A Future for the Centre-Right in Australia
15 October 2025
By: Centre For The Australian Way Of Life
By David Stevens
In the aftermath of another poor federal election result in 2025, the centre-right in Australia, as represented by the Liberal/National Coalition, finds itself with the lowest primary vote since the Second World War. Does this mean that Australia is now permanently a left-of-centre nation? And if not, what does the future hold for the centre-right political movement in Australia, which encompasses liberals, conservatives, and libertarians? In this essay I will discuss first what went wrong in 2025, and then what the future holds for the centre-right in Australia.
What Went Wrong
There are many similarities between the Coalition’s election loss in 2025 and its defeat in 2022.
In 2025 the Coalition’s campaign was poor and the Labor Party’s personal attacks against the Liberal leader, Peter Dutton were highly effective. The Liberal/National parties didn’t run a successful, equally potent, negative campaign against the ALP portraying the risks and damage of a prime minister from the Socialist Left faction of the Labor Party. The Coalition’s failure to do so is surprising, given the government’s poor performance from 2022 to 2025. During that time, Australia suffered the largest decline in household disposable income, a collapse in productivity that has taken productivity levels back a decade, and almost two years of consecutive negative GDP per capita growth, the longest-running decline on record. In addition there were multiple ‘crises’ – cost-of-living, housing, and energy. These ‘crises’ were all at the doing of government – high public spending causing inflation, growth-strangling regulation, mass immigration, perverse subsidies and market interventions.
In addition to a lacklustre campaign run by the Coalition, several external factors affected the result such as the politically-motivated interest rate cut by the Reserve Bank, the Trump global tariff shock and subsequent stock (and bond) market chaos. In the midst of all of this the Coalition presented no coherent economic plan for the future of the nation and according to opinion polls it was no longer regarded as a better economic manager than the Labor Party. For the Coalition to have lost its brand equity in this way was disastrous.
While Peter Dutton, the leader of the Coalition, has accepted responsibility for the campaign’s failures, as he should, he is not the only culprit. Many of his colleagues seem desperate to avoid any culpability for the Coalition’s disastrous tax policies and the limited policy offerings from the Coalition. Many shadow ministers failed to undertake the necessary work to develop policy. There is no one scapegoat.
Fundamentally though the failure of the centre-right in Australia is its failure to expose the Labor Party’s agenda for the moral, economic, and social failure that it is. This applies not only to the Liberal and National parties but also to the fringe centre-right parties such as the Libertarians (formerly the Liberal Democrats), Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Clive Palmer’s play parties, and various Christian-named parties. Australia’s leftward drift didn’t begin with the election of Anthony Albanese in 2022. It has been underway for most of the twenty-first century, notwithstanding nine years of a lacklustre (after its first year) Coalition government.
Democracy and Socialism
‘Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.’
Alexis de Tocqueville
The question of whether Australia is on a permanent path to the left is a fundamental question. The size, expanse, and influence of government today are at unprecedented levels. Government spending is now at least five percentage points of GDP higher than before the Global Financial Crisis. Federal government debt has gone from net zero dollars to in excess of $800 billion and well on the way past $1 trillion without a plan or pathway to halt the continued growth in government spending, taxation, and debt levels. Government regulation of the economy and livelihoods has never been greater – with the granting of excessive union privileges by Labor governments to its paymasters. This helps explain the decline in the country’s workforce productivity. The government has also stepped in to re-nationalise increasing parts of the economy, whether through intervention (regulatory or ownership) in electricity markets, gas markets, telecommunications, and infrastructure, as well as social services. The Labor government is now attempting to establish co-ownership of family homes.
The government’s role in the economy and livelihoods is at the greatest level since the Second World War. Beyond this, there is the intellectual influence of the left in Australia across many of the country’s key institutions. Be it through revisionism throughout the school curriculum, the appointment of activist judges to the judiciary, the virtually complete takeover of the university sector by left-wing academics, the arts and media, or the enlisting of various professionals and corporates via government procurement, subsidies, rules, or just plain intimidation, the scope of the state is expanding.
