Liberal party hardliners are on the back foot – but while Tony Abbott is around, the right will fight

The Guardian

18-07-2025

Four days on from the Liberal party's worst federal election defeat in its 80-year history, Tony Abbott sought to explain the wreckage. Peter Dutton, Abbott argued, put the Coalition in the 'box seat' to beat Labor with his opposition to the Indigenous voice to parliament, nuclear power ambitions, refusal to stand in front of the Aboriginal flag and warnings about 'indoctrination' in schools. That was at the end of 2024. Then something changed.
'This year, really from January on, we failed to pick fights,' the former Liberal prime minister told a podcast by the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), the rightwing thinktank of which he is a distinguished fellow.
'And when we did pick fights on, for argument's sake, trying to get public servants back into the office, as soon as we came under a bit of pressure, we pulled back. We kind of lost our mojo a bit; we lost direction a bit.'
The explanation from Abbott – who was close to Dutton – reflected a popular counter-narrative pushed by hardline conservatives in the election postmortem. The Coalition didn't lose, and lose badly, because Dutton had dragged it too far to the right, as most commentators concluded.
It lost, Abbott was suggesting, because Dutton pulled back.
As Sussan Ley tries to reposition the Liberals to the political centre in response to Dutton's catastrophic defeat, the new leader will face resistance from conservatives, inside and outside the party, who are adamant it must remain on the right.
This latest chapter in the party's enduring internal conflict is expected to flare during debates over whether to dump the target of net zero emissions by 2050, adopt gender quotas and embrace or shun culture wars.
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Conversations with Liberal MPs and insiders suggest that more than six years after losing his seat in federal parliament, Abbott remains arguably the most powerful conservative in Australian politics. One senior Liberal source said Abbott was as influential as he has been since he was dumped as prime minister in 2015.
The 67-year-old is entrenched in the ecosystem of rightwing media, thinktanks and lobby groups that shape conservative thinking. He sits on the board in charge of Fox News (Donald Trump's favoured cable news channel), appears regularly on Sky News, often with his former chief-of-staff Peta Credlin, and has ties to the IPA and the rightwing campaign group Advance.
Overseas, Abbott advises the rightwing political forum Alliance for Responsible Citizenship and is a senior visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, a Hungary-based thinktank supportive of the country's far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
In a revealing insight into his worldview, Abbott used a recent speech to the Hungarian Conservative Political Action Conference to urge western countries to have the 'cultural self-confidence' to resist the 'the politics of climate and identity' and the 'false doctrine of multiculturalism'.
One Liberal source suggested Abbott's endgame was to transform the Liberals – the supposed 'broad church' accomodating moderates and conservatives – into a rightwing party.
'He [Abbott] wants to be the major power behind the throne. He's not driven by money; he's driven by power,' a Liberal source said.
Abbott helped orchestrate Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's post-election defection from the Nationals to the Liberals to run as Angus Taylor's deputy, two sources familiar with the covert plot confirmed. He actively campaigned for fellow anti-voice campaigner Warren Mundine in his preselection tilt for Bradfield. He publicly put pressure on Ley to extend the Dutton-backed intervention into the troubled NSW Liberal division.
The three cases are evidence of Abbott as an active player internally. But they are instructive for another reason: in each, he failed to achieve his ultimate outcome.
The Taylor-Price leadership team never materialised while Mundine lost preselection in Bradfield to Gisele Kapterian. The NSW intervention was ultimately extended but in a vastly different form after Ley secured support for an all-NSW administrative committee to run the branch, effectively sacking the two controversial Victorian figures installed under Dutton with Abbott's support.
An 11th-hour push from right faction powerbrokers to secure Abbott a seat on the new committee failed.
Some Liberals view the sequence of setbacks, each at the hands of Ley and her allies, as signs of the waning influence of Abbott and the conservatives over the party.
Others aren't so sure.
Under Dutton, the conservatives ruled the Liberal party in Canberra. After the teal independents all but wiped out the Liberal moderates in 2022 and Scott Morrison's exit diminished the centre-right group that had expanded around him, Dutton and the right faction assumed both numerical and ideological control of the federal party.
Dutton's dramatic downfall at the 3 May federal election set in train a realignment of the internal power dynamics. With more than 20 members, the right is still clearly the largest faction in the 52-member federal Liberal party room.
