What’s in a name?

How do you reclaim the party of liberalism when the true liberals are long gone?

It’s long since become banal to hear moderate liberals invoke the name of Robert Menzies.

And yet listening to Liberal Party vice-president Fiona Scott this past week, amid yet another battle for the soul of the party, I was struck by her earnest belief in the so-called “party of Menzies.”

Scott appeared on Insiders on Background, RN, and in the Daily Tele, each time calling for the party to get back to its small-l liberal roots. In all three, the former Lindsay MP referenced the Menzies-inspired “We Believe” statement — which can still be found in the federal Liberal platform.

a just and humane society, where those who cannot provide for themselves can live in dignity….

“I mean how many people would even know that these are the principles and the beliefs of the Liberal Party?” she lamented to David Speers after reading a few aloud, noting robodebt directly contradicted them.

“I’m not sure as a party, if we’re honest with ourselves, if we are embodying these values.”

Unfortunately for Scott, the only thing Sky News took from this was an obsession with whether she believed Sussan Ley would last, running multiple commentaries on an awkward joke she later walked back — in line with the dozens of hit pieces they ran on Ley herself last week.

The party’s complete disconnect with its values statement prompts a number of questions:

• How can the Liberal Party call itself the party of Menzies when it has next to nothing in common with that party?

• Why would anyone who believes in such values join the party, or stay for that matter, after at least a decade of the opposite?

• At what point does the Liberal Party stop being the “Liberal Party”?

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Of course, the words “a liberal party in name only” is by now a truism. As former Liberal advisor Greg Barns SC wrote back in 2015, “the Howard years saw the Liberal Party become a misnomer,” the party having become “a deeply conservative force”. The party is technically still a broad church, with moderates welcome — in theory. But they’re expected to fall into line with whatever the right-wing majority decides, integrity be damned.

As Liberal member-turned-independent volunteer Charles Richardson told me when I bumped into him at a Monique Ryan event I covered in 2023, the “new right” started to take over as early as the ’90s — long before Scott implies it happened.

“The Liberal Party had this fundamental choice to make: Are we a liberal party as the name says, or are we a conservative party? And no one ever held a ballot on it, but basically over the course of the ’90s the party decided it was going to be conservative party.”

I understand liberals like Scott have a genuine interest in the existence of a liberal party, and want to save this one from itself. So too did Bridget Archer, who often argued she stayed for that very reason (I daresay she’d have held onto her seat if she’d quit and stood as an independent). It would be healthy for Australia to have a centre-right party that hasn’t jumped the shark.

But it’s unclear how they intend to do so in the face of News Corp’s hold on its shrinking base — and therefore on its preselections and policies — with true moderates now all but gone. And no, Sussan “dog whistle” Ley does not count, though she’s certainly a less damning choice than Angus Taylor, whose leadership reportedly would’ve seen the handful of remaining one decamp.

The “teals” are often said to be “‘the sort of women’ who should be in the Liberal Party”, as former Liberal MP Julia Banks noted in her commentary last week. And yet they are very much not in the Liberal Party, with liberal-thinking people unlikely to go near it with a 10-foot pole.

Banks saw the writing on the wall back in 2018, quitting the party in disgust.

Seven years on, the Liberal Party is less “liberal” than ever, making it hard to fathom how any true liberals could still be there, despite its name and history.

I reckon Menzies would have loved this one

So where should Menzies’ true believers go? Should they start a new party for liberals, leaving the LNP to the psychos who have claimed it? According to Banks, they should be working with the small-l indies, in what she believes should be a “Community Independents Party”, contradictory as it may sound. Before you laugh: the same Banks predicted the rise of the teals when I spoke to her for a 2021 essay.

Funnily enough, Scott also made an appearance in that essay — one I’d forgotten until I pulled it up just now. It was about an incident that happened in 2013, when she ran for the seat of Lindsay:

On the campaign trail, Abbott chose to highlight the “sex appeal” of Liberal candidate Fiona Scott, when asked what she had in common with her predecessor (Scott, standing beside him, laughed, as did Abbott’s daughter). Scott recently said that she knew almost immediately, once the shock wore off, that the gaffe was going to “hurt” her, damaging her credibility long term.

I’m not sure which party Scott thinks she ran for, or is vice president of for that matter, but it’s certainly not the liberal party, and it hasn’t been for over a decade.

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