It is telling that as the Left has marched through the institutions, trust in those institutions has collapsed. According to the Edelman 2025 Trust Barometer, ‘Widespread grievance is eroding trust across the board’. The public increasingly distrusts the government, business, media, and non-government organisations. Yet at the same time, the public’s default response to a problem, let alone a crisis, is for the government to act – either through more laws and regulations, or spending and handouts. More government is perceived to be the answer to the problems the government has created. This approach, if unchallenged by the centre-right from both philosophical and practical perspectives, will become entrenched in the decades to come. An ever-growing government will eventually fail as a solution – just like the Soviet Union eventually collapsed and as the People’s Republic of China will fail at some point in the future. Only freedom and liberalism can generate the wealth, opportunity, prosperity and human flourishing that individuals desire. But in the meantime, the left can impoverish a nation and its people at the expense of a privileged elite. It is worth remembering that authoritarian rule by the few over the many has been the natural form of government for much of human history. Our concept of liberal democracy may well be a short-term experiment, like democracy in ancient Athens. Despite our relatively young years as a nation, Australia is the sixth-longest-standing continuous democracy in the world. Ronald Reagan was correct:
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend sunset years telling our children and children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
The growth in government has not made Australia more productive or more competitive. Nor has bigger government made people happier or more optimistic about the future. The World Competitiveness Rankings by the International Institute for Management reveal Australia’s decline from among the five most productive countries in the early 2000s (when Australia’s reform agenda started to peter out) to the eighteenth most productive in 2025. According to the Global Happiness Report by Gallup, Australia’s happiness has drifted downwards (in both relative and absolute terms) over the past 15 years. The Edelman Trust Barometer for 2025 revealed that only 17% of Australians believe the next generation will be better off.
Robert Menzies, in one of his final comments in public office in 1967, stated, ‘the great issue to which liberalism must direct itself is socialism’. Now, more than ever, countering socialism with a conservative-liberal alternative is paramount.
An Optimistic Vision for the Future
What does an optimistic vision for Australia look like? Without a view as to where the country should go it is difficult for a political movement to have any true purpose. Leading Coalition figures, such as John Howard, Tony Abbott, John Anderson, Peter Costello, David Kemp, and Alexander Downer, have all noted the lack of core values underpinning the Coalition’s election proposals in both 2022 and 2025.
In my 2023 book, Dignity & Prosperity – The Future of Liberal Australia, the contributors and I attempted to present some of the fundamental principles and policies that should underpin the future centre-right and that have been lacking in recent times. Ultimately, the future political success of the centre-right (by definition led by a Liberal/National Coalition, as the only parties capable of forming a stable centre-right federal government) depends on presenting a values-driven policy proposition for a more optimistic and positive liberal future for Australia.
It is worth understanding that around half of all voting Australians do not have any recollection of what good government under a centre-right government is like. Since the Howard government was defeated, half the voting public are either new immigrants or were not old enough to vote in 2007. While we may draw on the past for political inspiration and philosophical direction, we must also address the present and focus on the future. In Dignity & Prosperity I concluded:
Liberalism has been the best approach for promoting prosperity and equal dignity for all Australians. A classical liberal economic and cultural agenda that focuses on the individual versus the collective, the family versus the state, and the small enterprises versus entrenched big unions and big businesses, might just be the formula for a successful liberal renaissance.
John Howard is oft to say that politics is a ‘battle of ideas’. What is the current battle of ideas for the centre-right versus the left? The core fundamental belief of the centre-right should be to promote, facilitate, and enrich human flourishing. This means that prosperity and dignity should be at the foundation of the principles and policies that the centre-right seeks to design, develop, advocate and prosecute (and then implement) to the Australian public in the years ahead. For these are not just about utilitarian outcomes, they are fundamentally moral questions about designs over the nature of the relationship between the individual and the state, between the fundamentals of choice versus coercion, and at the very heart of the ethics of what it is to be free rather than enslaved to others. Therefore, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians need to take on the left and their often sanctimonious language, and speak proudly in terms of the ethical and moral considerations that are at the heart of liberty and freedom. For the subjugation of individual choice and responsibility – the very denial of the pursuit of happiness – ultimately impoverishes people, not just economically or culturally, but spiritually and in their very well-being.
Having established the need for virtue- and values-based policies to be at the heart of the centre-right’s ideas for the future of Australia, we can now turn to those areas of current policy that are failing Australians and are inconsistent with our virtues and values. A few areas immediately come to mind.