Yet it was unable to install Taylor as Dutton's successor after surviving moderates, centre-right and unaligned MPs combined to make Ley the federal party's first female leader.
Taylor and senior rightwingers Michaelia Cash, James Paterson and Andrew Hastie have retained senior roles, but other conservatives were dumped or demoted, including Sarah Henderson, Claire Chandler, Tony Pasin and Price, who abandoned plans to run for deputy leader after Taylor lost the ballot.
The right was surprised and concerned at how far Ley went in rewarding backers and punishing internal rivals in her shadow ministry, particularly given she won the leadership by just 29 votes to 25.
'She overextended in the reshuffle and that could come back to haunt her,' one Liberal insider says.
For now, senior conservatives are supporting Ley after a tumultuous first two months in the role, which included navigating the brief split with the Nationals while grieving over her mother's death.
Taylor, now the shadow defence minister, has not been agitating behind the scenes and has been dissuading others from doing so, sources say.
The open hostilities in the run-up to the leadership vote, which included the distribution of a scorecard mocking Ley's closeness to centre-right numbers man Alex Hawke, her past support for Palestine and her alleged faith in 'numerology', have stopped.
There is a widely held view among Liberal MPs that Ley's fledging leadership is not under threat and undermining her serves no one's interest.
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Conservatives are wary, though, of the new leader's early, deliberate steps to distance herself from Dutton, such as opening her speech to the National Press Club with an acknowledgment of country to traditional owners.
'[Sussan] is a completely different leader to Dutton and that is a good thing,' a senior Liberal source says.
'She does need to be careful in navigating her way. Her acknowledgment to country at the Press Club and standing in front of three flags during her press conference did not go down well with the base.
'The Liberal party is the main centre-right party in Australia and we cannot forget that. If we do, we will lose our base.'
The right secured a small win ahead of parliament's return, with the faction's pick, Slade Brockman, defeating the Ley-backed candidate, Andrew McLachlan, in an internal ballot for the role of deputy Senate president.
Liberal MPs acknowledge conflict is inevitable and even necessary after internal contest was sacrificed for discipline under Dutton, a trade-off many MPs blame for the threadbare agenda it offered on 3 May.
But some fights are expected to extend well beyond the bounds of robust debate, descending instead into open political warfare.
'Everyone will behave themselves in the short term, but whenever something comes up, people will seek to use that to litigate their personal grievances,' one MP said.
'Things like net zero, for example, will really ramp up.'
Climate change is ground zero for the Liberal party's internecine conflicts. The latest battle – whether to abandon a commitment to net zero emissions by 2050 – shapes as a defining contest for Ley's leadership and the future of the Liberal-National Coalition.
The hard-won but fragile consensus that allowed Morrison to sign up the Coalition to the emissions target in 2021 has fractured, exposing deep divisions over what has become a totemic issue for the political right.
Ley immediately put net zero up for debate after agreeing to review the opposition's entire policy agenda.
The shadow energy minister, Dan Tehan, is leading an internal policy working group that will report to Ley and the Nationals leader, David Littleproud. The Nationals will conduct a separate review, to be jointly led by parliament's loudest net zero critic, Matt Canavan.
Liberal MPs are not optimistic a consensus position can be achieved as they brace for a divisive and damaging brawl.
'I'm a bit worried about it,' one says. 'The issue was settled at enormous cost [under Morrison]. No person in their right mind should open it up again.'
One option discussed among some Liberal MPs would involve abandoning 2030 and 2035 targets – a position that would be incompatible with the Paris agreement – but retaining the 2050 ambition.
Even that compromise would struggle to placate a growing number of sceptical colleagues, who believe net zero proponents have failed to explain the case for climate targets to rightwing voters.
'The mods say we need net zero to win,' one such MP says. 'That is the most facile, self-serving reason – it's exactly why people hate politicians.'
Pressure to dump net zero is also coming from the party's state branches and grassroots members.
Alex Antic's SA Liberal division, Price's NT Country Liberal party and the NSW Nationals division have all passed motions since the federal election rejecting net zero.
The branch members, who are responsible for selecting election candidates, tend to skew older and more conservative than the average Liberal supporter.
They tend to get their news and opinions from Sky News, Liberals say, making the conservative figures who appear on the channel's evening programs hugely influential over the 'base'.
Figures such as Tony Abbott.