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The Liberal Party has been losing ground to Labor for years, struggling against a one-party state machine that locks in left-wing control.

There’s no way to sugarcoat the weekend’s election results. For those of us hoping to stem the tide of secularism, socialism, statism and spiritual subversion in Australia, Saturday was a bloodbath.

Incumbent parties usually lose ground at a federal election. Instead, Labor enjoyed a 3% swing in its favour. This, despite putting Australia in a per-capita recession, delivering 12 consecutive interest rate hikes, a cost-of-living crisis, the steepest income decline in the developed world, and the sharpest fall in living standards in Australian history.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese became the first Labor PM to win consecutive elections since Bob Hawke in 1990, while Peter Dutton became the first Opposition Leader to lose his seat in Australian history.

Adding insult to injury, the Liberals suffered a complete wipeout in cities like Adelaide, Hobart and Melbourne, recorded their lowest seat count since 1946, and gained their worst primary vote since the party’s founding.

Clearly, Labor ran a very successful campaign and the Coalition offered anything but a viable alternative.

The One-Party State Machine

The Liberal Party has no-one to blame but itself for abandoning its own beliefs and chasing the wrong base with a watered-down, Labor-lite platform.

But elections are not won on values and policy alone. The Liberals were crushed on the weekend — and have been losing ground for decades — because they’re up against a machinery they do not understand.

We like to think of the Liberal Party and the ALP as equals in a race. In reality, Labor is running on solid ground, while the Liberals are sprinting on a conveyor belt that’s pulling them ever backwards. No matter how fast the Liberals run, they keep falling further behind — because they have no will to confront and dismantle the one-party state apparatus that locks in their defeat.

Unless the Liberal Party tears down this machinery, they may never win again.

Here’s what they must wage total war against — urgently and unapologetically — over the next three years:

Defund the ABC and SBS. Australians are being forced to bankroll their own indoctrination to the tune of $1.5 billion a year. Every time they switch on these taxpayer-funded broadcasters, they’re told — subtly or overtly — to vote for left-wing causes. At best, the ABC and SBS should be moved to a subscription model. At worst, they need to be defunded altogether. “But what about emergency broadcasts and rural coverage?” Keep them if you must — that’s just 3% of the budget. Privatise the rest.

Downsize the bureaucracy. One in every three voting Australians is either employed by the government or dependent on welfare. Most of them will vote to keep expanding this socialist largesse because their lives depend on it. Hundreds of thousands more are employed in government-aligned industries like the NDIS and “renewable energy”. Reform the NDIS, let the climate scam fund itself, and slash the federal workforce.

Depoliticise the bureaucracy. Government departments have been overrun by diversity training, “pride” promotion, climate millenarianism, hiring quotas, and a black armband view of history. Every year, billions of dollars in funding and research grants are handed out to woke NGOs and projects spruiking gender, race and climate. This is Labor’s shadow army, advancing the Labor-Greens agenda no matter who’s in power — all on the taxpayer’s dime. Stop pretending this is neutral. Call it out for what it is: the weaponisation of government. Then tear it asunder, root and branch.

End mass immigration. Albanese imported one million immigrants during his first term. By the 2028 election, some 600,000 immigrants will gain voting rights and an estimated 70% of them will vote left. Immigration is a sleeper issue in Australian politics for its role in the housing crisis and social disintegration. But it’s also reshaping the Australian electorate into Labor’s image. When it comes to immigration, get back to the basics — skilled migration, genuine asylum claims, family reunification, temporary study and tourism. Apart from that, turn off the tap.

Abolish the censorship regime. From anti-vilification laws to “misinformation” regulators to federal bodies like AHRC, ALRC, ACMA and AHPRA, the Liberal Party has inadvertently supported a censorship regime that now tightens the noose around its own neck. Far from being neutral, these entities are paid by the public to muzzle the right and peddle a leftist hegemony. Abolish the eSafety office. Repeal vilification laws. Reform the Human Rights Commission, ALRC, ACMA and AHPRA. And then get on your knees and apologise to your base for ever trying to police “misinformation”.

