Comment

Arthur Sinodinos
How to rebuild the Coalition

The implosion over hate laws is a bad start to the Coalition’s new year and for supporters of good government.

The situation is existential, but the outcome is not preordained. Liberals and Nationals have agency to affect the outcome. History suggests they can succeed.

The electorate will listen to a party focused on the basics, bringing the government to account and keeping its shape in response to rampant third parties such as One Nation. The Coalition can offer a practical program of economic management and reform to expand opportunity, a strong national defence and solid middle-class values to re-create a property-owning culture.

The Coalition has faced and stared down these challenges before. The Liberal Party rose out of the ashes of the United Australia Party. Its future was questioned during the Hawke–Keating hegemony, when it lost five elections in a row. Yet it stormed back in 1996 and spent only six years in opposition before returning to government in 2013. It has again fallen on hard times but remains the most successful political grouping in modern Australia.

The recent upsurge in support for One Nation is creating a bandwagon effect that threatens the major party status of the Coalition parties. It is coming from disaffected Coalition supporters but there is a smattering of Labor voters, too. Support is concentrated among non-university educated voters and in rural and regional areas, as well as among some younger men. Immigration and crime are highlighted as issues, but the nub of it is about Australia’s identity and value systems. One Nation is doubling down on the culture wars. Disunity in the opposition reflects and is fuelling the flight to One Nation.

The Coalition should have nothing to fear from One Nation on immigration and identity issues. Secure borders and an orderly immigration program have long been staples of Coalition policy, most famously at the time of the MV Tampa in 2001. One Nation offers nothing new in terms of serious immigration policy but provides a home for those supporters who want the Coalition to go further, whatever that means. Former Liberal Party donors are funding One Nation to put pressure on the Coalition.

Nor does One Nation offer a unifying way through on the hate speech debate. The major parties have had to grapple with the complexities of balancing freedom of speech with deterring behaviours that put citizens at physical risk. One Nation doubled down on its themes of immigration and visa controls and took an absolutist approach to free speech. This is the difference between major parties that aspire to govern for the nation as a whole and minor parties that are interested in narrow, sectional agendas.

The National Party is feeling the heat from One Nation. Moving further to the right to neutralise that appeal is a natural response but unlikely to work longer term. Imitating One Nation only feeds the beast. Why go for the pale imitation when you can have the original?

The Nationals should not walk away from their history and longstanding identity. They are a party of government that can deliver in ways One Nation cannot. They have supported free trade and rational economic policies and reform while providing appropriate support for regional and rural communities.

One Nation is a party of grievance that preys on division and practises scapegoat politics. It is not organisationally strong and has regularly fallen apart as its political representation has increased. In the 1998 Queensland state election, One Nation won 11 seats and then promptly divided, retaining only three seats at the subsequent election. In the process, the non-Labor vote split three ways and Peter Beattie’s Labor Party achieved minority government, going on to win a landslide at the next election.

The Nationals will succeed by lancing the boil of opportunism and populism that drives One Nation. The late, great senator Ron Boswell is a role model of effective Nationals leadership. He successfully fought off One Nation in Queensland in the 2001 and 2004 federal elections. He fashioned policies to address the needs of the disaffected rural groups and small business owners that One Nation was targeting. He starved One Nation of preferences and had a message of moderation and inclusiveness that also appealed to urban constituencies in Queensland. He articulated a moral stance that distanced the Nationals from the politics of race or division. Today’s Nationals have a playbook to follow.

To win, the Coalition must build a big tent that straddles the sensible centre-right and the middle, pushing Labor further left. Our system of compulsory preferential voting and independent electoral commissions has strong centralising tendencies. Cranking up the outrage machine to galvanise voters works best in systems with voluntary voting. In our system it is likely to turn off less-committed or soft voters, particularly in an era of looser party affiliations. For these voters, solutions trump ideology. They are not taken in by sterile debates about “real” Australians – a common trope of populists who seek to divide Australians into “us” and “them”.

The admixture of pragmatism and principle has been a hallmark of the Liberals since Sir Robert Menzies brought disparate non-Labor groups together in the new Liberal Party in 1944. Menzies built a broad church of conservative and liberal strands. His choice of name for the new party was not an accident but the evocation of classical liberal themes of freedom and individuality, in contrast to the collectivist ethos of Labor, exemplified by it hanging on to a broad swathe of postwar economic controls, culminating in the attempt to nationalise the private banks.

Menzies was a social conservative but not a reactionary. He did not embrace a backward-looking conservatism at odds with human progress. The party was dedicated to preserving the best of the past while adapting to the future. He articulated solid, middle-class values and private ownership that gave everyone a stake in social progress. He was, in the British sense, a “one nation” conservative – a believer in the notion that the things that unite Australians are greater than those that divide. He believed the obligation of government was to bridge the social divide, strengthening the bonds between various sections of the community. He wanted to build a big tent.

There are parallels between modern culture wars and debates in Menzies’ time about values, morals and beliefs, but he had an ability to link such issues to the bread-and-butter, practical concerns of voters. He also had a regard for the conservation of national institutions that belied a narrow tribalism.

Social media is reinforcing modern tribalism, aided by algorithms that amplify outrage. There is a proliferation of misinformation and disinformation, including state-sponsored propaganda. Digitisation has Balkanised the electorate, allowing us to choose our news and our facts, reinforcing our preconceived ideas and positions. We cannot agree on the problems let alone the solutions. This creates echo chambers that are no substitute for listening to voter concerns.

These developments contribute to electoral volatility, which is at unprecedented levels. Recent polls have the vote for the non-major parties – that is, voters supporting parties other than Labor and the Liberal–National Coalition – at a historic high of 45-47 per cent. Labor secured a healthy majority at the last election on the back of a relatively low primary vote. Labor traditionally has benefited from tighter preference flows than the Coalition. History shows us the only beneficiary of a fragmented non-Labor vote is the Labor Party. This is not true for the Coalition.

Younger Australians are more left than previous generations, particularly young women, many of whom are turning Green. That trend is dissipating among young men, who are increasingly attracted to anti-establishment parties such as One Nation. These young men seek validation of their economic and cultural worth in the face of changing expectations of modern masculinity. What they have in common is an impatience for new answers, not slogans. Affordable housing and economic opportunity loom large in their concerns. The advent of AI and its impact on entry-level roles, including in the white-collar space, increases that anxiety.

Some young people are flirting with socialism, which is easy if you have never experienced it. In the recent New York mayoral race, the electorate voted in record numbers for the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. He attracted 82 per cent of women under 35 and 65 per cent of men under 35, a small subset of whom had voted for Trump in 2024. He offered voters desperate for new solutions radical but seemingly plausible suggestions to address cost-of-living and housing affordability concerns. Last year, Democrats across the United States won a slew of state and local races by focusing on bread-and-butter issues such as inflation and the cost of living, as well as change to create new economic opportunities.

Good policy firmly grounded in the concerns of voters is good politics. Building a big tent means treating all voters equally – whether they live in the bush or in the outer suburbs or the inner cities – and addressing their concerns. The Liberals must create a unified front bench and get on with the real job of opposition – how to become the next government.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 31, 2026 as "How to rebuild the Coalition".

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