In this article, John Roskam contextualises and disseminates the IPA’s research on Australia’s political realignment.
To go from opposition to The Lodge, Sussan Ley will need to talk about topics Liberals have tiptoed around for years – culture and values.
Four months after becoming Liberal leader, Sussan Ley has said something that Liberal party members, Liberal voters – and, crucially, potential Liberal voters – can agree with.
Even better, it’s a position different from Labor’s.
Ley told the Committee for Economic Development of Australia that it’s impossible for the government to provide for every need and solve every problem by spending more.
“This mindset, supercharged in recent years, weakens both our finances and our national character,” she said.
It’s not quite Thatcher, but it’s a start. And it’s one thing to say it in opposition, it’s another thing to do it in government.
When Thatcher became Tory leader, voters knew she meant what she said. In 1971, as education minister, Thatcher abolished free school milk for children.
As UK prime minister sixteen years later, she famously told an interviewer, “I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!’ … and so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society?’ There is no such thing! There are individual men and women, and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people, and people [should] look to themselves first.”
Sussan Ley must re-discover traditional Liberal values
If Ley is to keep her job, she’s going to have to give a lot more speeches like the one she gave to CEDA. For Ley to go one better and go from opposition leader to prime minister, she will need to talk about more than economics. She will need to talk about topics Liberals have tiptoed around for years, namely culture and values.
As pollster and former Labor Party official Kos Samaras wrote on these pages a few days ago, “while conservative parties in other nations have successfully courted migrant communities through economic messaging and family values”, the Coalition hasn’t. He pointed out that nearly one-third of Australians were born overseas.
Liberal MPs might recoil at mentioning the words ‘family values’ or ‘family-friendly policies’, but that would be one way of beginning to unlock the migrant vote.
The phenomenon of socially conservative migrants voting for a left-wing party isn’t unique to Australia.
The Brookings Institution has noted of the United States that, “interestingly, on social values issues, foreign-born migrants are almost twice as likely to hold conservative/very conservative views and still identify as a Democrat compared to the overall population.”
At the Voice referendum, those born overseas were more likely to vote No than those born in Australia.
“The Liberal Party is at its best when it presents itself as a mass-appeal, broad-based party.”
John Black, a pollster and former ALP senator has long talked about the importance of education to migrant communities. At the federal election, the Coalition had a carefully considered education policy that was only released at the last minute because Coalition strategists feared that talking about anything other than ‘cost of living’ would distract the electorate from its economic message.
As it turned out, the Coalition had no economic message to speak of.
In any case, education shouldn’t be regarded as an issue only of concern to migrant communities. The 2025 NAPLAN results revealed that “students from migrant families are ahead of their Australian-born peers in all year groups and areas tested.”
The challenge for Liberals will be to engage with migrant communities without falling into Labor’s method of politics. The ALP was founded as a sectional party to serve the interests of trade union members, and is comfortable with the idea that migrants are just another identity group to be managed. The Labor Party will always be better at playing identity politics than the Liberals. The Liberal Party is at its best when it presents itself as a mass-appeal, broad-based party.
One of their many problems is that Liberals have come to believe that modern politics requires the electorate to be compartmentalised with a focus on the specific interests of ‘millennials’, ‘professional women’, ‘migrants’ and so on. When politics becomes a game of merely matching a policy to an identity group, what’s lost is any concept of what all voters, and all Australians, have in common.