While you’re at it:

• Scrap the national curriculum, which primes children to vote left as soon as they’re old enough.
• Shutter Creative Australia, which forces the public to fund far-left “art” to the tune of $200 million annually.
• Restore political impartiality to the Australian Research Council, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the Australian Public Service Commission, and the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority.

But What If…?

The list above may sound radical, but only because Australians have been thorough radicalised by left-wing ideology for at least a decade. These reforms would help restore the fair and balanced political arena that Australia enjoyed throughout most of its history. And it’s the bare minimum required to give the Liberal Party a fighting chance in future contests.

Moderates, mainstreamers and managerialists will no doubt have their objections, so let me address the big ones here:

But what if the Australian public doesn’t have the appetite?

Create the appetite in the Australian public. Stop following and start leading. Frame these reforms as “a fair go” for forgotten Australians, because that’s exactly what they are. Link them to major pain points like housing, inflation, censorship, declining morale, and the cost-of-living crisis (which is really a cost-of-government crisis). If you’re out of ideas, study Christopher Rufo, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Charlie Kirk in the United States.

But Dutton tried the Trump approach and it failed.

No he didn’t. If the one-party state machine I’ve described above was a brick wall, Dutton attacked it with the equivalent of a tack hammer. Trump is using a wrecking ball. As Alexandra Marshall has put it, Donald Trump “barbecued the sacred cows of the Left and invited the working class over for a snack. He sacked the disloyal wets. Instead of cowering to the press, he called them liars to their faces. And most importantly, Trumpism won — everything — in a landslide.”

We’ve never seen a Liberal Party like this because the Liberal Party has never attempted it. It’s time to try a new approach and give the papers and the pundits something to really whinge about.

But we’ll be accused of starting a culture war.

This is the biggest lie in politics today. Labor, the Greens and their ideological foot soldiers started the culture war by surgically castrating children, preaching climate hysteria, putting drag queens in libraries, banning common sense, rubbing sexual degeneracy in our faces, and branding everyday Australians as colonisers who must be welcomed to our own country. Responding to this abject madness isn’t “starting a culture war.” It’s finishing one — and it’s high time we did just that.

But aren’t these beliefs just part of modern life now?

No, they absolutely are not. Unlike other cultural trends that develop slowly over time, this new set of beliefs was forced on Australians from outside — which explains why a large and growing segment of the population has had a gutfull of them after only a few years. Known popularly as ‘wokeness’ (but more accurately labelled Western Marxism), this secular religion spread to Australia from the United States and has its origins in early 20th-century Marxists and Karl Marx before them. Its purpose is to pit the ‘oppressed’ against ‘oppressors’, redefine morality and truth, and abolish every norm that made the West free, safe and prosperous in the first place. Open your eyes and realise that Western Marxism is the animating worldview of the Labor-Greens alliance.

The Liberal Party’s Spiritual Roots

The next three years are going to be painful. Labor has a strong mandate to rack up eye-watering debt, double down on censorship, enrich the climate cartel in exchange for blackouts, invent sundry new taxes, create more welfare and NDIS dependancy, impose Digital ID and CBDCs, make life and housing less affordable still, and divide Australians even further by race.

As a Christian, I know the root cause of our national demise is spiritual. The Russian novelist and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was spot on when he said, “We have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” The writer of Proverbs is even blunter: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people.” (Proverbs 14:34).

But none of that is an excuse for idleness. From the days of its founding under Sir Robert Menzies, the Liberal Party was built on civic virtue, a Christian conscience, and faith-informed service. The party can return to its roots, or it can wither, die, and be replaced by a movement that’s fit for purpose. The British Tories are learning this the hard way, as Reform rapidly rises to take their place. The same will happen here if the Liberal Party abandons the fight.

The machine is real. It grows every year, funded by the public purse, fortified by the illusion that it serves us all equally and represents business as usual. It doesn’t. From here on in, it’s socialism or bust. And whoever successfully destroys the machine will inherit the mantle of governance.

The clock is ticking. Which way Liberals?