More than 20 years after he wrote that the Liberal Party has deserted it roots and become deeply conservative, Greg Barns argues it is well beyond time for a genuine liberal force to enter the fray.

In 2002 I left the Liberal Party, after being disendorsed as a candidate for the Tasmanian state election that year. A year later I wrote What’s Wrong with the Liberal Party?, which Cambridge University Press published. The argument was, in part, that the party’s name was a misnomer because it had become, under then leader and Prime Minister John Howard, deeply conservative. There was, I wrote, a gap in the political ideas marketplace for a genuine liberal force. It’s taken a while but maybe we are finally getting there.

Splashed around the media today is talk of Teals and centrists like ACT Senator David Pocock forming a new party. A political force that would capture votes from social and economic liberals who are dissatisfied with the increasingly One Nation lite Liberals and the often timid ALP.

Such a political party would do well. As I observed over two decades ago the traditional Liberal electorates in middle and higher socio economic areas - Kooyong in Melbourne, Warringah in Sydney, for example - would back candidates who, in that era, supported asylum seekers and wanted a dynamic,........

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