Change or die: how the Liberal Party’s long resistance to reform has left it fighting for life

The Liberal Party of Australia has fallen on hard times. The party has struggled to attract voters and has gone through 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 new research

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 organisation during this period.

After Malcolm Fraser’s defeat in 1983, the party ordered a major review – the Valder Report – which remained largely unimplemented.

In the 1990s, a decade of losses translated into only modest changes to the party’s organisation and relationship with its divisions. During the Howard government (1996-2007), there was talk that the party should take the opportunity to reform itself from a position of strength. But it never happened. After the defeat of the Howard government in 2007, the main change was the merger of the Liberal and National Parties in Queensland (LNP).

By contrast, during the same period the Labor Party has undergone several reform waves, all of which have centralised authority and created an incentive structure to help the party manage its state divisions and discipline its membership.

Modernisation and centralisation have typically come to mean less say for party members. While this can lead to negative outcomes for internal party democracy, it is a boon for party leaders who have to win elections in a compulsory voting system with preferential voting.

The Liberals never gave members the same scope to be involved in and influence policy as Labor did. Its methods for managing conflict typically empowered incumbent factions within state divisions rather than giving the federal party the tools to keep the state divisions aligned with its centrist and pragmatic footing, which was the key to its electoral dominance in the 20th century.

Why does this matter? Because it is directly related to the change in the party’s membership base and policy interests. State divisions have control over candidate selection for state and federal elections. Divisions are also responsible for managing party membership and the overall health of the party organisation.

Over time, this means that a narrowing, older, more partisan, less centrist and less metropolitan membership base has slowly shifted the Liberals out of the middle ground. The devastating electoral results in 2022 and 2025, attributed to a failure to connect with middle and metropolitan Australia, are a direct result of this slow process of a failure to modernise.

A drift away from traditional strengths?

This organisational drift has had an ideological consequence, too. Once described as an “election winning machine”, the Liberal Party now finds itself being consistently out-polled by One Nation, a party talked about for three decades but, until recently, ignored by most voters.

A hint about where the party has faltered may lie in its contemporary policy approach. The Liberal Party has traditionally been considered a pragmatic and ideologically flexible party, able to draw on a wider segment of society for its candidates than Labor.

Its traditional focus areas have been the economy, national security and the pragmatic and limited acceptance of some social democratic ideas about the welfare state. In recent years, however, the party seems to have become more enthusiastic in its support for issues that have often attracted the attention of smaller sections of the community.

Indeed, much has been made of the Liberals’ increasing focus on the culture wars, a sign of what political scientists would describe as an “issue competitive party”. This is when a party emphasises the issues it wants to dominate political debate, rather than focusing on the issues it think will help it win the election.

In practical terms, this means that the party has switched from office-seeking behaviour, aimed at capturing office, to policy-seeking behaviour, prioritising the elevation of specific issues over winning government. This trend has gathered pace since the end of the Howard government as more Liberal politicians have chosen to emphasise identity politics issues over the economic debate.

When the ‘broad church’ becomes too broad to manage

Historically, the Liberal Party has mostly successfully managed a diverse range of ideological forces on the right into a single purpose to win office. Today, there appear to be almost two Liberal parties. The first — spanning the moderate/left faction and the traditional fiscal conservative right — remains office-seeking.

This contrasts with an emerging group, located on the Liberals’ right wing and in the National Party, which is increasingly policy-seeking.

It is no surprise that we can observe changing patterns in how the party campaigns and who votes for it. The Liberal Party and its predecessors were founded to oppose organised Labor. It also intended to be a better friend to (small) business than Labor.

So the loss of “issue ownership” of the economy is not a minor setback but a threat to the party’s core purpose. If it is to remain a mainstream party of government, rather than a fringe player on the right, it will need to reclaim this mantle and rebuild an organisation that is both capable of, and interested in, doing so.

But how strong is the desire for reform within the party? For example, Senator James McGrath, chair of the commission, urged the party to take on women’s underrepresentation as a matter of winning office. Party leaders rejected gender quotas within a single day. If the party can’t sit with its hardest questions for longer than that, Taylor’s “change or die” ultimatum may soon have its answer.

Marija Taflaga receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the European Research Council.

Matteo Bonotti and Zareh Ghazarian do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.