There was a plea from James Allan in the magazine for figures such as Tony Abbott to speak out and assist the floundering Liberal Party.

But my Lord there’s plenty of reason to hear from John Howard and Tony Abbott. And I don’t mean their mouthing the hackneyed, threadbare utterings that ‘the Libs need to pull together’ and that ‘everyone should come together’.

His article begins with the problem of treating political parties as beloved sports teams which must be supported and protected, even when they lose.

And James Allan is right.

There are plenty of party faithful who would prefer to talk about loyalty and unity instead of ideas and principles.

Parties operate under the sunk-cost facility – accumulating blood, sweat, money, tears, and failed dreams until they are left slouched at the corner of the room like a rat-nibbled teddy bear.

And if this were a discussion about a one-off loss or a battle well fought against a skilled Labor government, the loyalists might have a point. Rally, regroup, and sharpen the pitchforks. In the case of a sustained and total collapse of Liberal Party ideology, however, it is Mr Allan who has the point.

There is considerable friction between those trying to save conservatism as a movement and the others who want to save the Liberals as a party. It is not yet clear if those goals are compatible. We all hope they are, but if they are not, it is the party that must lose.

Let us discuss the saving of conservatism.

To follow Mr Allan’s use of sports, nations are the true equivalent of a sports team to be supported at all costs. Sport is essentially a placeholder for war in which humans throw balls at each other instead of spears. (Hence the existence of the modern Olympics and why nations get themselves kicked out or have their flags taken off them when they start armed conflicts.)

A person must protect their country to the last man or the game of civilisation is over.

Political parties… No. They are not sports teams so much as democratic mechanisms. When they break, they are no longer useful.

They break all the time.

A political party is not a club, a career, or an emotional crutch – it is a device to collate political ideas around elected representatives who write and pass policy which builds the legal, social, and cultural framework of a country. The personalities and party names that contribute to this project change over the centuries. Some are grand, but most are forgotten.

Legends such as Howard, Hawke, Whitlam, Hughes, Lyons, Menzies, and Barton assist to re-group parties around half-forgotten lessons but ultimately, their memories will rot away as have the old jetties in Australia’s rivers where the cream boats moored.

The one thing that endures, through tide and time, is the separation of politics between control and freedom. Far-Left and Far-Right. Communism and Anarchy. The paranoia of a government that thinks it knows best, and the desperation of its people to create, engineer, and survive. That old Western spirit that outright refuses to live as a ward of the state while ever there is hope for personal enterprise.

Left and right are overarching principles. They do not die even if one side holds power and the other is forbidden. In the Westminster system, major parties occupy the peaks of left and right (the duopoly) and minor parties scatter across the gaps attempting to climb their way up one voter at a time.

Those who say there is no such thing as left and right are incorrect. They are observing the two major parties merging, listing Australia’s political landscape to one side, but the divide itself remains, as true as it always was, with one peak unoccupied and up for grabs.

When a major party slides off its popular mountain like this, it triggers a minor party race to the top.

If a political party neglects the ideology that underpins its reason to exist, it must either be beaten back into shape, purged, renamed, or abandoned. Especially if the leadership are to blame. What the modern Liberals are doing, visually, is sliding off their conservative peak and trying to climb up onto Labor’s mountain which is well and truly crowded.

And they really don’t want you to point that out. It’s why they refuse to discuss left-vs-right. Doing so makes their folly particularly obvious.

The decline of a major party is difficult to accept. People attach part of their personality to political parties, even sensible and stoic conservatives who feign disinterest in the culture wars. A party is an identity, like race, sex, sexual preference, religion, and pronouns(?).

When people hear criticism of a party, they often feel as if that is directed toward them as well. It is not. We are in a situation where the majority of voices praising the Liberals are the people who want to see conservatism destroyed. They are cheering our demise and yet the leadership mistakes this noise as an indication they are headed in the right direction.

Sentiment and nostalgia are inevitable human qualities, but ultimately that is not what political parties are for.

Tony Abbott acknowledges this in his recent article in The Australian where he notes that the modern Liberals were formed from the ashes of the United Australia Party in 1943. He then goes on to observe a warning:

‘…if the right lessons are not learnt the party could fade into irrelevance, a fate that now threatens an even more storied political movement: the world’s oldest and hitherto most successful political party, the British Conservatives.’

