 1943. The federal election in August that year had reduced the number of United Australia Party MPs to fourteen out of the 75 members of the House of Representatives. The author was Frank Louat, a prominent Sydney barrister and member of the United Australia Party. He was writing to the Institute of Public Affairs in Victoria (then less than a year old) about efforts in New South Wales to form a new centre-right political party. A New South Wales ‘unity’ conference had resolved to establish a new party – the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), made up of UAP members and other centre-right groupings. ‘I have not found anywhere, outside the official sponsors of the new Party, anyone who takes it [the LDP] very seriously’, Louat wrote. ‘For example, such a typical conservative as my Bank Manager referred to it as “painting up the U.A.P.”, and said he was glad to note I hadn’t anything to do with it.’

This is what the disintegration of a political party looks like. Election defeats are one thing, but the failure of a party to attract members and personnel – so that even ‘a typical conservative’ is embarrassed to be associated with the party – is fatal. The reconstruction of centre-right politics after 1943 was an enormous task that required rebuilding from the ground up.

In 1944, Robert Menzies chose the liberal philosophy as the new party’s binding principle. Liberalism was the dominant force in the immediate postwar years, following the defeat of totalitarianism in Europe, the onset of the Cold War, and the legacy of wartime rationing and regulation. ‘If we are to build a new Party it must have a name which expresses our true and permanent point of view’ he wrote in a confidential memo in 1943. This was the genesis of the Liberal Party.

Menzies placed this philosophy front and centre of his political strategy. He embedded it not only in the party name but in his speeches. The closing line of his 1946 election campaign address declared: ‘Liberalism brings to you the only real hope of a free, friendly, prosperous, and growing Australia.’ He was not alone. John Carrick, the general secretary of the NSW Division, authored ‘The Liberal Way of progress’ in 1949. The party organisation, he said, should serve as ‘a trustee of the party philosophy’. Surviving letters, pamphlets, and paraphernalia in these early years reveal a level of idealism across the party membership that would surprise many today.

The Liberal ‘Broad Church’

In 2025, many more Liberals discuss the concept of their party as a broad church than talk about the religion the church is meant to preach. After an election defeat, the measuring tape always comes out. ‘Is the church broad enough?’ In 2022, Peter Dutton promised to once again make the Liberal Party a ‘broad church’, ensuring ‘we represent all Australians’. In 2025, the promise of a broad church is being made yet again.

During the Liberal Party’s first forty years, no one ever spoke about it as a ‘broad church’. The idea of the Liberal Party as a ‘broad church’ is relatively recent. Like most expressions in Australian politics, it has its origins in British culture. Setting aside the ‘broad church Anglicanism’ of the nineteenth century, by the 1970s the label was typically employed as a description of the British Labour Party. The British Labour prime minister Harold Wilson wrote in 1976, ‘A modern democratic party is a broad church; its parliamentary spectrum normally covers an even wider arc than the views of the half of the country whose support it claims.’ Wilson was thinking of his own party, of course, which accommodated the moderate social democrat and the unreconstructed Marxist.

A survey of how Australian newspapers used the term in the early 1980s shows that the ‘broad church’ label was applied to both the Labor and Liberal parties. As a description, ‘broad church’ conveyed little beyond the accommodation of diverse views and interests. As intra-party debate intensified between the Liberal ‘Wets’ and ‘Dries’, the idea of the party as a broad church became more attractive to those seeking to accommodate both sides.

By the mid-1990s, the Liberal Party had become the broad church party. The label was baked into the party’s identity and resonated further after One Nation’s rise. With minor adjustments, the term explained the divide between ‘liberals’, who favoured economic and social policy liberalisation, and ‘conservatives’, whose priorities centred on protecting national symbols, institutions, and culture. Where the ‘Wets’ and ‘Dries’ confined their arguments to economics, new debates extended to social issues, such as multiculturalism. In the 2010s, they encompassed environmental issues, such as climate change, and cultural issues, including identity politics. At some point the word ‘liberal’ disappeared altogether, and the divide became ‘conservatives’ versus ‘moderates’.

The ‘broad church’ mantle invites accommodation and encourages compromise, but it muddies the waters regarding the Liberal Party’s purpose. It emphasises representation and the defence of interests over the advocacy of core principles. It encourages party members to pick a side. It suggests an incompatibility between ‘liberalism’ and ‘conservatism’ in a way that is conceptually flawed. And it deceives some into believing the best policy approach involves striking a middle course between two traditions, the result of which is to satisfy no one, and annoy everyone.