To start with, the Albanese government’s approach to industrial relations, and in particular, its attempt to eliminate individual contractors and re-regulate the labour market, appears to be primarily aimed at entrenching union power at the expense of higher productivity for enterprises, as well as lower wages and less flexible workplace arrangements for workers. The mandating of retirement savings into union-dominated superannuation funds. The mandating of renewable energy targets and the pursuit of net-zero (anthropocentric) emissions. The grotesque use of taxpayer money to pick winners and prop up inefficient ‘businesses’ and the waste of taxpayer funds to support ineffective, and politically motivated programmes. Examples of these include the out-of-control expenditure of the deeply flawed NDIS, subsidies for renewable energy projects (including the necessary poles and wires to connect them to the network), the NBN, government-mandated and funded pay rises for various ‘care’ sector providers – on the condition that the workforce is unionised.
Add the incentive-sapping excessive regulation that is now imposed on small and medium sized businesses including the veritable list of director’s responsibilities, none of which seem to apply to leaders in the public sector or union movement, the ideologically driven national curriculum, the roll out of identity politics, and the unjustifiably high remuneration of the bloated and growing senior public services (including university administrations) and government authorities. There is no reason why the head of government departments in Australia should be paid three to four times more than their counterparts in the United States or Britain. There is a veritable trove of areas where alternative ideas can be propagated.
As Margaret Thatcher famously said, ‘the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.’ Accordingly, if the centre-right is to put forward an alternative, it must make the case that spending other people’s money on everything has to stop because the money has to come from somewhere – either from other people through taxation or debt borrowings, for which future generations will pay. If ever there is an issue that young people in Australia should be concerned about it is government debt. As the population ages, with a smaller proportion of people in the workforce, it will be those young people who will bear an enormous burden in the form of higher taxes for this generation’s profligate spending and borrowing.
From a practical perspective, the Coalition can learn from the approaches of its two greatest leaders, Robert Menzies and John Howard, and look to how they invoked underlying philosophies and principles to develop time- and context-appropriate policies that won over the broad, aspirational middle class and advocated for an optimistic national future. Menzies referred to the key constituencies of ‘the forgotten people’: salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers, and so on. He described this middle class as, for the most part, unorganised and unselfconscious, and not rich enough to have individual power. Howard had, what the media described as his ‘battlers’, but in reality, he sought to develop policies for four key constituencies of the middle class, namely: families (with children), small businesses, retirees, and regional and rural communities. It would be fair to say that, for the last few elections at least, the Coalition has failed to adequately develop and advocate distinctive policies consistent with its values for these constituencies.
At the heart of modern policies for these constituencies is the necessity to provide: choice, opportunity, a low level of taxation and regulation, the necessary infrastructure (social and physical and legal), a fiscally responsible safety net for hard times, a safe and secure environment in which they can thrive and pursue their happiness, a respect for everyone’s human dignity and an appreciation of the inspiring heritage and history from which come the current generation’s benefits. This needs to be coupled with an acknowledgement that with freedom comes responsibility. Individuals, families, enterprises and communities need to accept a greater role and responsibility for their actions.
What might some of these policies look like? Pro-family policies on taxation, energy, and housing. To start, let’s have a single definition of family income used for all tax and benefits purposes – simple, fair, certain, and without the need for thousands of bureaucrats to administer over a dozen different definitions of ‘income’. The combined family income would be the basis for taxation and receipt of benefits. Families would receive tax benefits for each dependent child – as is used in many overseas tax regimes. If the costs of childcare are to be subsidised by taxpayers, it should be in the form of tax deductions for childcare expenses rather than through direct subsidies to providers. The tax reform advocated by the Coalition must at a minimum include support for the indexation of tax thresholds, as is done in many other countries, to stop increasing average and marginal individual tax rates and act as a check on revenue growth.
There is also the potential to develop northern Australia, so more generous Zone Tax Rebates for living away from the large metropolitan cities and the creation of (tax and customs) Free Trade Zones across the north.
A lower tax regime to encourage and reward (for the greater risk) family enterprise should be accompanied by a renewed workplace relations reform agenda that encompasses a single minimum wage and standards (phasing out complex awards), ease of hire and fire provisions, and greater use of flexible, higher wage, productivity enhancing, individual and enterprise agreements.
