A Values Proposition

A compendium on leadership by distinguished Australian and former Federal Liberal Party President Ashley Goldsworthy is essential reading for today’s generation of leaders.

Leadership is a process, the effective execution of which requires the leader to juggle competing priorities, goals, and approaches to issues. A leader needs to be focused, but still adaptable; courageous, but not reckless; and assertive, yet humble and authentic.

Without a concrete set of fundamental values to which a leader can hold, they risk being lost in a plethora of conflicting demands pulling them in different directions—and losing their identity in the process. This was exactly what happened to the federal Liberal Party in 2015. And a decade on, it is still struggling to find itself.

An insightful compendium on leadership by former Federal President of the Liberal Party Ashley Goldsworthy, Leadership: The Ten Commandments, hammers the importance of understanding one’s values and principles when exercising power and influence as a leader.

FORGETTING THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLE

Since the end of Tony Abbott’s premiership, the Liberal Party has been wandering in the ideological wilderness—in government and even more so in opposition. Malcolm Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 committed taxpayer money and Australians’ skills and resources to a government-led white elephant project, which was first quoted at $2 billion and has since inflated in price to more than $12 billion. This project has been incompatible with liberal values from its outset because it elevates public sector direction over private sector innovation.

Josh Frydenberg’s post-pandemic federal budgets were a Keynesian spendathon, which set Australia up for record debt, record deficits, and generations of expensive interest payments. My commentary of the Morrison government’s approach to economic management, at the time, was even more scathing:

The notion that governments should continue to spend other people’s

money, come rain, hail, or storm, until it’s all gone is not [even] actually Keynesian—it’s socialism … [Keynes at least] call[ed] for tightening the belt when the economy is doing well and chugging along, so as to not overheat the market and worsen inflationary pressures.

The Liberal-led Coalition government did no such thing.

As a party of individual liberty [the Liberals] should serve, rather than lecture.

In late October 2021, Scott Morrison committed Australia to the net zero carbon and carbon-equivalent emissions target by 2050, a policy assessed by Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) Research Fellow Cian Hussey as inherently illiberal because—even by its proponents’ admission—it requires the subordination of individual rights and ways of life to support a government mandate. Cian observed:

Australia’s political class has for too long failed to properly discuss the profound nature of the policy of net zero. It doesn’t just mean changing our electricity generation from coal-fired power to solar panels and windmills. It means changing every single component of our lives—from the food we eat to the cars we drive; from the homes we live in to how and where we can visit family members or take a holiday.

Net zero and big government spending both continued to feature prominently in federal Liberal Party policy offerings throughout the opposition years between 2022 and 2025. This demonstrates how the party had become removed from its foundational values and identity, as a party of individual liberty that should serve, rather than lecture, Menzies’ forgotten people, Howard’s battlers, and Tony’s tradies.

Values, according to Goldsworthy, are crucial to leadership “because they serve as the foundational principle that guide a leader’s decisions, actions and interactions with others,” especially in an environment where leadership necessitates balancing competing goals.

Unlike the Australian Labor Party, with its democratic socialist values and third way inclinations, and the Nationals, rooted in regional Australia, the Liberals are historically made up of disparate groups of people with no common foundational values other than being in opposition to Labor. It began as a fusion of protectionists and free traders, which has today evolved into a strange concoction of libertarians, so-called moderates, and social and fiscal conservatives.

The first three of Goldsworthy’s leadership commandments, around courage, commitment, and conviction, can provide a framework for reinvigorating not just the party he has devoted so much of his life to, but also the broader centre-right movement in Australia.

LEADERSHIP: THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

Ashley Goldsworthy’s ten commandments are as follows:

I. Thou shalt have courage
II. Thou shalt nurture commitment
III. Thou shalt have conviction
IV. Thou shalt communicate
V. Thou shalt have compassion
VI. Thou shalt build a culture
VII. Thou shalt nurture followers
VIII. Thou shalt not be in denial
IX. Thou shalt embrace strategic IQ
X. Thou shalt not delay.

Each commandment reflects the author’s lifetime of leadership experience in business, politics, and community organisations.

But Goldsworthy’s guidebook to leadership is also grounded in theory, even if the tone is very practical and the content enriched by years of first-hand experience. For me, as a former management academic, it was fascinating to identify the various textbook concepts being applied masterfully by Goldsworthy in practice.