Nigel Farage’s Reform is well on its way to challenging the Tories, so much so that he may very well bargain for Prime Minister if the two parties are able to hitch themselves together for a coalition against Labour at the next election. Stranger things have happened. The ruckus on Friday with Reform Chairman Zia Yusuf stepping aside after a row about a burka ban is probably a net benefit to the Farage crusade against Woke. Farage is almost at the top of his right-wing hill and he is busy converting the Tory MPs defending the battleground. It is more efficient to convert rather than replace to swell the Reform ranks in the space between elections.

The only reason the Liberals are not in a similar situation to the Tories is purely a lack of Faragian personality. Sussan Ley must be thanking her lucky stars rivals like that are a once-in-a-generation event.

But to return to the birth of the Menzies-era Liberal Party, it was created by a single-minded personality following a series of social catastrophes that left existing political parties unable to properly articulate the new message. It is a response to hopeless disunity.

And it was a process far messier than the legend of Menzies would have us believe.

Still, it is worth listening to what Menzies had to say when he was of the belief that the United Australia Party had outlived its use. See if anything sounds familiar.

The name United Australia Party has fallen into complete disregard. It no longer means anything.

Many of my own strongest supporters in my own electorate decline to have anything to do with the party as such.

If we are to build a new party, it must have a name which expresses our true and permanent point of view … our side of politics should stand for liberal democracy. After all, this is one of the natural classifications of political thought, fascist, communist, and socialist being among others.

This is not even the first Liberal Party. Menzies revived the 1901-1916 Liberal Party, founded by Deakin, Cook, Reid, and Forrest over a century ago. It was known as a fusion of parties and ideologies whose primary objective was to oppose Labor and its multitude of sins.

All over the Western world I have noticed that union and communist movements tend to be ideologically stable. Destructive, sure, but they know what they are.

Conservatism and liberalism are ideas that phoenix to survive.

Perhaps it is because political power gravitates toward control and so right-leaning parties must have their skin shed… I feel it very strongly as an observation of the system itself and if that is true, no centre-right party can endure forever in anything other than a name.

There have been many wasted column inches discussing what the Liberal Party values are and how they must adapt to modern Australia.

Upon returning to history it is clear that the single purpose of the Liberal Party, in all of its lifetimes, is to oppose Labor’s communism.

If it cannot perform that task, it is not the Liberal Party.

We may not have experienced global war or a great depression, but we have been enduring a war of attrition against stealthy communism and a fake climate apocalypse – believed by no one and yet financed by everyone.

There is no Mao scaffolding upon which our teachers have been slaughtered, but our cultural history has been tossed on the bonfire by a jealous and deeply inferior collectivist ideology. Similarly, our economy has been devoured by the war machine of Net Zero but, unlike a geopolitical foe, there can be no victory against a spectre comprised of dogma and corruption except bankruptcy. Net Zero is a creature that exists within the veneer of ink used to sign the Treasury away.

The political structure of this country also faces a more grim and perhaps more difficult problem … that of consolidated lies.

Climate Change and its policy offspring, Net Zero, are well-known to be the cause of most economic and social issues. Even mass migration has been justified both as a human rights issue for climate refugees and an economic one, to artificially prop up the budget drained by its green sickness.

Voters who have been woken up to this scam by the lightness of their wallets can see the answer: ditch Net Zero.

You would be hard-pressed to find a serious politician prepared to commit to the original hellfire version of the climate narrative. They prefer a vague fear about statistical variations in the weather.

Considering Net Zero is Labor’s critical weakness, conservative voters everywhere are shouting at the Liberals to wage war on Net Zero.

In this leading article this week, Editor-in-Chief Rowan Dean urges:

Not a half-baked, timid, a bit-of-this and a bit-of-that emissions-cutting nonsense, but rather, a full-throated, passionate, antagonistic and aggressive no-holds-barred opposition to the ruinous climate change and Net Zero idiocy.

It is very sensible and good advice, if your goal is to save Australia.

And yet the Liberal Party cannot do this without admitting that either it was misled (which it implies it is stupid) or that it knowingly lied. People within the orbit and gravitational influence of the party stand to lose a lot of money.

Saving the nation from politicians will create powerful enemies on both sides of the bed.

And so we are stuck in a position where words such as ‘modern’ are used to airbrush over a trembling fault line.

Conservatism has one purpose. Oppose Labor and its communist tendencies. All Liberal policies and dialogue must devote itself to this cause or it we can no longer make the argument for its preservation.

The Liberal Party is not a broach church. That was political spin to save one Prime Minister’s leadership a lifetime ago.

It is a focused movement, fundamentally of the Right, and utterly devoted to the destruction of collectivism and the leaders who promote it.

Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.