The coalition under Sussan Ley must focus on winning back moderate voters for any chance at the next election while also accommodating conservative MPs, an expert says.
MPs have been trying to determine how the opposition can regather and become competitive at the next election, amid tensions within the Liberals following the coalition’s worst-ever election defeat in May.
While some within the Liberals contemplate a further shift to the right as support grows for parties like One Nation, one academic says any future direction for the party needed to come back to the centre of politics.
“Australians like centrism, they don’t like anything too far left or too far right,” Monash University politics lecturer Blair Williams told AAP.
“If the Liberal Party did go down that conservative route, they might take votes from One Nation, but I don’t know if they’re going to win back the seats they need in the metropolitan areas.”
Frictions emerged in the party since the sacking of conservative NT senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price from the front bench and MP Andrew Hastie’s resignation from the shadow ministry over policy differences.
Dr Williams said while Ms Ley as leader should focus on getting the Liberals back towards the centre, the party would be most effective in accommodating a wide range of views.
“The Liberal Party is strongest when it’s a broad church, where it has a broad range of opinions from conservatism to liberalism,” she said.
“But it seems to be quite difficult for them right now, so it’s not an easy path forward.”
The coalition’s election postmortem is still being carried out, with policy reviews in portfolios such as energy and climate also ongoing.
The lack of policy has meant some MPs struggle to articulate the party’s position, Dr Williams said.
“It would be good for them to have some kind of policy basis that they can come back to and they can talk on,” she said.
“There’s been a vacuum of policy for a good while now, for a good few years, even the 2022 election there weren’t many policies.”
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