The need for performance review to be “a constant daily activity, and [informal] feedback should be just as frequent”, for example, is a widely accepted best practice, promoted in human resource management courses, in response to the tendency for many organisations to treat performance appraisal as simply a periodic box-ticking exercise.

However, Goldsworthy does not shy away from confronting traditional academic thinking. For instance, he challenged the conventional understanding of the Goal Setting Theory about the importance of quantifying objectives:

People are motivated by intangibles, such as values, ideas, competition and commitment. People are more excited by the challenge to build a car of high quality (a value) than they are to build one of low cost (a number).

This is not to say that he rubbished the theory. Rather, Goldsworthy emphasised the value of adaptability in leadership practice and cautioned against being beholden to a particular way of thinking and operating: “Leaders have to be able to adapt … to new circumstances, to new competitors, to changed internal dynamics.”

Values and principle are the key that a leader needs in order to balance adaptability on the one hand and conviction on the other.

HAVING THE COURAGE TO TAKE A STAND

IPA Senior Fellow John Roskam characterised the Morrison government’s 2022 election campaign as “a lacklustre, tired, policyless and visionless, three-term minority government[‘s] asking for another three years in office”. He continued: “The truth is the federal Liberals haven’t known what they stand for since May 2014”.

While an endorsement for Goldsworthy’s book from Liberal icons John Howard and IPA Distinguished Fellow Tony Abbott are testament to its excellence, it is indeed the current generation of federal Liberal Party leaders that need it the most.

The inadequacies in their courage, conviction, and commitment saw the federal Liberal Party following rather than leading its junior partner, the Nationals, in opposing the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. And, again, it was the Nationals and Liberal backbenchers who took the lead on the party’s eventual backpedalling on the 2050 net zero emissions target. These have made the task of communicating the party’s leadership credentials all the more difficult, and the fulfilment of the rest of Goldsworthy’s commandments very tough indeed.

The Liberal Party was not the only organisation that rose to oppose Labor’s wartime and postwar socialist excesses. The IPA was founded in 1943, a year before Menzies created the current incarnation of the Liberal Party, to offer an intellectual counterweight to socialist thought-leaders and to protect individual and economic freedom.

Eighty-three years on, we continue to be relevant, adaptive, and relatable because we have never compromised on our values and watered down our principles—as the Liberal Party has since 2015—and by unashamedly standing by them. Under the leadership of Scott Hargreaves as Executive Director, we established five pillars on which our research and communication efforts are grounded:

• Freedom for an Australia in which we can speak freely and make our own decisions;
• Security to protect our borders, property rights, and the essentials of a free and prosperous society;
• Prosperity arising from a free society, which unleashes economic opportunities for all;
• Nationhood underpinned by core values and shared stories that bring all Australians together under one flag; and
• Self-reliance and character development, centred on the sovereignty of the individual rather than a dependence on the state.

These reflect our fundamental values and principle. They are non-negotiable. And they are crucial to the execution of leadership as a practice.

A MESSAGE TO THE CENTRE-RIGHT

Goldsworthy asserts:

When leaders delay decisions, they inadvertently send a message that indecisiveness is acceptable, which can permeate the entire organisation … Timely decisions … maintain momentum, seize opportunities and build a culture of confidence and action.

The main centre-right political organisation at the federal level has lost momentum due to indecisiveness and, if I may be so blunt, a degree of cowardice.

This is why the more radical elements of the left have managed to wreak havoc on the National Electricity Market, preside over the largest migration program—by far—in Australia’s history, and continue the legacy of big government, more red tape, and declining private sector investment in critical sectors.

But no good comes from wallowing in self-pity and seeking to become the pale shadow of a so-called woke progressive movement. Among Goldsworthy’s ten leadership commandments, courage comes first. And, for the federal Liberal Party, this translates into the courage to admit its mistakes, move on from the last decade of ineptitude, and once again show Australians what it takes to be a natural party of government.

The people of Australia are crying out for parties in the centre-right to show leadership. If the Liberal Party should fail to do so, and do so quickly, other centre-right political movements are waiting restlessly in the wings.

This article from the Summer 2025 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Senior Fellow, Kevin You.