The Liberal Party of Australia has fallen on hard times as the party struggles to attract voters and weathers leadership uncertainty.

In his first press conference as leader in February 2026, Angus Taylor said that his party needed to “change or die”.

To try to modernise itself, the party announced a commission to gather ideas and build consensus for an organisational reform agenda.

In May 2026, the commission released a discussion paper and a survey, addressing issues of organisational hierarchy, representation and factionalism that have long plagued the party.

The scope of the commission – its willingness to engage with ideas that it has resisted for decades – is a reflection of the dire circumstances in which the party finds itself in mid-2026.

Our new research shows that it is the party’s lack of appetite for reform that has left it out of touch with voters and now in existential crisis.

Our recently published book (Volume 1 and Volume 2) on the Liberal Party casts a critical eye to understand the apparent decline of the party and its resultant electoral behavioural changes in the 21st century.

These changes offer clues about the Liberals’ malaise.

The current Liberal Party emerged as a response to a series fragile alliances of non-Labor parties in Australia in the early 20th century.

When Robert Menzies founded the modern Liberal Party in 1944, he sought to replicate the formalised branch structure of the Australian Labor Party.

However, Menzies wanted to keep a decentralised organisation so that the parliamentary party and leader could maintain significant power over the party’s policy direction.

The result was a strategically nimble parliamentary party, but one that had very little control over its state divisions.

For decades, this formula worked. The Liberals have governed Australia for two-thirds of the time since 1945. However, the party only engaged in the most minimal of reforms to its party........

© The New Daily