This column isn’t directed at every reader of the increasingly august paper of review for Australia’s right, The Noticer. This is directed at those of you who are still in the Liberal Party. And you know who you are. You probably already screenshotted my tweet from last week where I laid this out more succinctly, I know you did because you forget those little WhatsApp groups of Young Liberals and staffers all get screenshotted and sent to me as well.
There’s no way to sugarcoat this or frame it in a more persuasive way. There’s no way to let you down softly, or socialise this concept gently. If you are one of the people of the right in this country still a member of, or providing administrative or operational labour to, the Liberal Party of Australia or any of its state branches – you need to leave. If you don’t, then you’re not on our team. You will never be on our team. Our country is changing, we’re in the middle of the biggest shift in conservative politics in this country since the Cold War. New battlelines are being drawn. New distinctions are being made. The entire political spectrum is shifting. And the Liberals aren’t on the right of it any more. Wherever the line is, it’s not near them.
I was originally going to make this a more flowery exhortation with some fun lore about my own time in the Party, why I left, where it’s heading, but minutes before sitting down at my desk Sussan Ley did a lengthy effort post on her views on the March For Australia this weekend where she offered Anthony Albanese her support to “repair our social cohesion, to strengthen what binds us, and to ensure that every Australian, no matter their background or faith, can feel safe, respected…” and I thought – we don’t have time. They’re moving past the point of no return rhetorically, no new polls or bigger marches are going to change their position.
I say this a lot. Politics is the square root of money, manpower and time. Three angles that have to add up to win. Money, even though it doesn’t seem like it now, grows on trees. Manpower, surprisingly easy to acquire with a modicum of charm and persuasion. But time – time is fixed. Time is a constant. There is only so much time. We are ticking down the minutes until 2028 and the last chance we have for a political solution to the growing social, cultural and economic crisis looming over our country.
You’re a 26-year-old political staffer in a shadow minister’s office. You keep your mouth shut in branch meetings because your girlfriend wants to run for a state upper house preselection next year. You follow my tweets obsessively. Your phone is full of memes and edits from Auspill’s Tiktok. You read Bronze Age Mindset during Covid and started going to the gym. You live in hope that one day the Liberals will be “based”. You convince yourself Hastie is the answer. I don’t have time to convince you anymore. You need to go.
You’re a 34-year-old lawyer. Your firm is reasonably conservative but you still enthusiastically participate in Pride Month morning teas. You’re a branch president now. You’ve been to a couple of Sydney Trads meetings, you’ve read the literature, you might even have snuck out with your flag on Sunday. But you’re hedging your bets. Maybe things will change, maybe the spirit of the Howard years will rise up like a ghost and shake the walls of the Party and you could get preselected yourself. I don’t have time to convince you about why that’s not true. You need to go.
You’re 45. You’ve worked for the Liberals for 25 years. So long you’re not even in a faction anymore. You haven’t paid membership dues in two terms, they just let you into any branch meeting now. Your politics, your ideological centre of gravity, subsumed by the singularity generated by the constant spinning of the Liberal machine. You don’t even know why you’re there anymore. You took a 100k pay cut after the last election loss. You got divorced twice, once while you were over the Nullarbor in a RAAF Dassault Falcon because your Minister forgot his briefcase and you had to bring it to her in Perth. You’re one of the greatest political strategic minds of your generation but I don’t have time to convince you anymore. You need to go.
Because there’s thousands of you. But there’s hundreds of thousands of 18-year-old kids out there who haven’t signed the membership form yet. If they know it at all they only know the history of Australian conservative politics in the abstract, as history. And they’re blank slates.
Their views are moulded by social media algorithms, so we can remould them with precision, without legacy opinions and learned narratives. With an investment of time, we can turn you into a supporter – but with the same investment – we can turn them into weapons. And there is only so much time. The time for convincing you is running out. If you’re not already convinced, maybe you never will be.
Ask yourself, if the movement for a New Right rolls on without you, if you keep having a buck each way on the outcome – and you lose, what are those kids going to think when you show up late? Do you think you’re going to walk back into a minister’s office in the coming regime? Do you think they’ll take your opinions, which are probably very valid, at all seriously when you waited so long to stand beside them?
In a way this is a fitting end for Australian conservatism – redundancy. For many it will be welcomed, many conservatives would relish the chance to be the lone voice in the wilderness, or rather, the ruins of legacy politics, “wither the global rules-based order” “wither… civility”.
For some of you, it’s redundancy quite literally. South Australian and Victorian staffers have elections next year. And no one will begrudge you waiting a little longer to get a decent pay day. But that’s really the outer limit of our patience.
When hundreds of thousands of your fellow Australians risked their livelihoods to march against immigration, the Liberals were at multicultural events, they were negotiating with Indian finance ministers, they were rubbing shoulders with refugee advocates and NGOs. They are not with us. There’s an argument to be made they never were, but it’s not even worth litigating anymore. The Liberals, as a conservative movement, are over. Some of you have reached out and asked, but what comes next, there’s nowhere to go. There’s never been a fixed destination. We’re all going up the river together, to call back to my last Noticer piece and its Apocalypse Now references. You need to decide if you’re in the boat, or on the shore. Maybe I’ll see you there at the end of the journey and ask you “Have you considered any real freedoms? Freedoms from the opinions of others? Even the opinions of yourself?”
I left the Liberals in 2019, and there’s less money, and less lunch, and less of that intangible feeling of being in control and at the centre of things. I miss some of the people, some of the types of people you’d encounter. I miss the clear victory conditions and the feeling of winning a battle. What I don’t miss is lying to myself. Not just about the policies, if you can call them that. You have to build up a crust of compromise around your own political psyche to stop the truth getting in. If you so much as clicked this link, and you’re still inside the Liberal beast – chances are you’re lying to yourself too.
You have nothing to lose, and only your soul to gain. And maybe along the way, we can save our country. If you know that, and choose to stay behind, maybe you belong there. But I’m an eternal optimist, and I believe at the bottom of my heart, I’m going to see a lot of you at the end of the river very soon.
John Macgowan is a former Liberal staffer, consultant, failed independent political candidate and right wing provocateur. Follow him on @john_macgowan on X.
The post You need to leave the Liberals – or you’re not on our team first appeared on The Noticer.
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