The modern Liberal Party was trained by the ABC. By Matthew Kelly in The Spectator.
Victoria struck first.
On the November 19, the party elevated Jess Wilson — a first-term MP …
New Liberal leader in Victoria
Ms Wilson is 35 and ideologically closer to the Teals than Menzies …
A gung-ho Jane Fonda for the Voice, Jess Wilson is dead-set your girl-power version of Philby, Burgess, or Maclean. Take your pick. The point is not the gender. The point is not the youth. The point is that she has been in Parliament for under two years and walks into the leadership like a cadet journalist suddenly appointed foreign editor. No scars, no battles, no record. Just a clean LinkedIn profile and a political class desperate for something — anything — that looks like renewal.
New South Wales answered on November 20:
Mark Speakman resigned — all bathos, no pathos — and Kellie Sloane materialised before the dust settled. A veritable Lucretia Borgia riding down Old South Head Road carrying the head of Speakman, cackling insane reasons: he doesn’t cut it with Gen Z, he wears a suit, he doesn’t drive an EV. The speed of it alone suggested choreography, not leadership — a party confusing velocity with judgement. …
New Liberal leader in NSW
The former ABC cadet and Nine presenter who has since reinvented herself as the protector of Sydney’s most expensive postcodes. A Sloan Ranger by any measure – and yes, many of us remember being told Lady Di was one – only this one hails from Patrick White’s old stomping ground in Centennial Park. She is, quite literally, a creature of the harbourside: Rose Bay, Vaucluse, Point Piper, Double Bay. Her idea of hardship is a Woolworths opening within sight of a yacht club.
Her record speaks for itself. Sloane has opposed development everywhere, always, at every scale — derelict service stations, townhouses in Rose Bay, modest apartment blocks, even the Woollahra station precinct. New housing in her electorate is a ‘punishment’, density is ‘confronting’, and increased supply is ‘unfair’. She held a housing forum where locals complained about immigrants, clogged roads, sailing conditions, and pressure on landlords to charge less rent. This is not conservatism. It is gentrified protectionism with a Pilates mat.
Nothing personal, but anyone who thinks this woman can speak to Penrith, Newcastle, Blacktown, or Wagga is dreaming. You may as well send a French aristocrat to negotiate a shearing dispute.
Her entire political instinct — aesthetic, economic, cultural — is coded for the harbourside. When the Liberal Party elevates someone like that, it’s not trying to win the state; it’s trying to protect its last three seats.
Is the Liberal Party in its death throes? Is it Labor lite, desperately trying to stay relevant within the uniparty?
Put Wilson and Sloane together and you get a picture of a party that keeps mistaking staffers for leaders, managers for fighters, and professional-class fluency for conservative conviction.
These are not conservatives. They are merely polite. They are fluent in all the cultural niceties of the age: progressive symbolism, ESG reflexes, the Voice, Net Zero, gentle admonitions about kindness, and the ABC dialect spoken softly into the national ear.
None of this means they can’t win. Any opposition can win if the government self-immolates. But nothing about this duo makes victory likely.
They’re Labor-lite: offering all the symbolism and none of the spoils, all the moral vocabulary and none of the transactional muscle. Labor gives its base grievance, redistribution and reward. These two give mood lighting and moral sentiment. Why pick the imitation when the original still prints the free-money cheques?
And that’s the structural problem. The Liberal Party is no longer anchored to anything. No class, no region, no moral centre, no economic base. It mouths conservative slogans but lives a soft-left cultural life. It campaigns like Labor’s conscientious niece. It elevates leaders who would be more comfortable on Q&A than in cabinet. It is becoming the political equivalent of a heritage-listed building: nice to look at, impossible to live in. ..
And what engineered this change within Australia’s body politic? Before Gough, the ABC was politically neutral and insisted on reporting all the relevant facts, which in party terms meant it was slightly right wing. The Whitlam Government was determined to change that, because it recognized the central role of the ABC in shaping the media landscape. So, as a matter of silent policy but of the highest importance, it set about transforming the ABC — by letting it choose its own personnel, with some seeding to start the ball rolling. Personnel is policy, and leftists only hire leftists. After a decade or so the institution belonged to the left. Total triumph followed:
And if you want to know who to blame for the cultural drift – for producing a generation of Liberals who sound like they’re auditioning for Q&A rather than leading an opposition – well, shove a camera at Maxine McKew, Tony Jones, and Kerry O’Brien. Albanese’s favourite Trotskyists turned performance artists masquerading as political journalists.
The trainers of the modern Liberal leaders
The ones who taught a generation of politicians that politics is not about representing the country, but about performing for the ABC.