The language of a ‘broad church’ papers over the cracks of a divided party when what the Liberals need is a reckoning. The concept emphasises the differences between party members rather than their shared objectives. Party members struggle to translate old principles into a clear program for contemporary challenges. They are unable to draw a line from which they cannot retreat. Intra-party debate over whether Menzies was a ‘liberal’ or a ‘conservative’ indicates a broken political compass. Neither answer is as significant as the debate itself – that Liberals struggle to interpret their own party’s founder.

The disappearance of a common liberal language in Australia is almost as striking as the fact that few Liberals seem to notice or care that it has happened. The current demarcation between ‘conservatives’ and ‘moderates’ – admittedly often imposed from the outside – is symptomatic of a party without a purpose. Both labels are unanchored by any core philosophy of government beyond their attitude toward change.

The most successful Liberal leaders understood the Australian liberal tradition. John Howard’s 1996 Robert Menzies Lecture remains one of the last and best attempts to articulate it, and it deserves revisiting for one reason alone: Howard chose to define a ‘broad church’ not as a collection of diverse interests requiring management, but as a synthesis of a political tradition.

At a minimum, this conceptualisation gives substance to the idea of a ‘broad church’. Howard shifted the focus away from the Liberal Party itself to ‘the broad church of Australian Liberalism’, describing ‘a liberal political tradition that encompassed both Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill.’ Howard said of Menzies:

A broad-based political philosophy. That was Howard’s attempt to synthesise two intellectual foundations: liberalism as a political philosophy, and conservatism as a disposition toward gradualism and respect for established institutions.

The Australian Liberal Tradition

The sad truth is that most Australian Liberals do not think about a ‘liberal tradition’. When any tradition is raised, it is typically a conservative one. Yet until the 1980s, few Liberals described the Liberal Party as ‘conservative’ – that was mostly left to Labor and political opponents in the media.

The rise of ‘conservativism’ as a positive label in Australian public debate represents one of recent history’s more interesting developments. It results, partly, from the cultural hegemony of American politics, where ‘liberalism’ has come to mean leftist politics, rather than freedom and dignity of the individual. Adding to this terminological infection, many Australian Liberals align themselves with Britain’s Conservative Party, a very different beast in a Britain still riven by social class.

At federation, Australian Liberal Protectionists and Free Traders fled from the conservative label. Instead, both sides argued vigorously over who represented the ‘true’ liberal party. Consider the following words of George Reid, the Free Trade Party leader:

This was the widely shared view in the nineteenth century. Australia was seen as one of humanity’s great liberal experiments, free and egalitarian, a pioneer in democracy, untainted by old-world hatreds and hierarchies. The nineteenth century Irish radical and former Victorian colonial premier Charles Gavan Duffy once described an Australian ‘conservative’ as someone who supported ‘only’ five out of six of the Chartist demands (universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, annual elections, equal sized constituencies, paid parliamentarians, and no property requirement to run for parliament – presumably with scepticism about annual parliaments). In Britain, Chartism was regarded as a radical movement. But in Australia a ‘conservative’ could embrace the liberalism of demands such as regular elections and the secret ballot.

The English conservative tradition was not absent in Australia, however. Australian liberals still offered caution to prevailing fashions or drastic change. They emphasised prudence and incremental progress. They believed that society can be wrong about things, but rarely foolish; that there is a deep rationality to social institutions that should be understood before they are meddled with. Such a sensibility is not inconsistent with liberalism. In 1900, the Australian Free Trader, William McMillan, described this approach as ‘Conservative Liberalism’. But it was still liberalism. And to the extent that conservatism is a disposition rather than a philosophy of government, Australian liberals were satisfied to internalise its wisdom within their own tradition. They recognised that Australians regarded capital-c Conservatism with an element of suspicion, associating it with reactionary politics and the entrenched inequality of Old Europe.

That is why Menzies chose to call his new party Liberal and not Conservative. ‘We took the name ‘Liberal’ because we were determined to be a progressive party’, he wrote in his memoir, ‘willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his rights, and his enterprise, and rejecting the Socialist panacea’.

To Menzies, the philosophy that most effectively opposed totalitarianism was liberalism. The policies that prioritised individual development over expanded state capacity were liberal policies. Menzies’ 1940s speeches resurrected liberal rhetoric last employed by Joseph Cook, the ‘Fusion’ Liberal party leader. In his 1913 election address, Cook said that liberalism.

A broad-based political philosophy. Cook synthesised the liberal idea that the individual is the primary unit of society, with the conservative disposition to evolve gradually and conserve what is best. That is the tradition which Menzies wanted to resurrect after the catastrophes of the Great War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. This is what he meant in October 1944 by a ‘revival in liberal thought.’

