Liberals bank on homeownership to fix ‘broken’ party

“This isn’t just about electoral success, it’s about intergenerational equity. If your fortune in life is pre-determined by the lottery of whether you’re born into a land-owning family or not, we will be a poorer nation.”

Liberal candidate Roshena Campbell lost Aston to Labor’s Mary Doyle after a 4 per cent drop in the party’s primary vote this month followed an 11 per cent drop in 2022.

It marked the first time in more than 100 years that a government has won a seat from the opposition in a byelection, and followed crushing state election losses for the Coalition in NSW and Victoria.

Victorian shadow finance minister Jess Wilson said the Aston loss was an important lesson and the party, at a state and federal level, had to appeal to everyday Australians with a forward-looking and positive agenda.

Menzies Young Liberals president Dean Dell’Orso, 21, said it could draw back younger voters by better communicating its fundamental values.

“Equal opportunity, reward for effort and personal responsibility remain timeless principles,” Mr Dell’Orso told AFR Weekend.

“They have the potential to appeal to all Australians. Our challenge and opportunity is to better apply these values to the problems affecting young Australians today. Our priority is to listen.”

Another young Liberal member, Sali Miftari, agreed that home ownership could present a pathway back to government, but said the Aston byelection showed the party’s Victorian ranks needed a clean-out.

“The party is broken. People are trying to blame the public: that Victoria is too left-wing, there’s too many renters. But they’re not having meaningful debate about whether our values resonate in the community,” he said.

“Part of the challenge is caused by the fact we don’t attract talented people in the party. We’re suffering from decades of incompetence at an organisational level. Aston is not Roshena Campbell’s fault. The boil has been bubbling for a long time and Aston just lanced the boil.

“If you keep arguing over irrelevant things you are going to lose. Our membership has been radicalised by Sky News.”

But 84-year-old Ian Macphee, who served as a federal cabinet minister in the Fraser government and helped campaign for independent Zoe Daniel in his old seat of Goldstein last year, says the party is dead in the water.

“The party may well die out. Frankly, I can’t see a road back for the Liberals. I don’t think they will change their method of pre-selecting people,” Mr Macphee told AFR Weekend.

“It’s swung to the right wing in an extreme way, which has affected the opinion of under-50s. This is worse than 2007. It’s now catastrophic. I can’t see an alternative to Peter Dutton, and he will never be good enough to win an election. But I don’t think changing leaders matters ... because the Liberals have moved away from public opinion.”

John Black, a former Labor senator for Queensland who is now executive chairman of demographic and political profiling company Australian Development Strategies, says Liberal operatives may need to “set fire” to the party and start again as they had even lost the vote of the wealthy.

Mr Black said the Liberals were fighting a losing battle on three different fronts. The Greens, he explained, win the hearts and minds of idealistic young people and direct their preferences to Labor, while teal candidates pick off older voters.

“They’ve got a few middle-aged white blokes from Queensland trying to win over professional women from Melbourne,” Mr Black said.

“They’re clinging to the ideological wreckage of the past hoping to wash ashore, but Aston is where they will keep washing up.”