Eighty-one years ago yesterday, Robert Menzies founded the Liberal Party. Today, it faces the most severe crisis in its history. This is not simply some garden variety post-election soul-searching of the defeated. This is a party figuring out whether it can go on. A party where its members are so plainly canvassing the possibility of the splitting permanently that one of its rising stars, finance spokesman James Paterson, was moved this week to deliver a major speech imploring his colleagues not to divorce one another. Its leader Sussan Ley on Thursday declared the party had strayed from its foundational values and issued a cry for the party to return to them.

This is not the consequence of one bad night in March. This year’s election was not a happening, but a culmination. In the narrow sense, it was a sequel to the nightmare of 2022, when the problem was not so much the size of the defeat (Labor won a tiny majority) as the nature of it. The Liberals watched as the teals swept away wealthy inner-city seats that were once unlosable, in the process vanquishing the Liberal Party’s most senior liberally minded politicians. This year’s election finished that job, vanquishing the Liberals from the cities almost entirely.

Illustration by Simon Letch

But in the broader sense, 2025 was decades in the making. If the Liberal Party’s problems are now existential, it is because the very conditions that made it viable, indeed dominant, for so long have evaporated. Some of this is a function of the Liberal Party’s contradictions. But some of it is a result of its successes, too.

Menzies created the party........

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