This faith has been so thoroughly lost that some on the centre-right talk of the Liberal drift ‘from founding conservative values’. These critiques are half correct; they are correct about the importance of values, but anachronistically refer to ‘conservative’ values. The drifting identification of the Liberal Party as a conservative force in politics has predictably coincided with the tendency of the Party to appear reactionary and unappealing to the electorate, lacking a coherent alternative programme of its own.

The Decline and Fall of a Common Liberal Language

To read Menzies’ Forgotten People speech today is to be struck by its moral vocabulary. In Menzies’s Australia, there are no stakeholders or ‘demographics’, but moral agents. Personal character is as much responsible for national growth as cost-benefit analysis; private morality is indelibly linked to social order. Public ethics is openly debated and grounded in shared religious and philosophical traditions. Concepts such as duty, virtue, thrift, and even a sense of spiritual purpose are central to this political language.

This is a language of values. Menzies’ rhetoric is pro-market, but not market-centred. He believes in the individual, but of the self-reliant and unselfish kind; responsible to others, and free to judge for himself or herself. These are the qualities, in Menzies’s mind, that make up the moral ecology of a liberal society.

Menzian liberalism was a post-war phenomenon with pre-war moral foundations. The story of the Liberal Party from the 1960s onwards is the decline of the social sources that gave the early Liberals their moral vocabulary – the church, the civic-republican ethos, and the ‘old’ middle-class values of thrift and independence – which have withered in a service-driven and knowledge-based secular society. In their place, new centres of moral authority have emerged: the expanded university sector, mass media, think tanks, and non-government organisations.

These new sources of social behaviours adopted a different public language, a technocratic and instrumental dialect that treats policy as a technical service rather than a moral project, and politics as a professionalised vocation that is just as data-driven, but also poll-driven. The Liberal Party adopted this idiom, but the new language cannot unite the party or address contemporary challenges. Once established to defend self-reliance, Liberal parliamentarians now find themselves arguing over decimal points on programs they would have once questioned the purpose of.

‘Conservatives’ seek to defend traditional moral concerns. ‘Moderates’ seek to court the new knowledge-class suburbs. Neither label supplies the broad, value-laden story that once united the shopkeeper and the barrister. This gets to the heart of the Liberal Party’s identity crisis.

Reviving a Common Liberal Language

Values make a difference. By themselves, they cannot solve technical policy problems, but they ground policy choices in a framework, making those choices easily communicable to the public.

So, what to do? In October 1944, Robert Menzies invited the leading centre-right figures of every state to Canberra and built a coalition of interests around a standard set of liberal values. Perhaps it is time for a renewal of vows; to meet in Canberra again, with a conference of every state Liberal leader and deputy leader present, their organisational leadership, and the federal leadership – with broadly equal representation of men and women – to renew the liberal cause in Australia.

The conference should agree on a statement of values and a platform that revitalises the policy efforts across every state and territory division. The party constitution should be considered and amended where necessary to encourage party participation and to strengthen the party organisation as a fighting force. It’s an opportunity for the federal leader to give a headland speech that focuses on the deep challenges confronting Australia, and to provide a vision that looks to the long term and that is grounded in liberal principles.

A revival of liberal thought is needed more than ever. Across the Western world, centre-right political parties are unable to confront the challenges of a growing post-industrial administrative state. Against an ageing population, Australia is rapidly becoming a ‘care and compliance’ economy, where human services drive job growth, but government rules and subsidies determine the direction of travel. The fastest-growing occupations in Australia are those related to subsidy-driven care, including disability, aged care, and childcare. Before 2008, job growth in the non-market sector broadly tracked that of the market sector. It’s now outpacing it – 83% to 23% since 2008.

With its overreliance on income tax, the government looks to young Australians to underwrite the system. Yet three in four adults believe young Australians will be worse off than their parents. The cohort born in the 1990s was the first in generations not to earn materially higher incomes than their predecessors. In the decade prior to the COVID pandemic, the average real disposable income of young Australians declined. Housing has never been more expensive. Education outcomes are stagnating. Taxes are going up. Productivity growth is among the worst in the developed world.

These are challenges that require a holistic and moral response that explains Australia’s drift towards stagnation. Neither ‘conservatism’ – which is reactionary and unappealing to a broad swathe of Australians – nor ‘moderation’, which offers only a half-hearted deceleration of drift, can give the Liberals a roadmap to success. Only liberalism, with its foundational moral belief in the individual, and its determination to empower the individual with choice, will generate the motivation, creativity and self-belief on which successful policies rely.

A broad church is only sustainable when its worshippers share a faith. However, over the last thirty years, that faith has splintered, and the concept of the ‘broad church’ has served little purpose. The first step to the recovery of liberalism is the rediscovery of liberal principles.