The current affordability crises in energy and housing are the direct result of failed government policies of excessive (and counter-productive) interference in these markets. Lower costs for both businesses and households are crucial for them to flourish. Removing subsidies from renewables, lifting the ban on nuclear power, and fast-tracking approvals for new coal and gas projects are policies the Coalition must pursue.
Families should have access to their superannuation to allow them to buy their own home. Owning one’s own family home provides a greater stake in the future, a nurturing environment to raise children and grow old, and is far superior to support family formation than the promise of a caravan, boat, or overseas holiday when one retires at in thirty years. Planning and building codes should be reformed to reduce the cost of housing construction, and the rights of owners should take precedence over those of bureaucrats or neighbours. Private builders and subcontractors in the residential construction industry must be defended against ensnarement from militant building unions.
For retirees, there should be greater flexibility and choice to continue working and saving without incurring onerous financial or reporting penalties in superannuation or pensions. Respect for the continued ownership of their family home and facilitating their stay in that home for as long as physically possible avoids (or at least delays) institutional care, allowing older Australians greater personal dignity and independence, and it also saves the taxpayer money.
Ideas and Leadership
Success in politics is a combination of both ideas and leadership. Up to now this essay has discussed ideas. Now I will briefly cover the crucial ingredient – leadership. Henry Kissinger described leadership as the combination of ‘courage and conviction’. Winston Churchill said, ‘courage is rightly considered the foremost of virtues, for upon it, all others depend.’
Australia has indeed been fortunate in the post-war period to have had two outstanding centre-right leaders in Robert Menzies and John Howard, who were both ably supported by talented cabinet ministers. Menzies and Howard both demonstrated a commitment to ideas and a willingness to lead. As did Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who led governments and movements that left an indelible mark on the history and direction (for some time) of their nations and indeed the world.
Unfortunately, the major centre-right political parties in Australia have come to be dominated by factionally aligned self-serving careerists, who lack life and professional experience. In a series of interviews available on YouTube, I conducted for Dignity & Prosperity, John Howard, John Anderson, and Tony Abbott all lamented the rise of careerists – or as John Howard describes it, ‘the preferment co-operative’. It is imperative that the centre-right attract better-calibre candidates from all walks of life, who can become future leaders, cabinet ministers, thinkers, advocates, and policy reformers in the parliamentary ranks. Candidates must be driven by a genuine sense of public service rather than an ambition for self-enrichment or a comfortable career.
All is Not Lost – Yet
At the 2025 federal election centre-right parties received approximately 43% of first preference votes, and centre-left parties and left-leaning independents (including the Teals) received approximately 53% of first preference votes. The Labor Party gained 2.4 million distributed preference votes, compared to 1.6 million preference votes for the Coalition. With a first preference vote of approximately 35% the Labor Party won 94 out of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives. The ALP received close to its lowest-ever primary vote in the 2025 and 2022 federal elections and yet won a majority of seats on both occasions. Yet for all this, it is also worth remembering that in 2004 when John Howard had a large increase in his majority (to a similar seat count to what Labor now has) at his then fourth election victory, it was only three years later that Labor under Kevin Rudd won in 2007. However, winning elections is not the end in itself. It is merely a means to what should be the goal – to deliver a better future for Australians.
Returning to the factors that underpin political success and good government, there are two major challenges for the centre-right if it is to defeat the socialist left and the current Federal government. Winning elections is not the same as delivering good government. To succeed, the centre-right not only needs to defeat Labor at the polls it must but also win their hearts and minds of the electorate to deliver an alternative direction for the country. It is this latter task that is the most difficult.
The centre-right must converge around a core set of virtues and values and then formulate policy ideas based on these values. The various parties of the centre-right must exchange preferences with each other. The centre-right must also identify, select, and promote the talent necessary to provide the leadership required not only to win, but to deliver the requisite change in direction. The Coalition’s current personnel deficit is as great as the policy deficit.
Unless, and until, the centre-right in Australia overcomes its lack of principles, policies and personnel, it will remain irrelevant and incapable of halting (and then reversing) the drift to the left of our country.
This article is from Volume 1 of Essays for Australia 2025 and is written by David Stevens.
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