I warned the Liberals years ago where they were heading. Their latest internal report proves they walked straight into the trap: PVO

By PETER VAN ONSELEN, POLITICAL EDITOR, AUSTRALIA Published: 13:29, 18 July 2026 | Updated: 13:36, 18 July 2026 The Liberal Party's latest internal discussion paper is too little too late. It reads like a blueprint for the future written a decade too late. Yet even then Opposition Leader Angus Taylor dismissed its core suggestions almost out of hand. Is it any wonder the party of Robert Menzies is on life support? What radical ideas did the report canvass in a bid to save what's left of the Liberal Party? Greater representation of women and multicultural communities. Genuine engagement with younger Australians. A credible position on climate change. Modernised preselections capable of attracting candidates who resemble the country the Liberals hope to govern. These aren't new ideas. They're overdue admissions. Had the Liberals confronted such challenges when they first became glaringly obvious, they might've arrested the electoral fragmentation now threatening their very existence. I was one of the voices all but pleading with the party to get ahead of horizon problems, but alas. In 2019, the Liberals held 23 of the 50 electorates with the largest numbers of managerial and professional women. They now hold just two. More than 55 per cent of party members are over 60 years old, while fewer than one in 10 party members are aged between 16 and 30. Urban areas, women and younger voters have all walked away from the Liberals in record numbers. Now that the Liberals have finally decided to think outside the square (other than their leader, it turns out, who can't or won't), the timing couldn't be worse. That is the cruel irony of this report. The reforms it canvasses are overdue and necessary, but the moment when they could have been undertaken at manageable political cost within the party's narrow heartland has now passed. Liberals now need to worry about what little is left of their base being stolen by One Nation. 'Taylor's categorical claim that he has never supported 'any quotas at all' is also impossible to reconcile with the Coalition's own arrangements,' writes PVO. (Angus Taylor and Jane Hume are pictured) Embracing some of the recommendations in the current climate risks making an already bad situation even worse. On the party's metropolitan and socially moderate flank, voters concerned about climate change, gender representation and generational fairness have already migrated to the teals, Labor and the Greens. They won't suddenly return because an internal commission has finally noticed that the average Australian does not look like the average Liberal MP. On the right, the more immediate existential threat is clearly One Nation, whose primary vote is higher than the Coalition's combined vote. Before the Liberals can again compete to form government, they must ensure Pauline Hanson doesn't replace them as the principal opposition force. Any abrupt embrace of gender quotas, diversity targets or softer climate rhetoric will be weaponised by Hanson as proof positive that the Liberals have learned nothing and are simply becoming Labor-lite. That characterisation may be cynical, but it is brutally effective. The Liberals are therefore operating against two different political clocks at the moment. Their long-term survival requires modernisation. Their short-term survival requires them to stop haemorrhaging votes to One Nation. The structural repairs that might make the party electable again over the next decade could make it even more vulnerable over the next 18 months. This leaves Liberal strategists with no painless choices. Doing nothing guarantees long-term decline. Acting now risks accelerating short-term losses to the populist right. That is the steep price of spending a decade refusing to face reality. Yet the instant the commission pokes its head beyond the usual bromides, in comes Taylor to play whack-a-mole. 'Liberals now need to worry about what little is left of their base being stolen by One Nation,' writes PVO. (Pauline Hanson is pictured) 'I've never supported any quotas at all,' the Opposition Leader declared, dismissing the idea of reserving winnable seats for women before party members had even begun debating it. The internal review, chaired by Queensland Senator James McGrath, didn't even recommend quotas. It presented them as one of six options, setting out arguments for and against each option. That's what a discussion paper is supposed to do. Why commission a review into how the party must change if its leader intends to veto the difficult ideas on arrival? Taylor's alternative was the same empty incantation Liberals have chanted for years: recruit more great people! Brilliant. Why didn't anyone think of that before women dwindled to just 21 per cent of party members and a dismal one in five Liberal MPs in the lower house? Opposing rigid gender quotas is a perfectly legitimate position. But it requires a credible alternative capable of overcoming the branch structures, factional bargains and incumbent protections that continually reproduce the same result. Taylor's categorical claim that he has never supported 'any quotas at all' is also impossible to reconcile with the Coalition's own arrangements. Coalition agreements have long guaranteed the Nationals a share of cabinet and shadow cabinet positions based on their parliamentary representation. Those positions are reserved for Nationals, who decide which of their MPs will occupy them. Is that not a quota? Wasn't a core aspect of Taylor's pitch to take over as leader to restore the Coalition, which means locking that quota arrangement in? Taylor is entitled to argue that gender quotas should be treated differently from party affiliation quotas. But let's hear him have the guts to express that worldview. What he can't do is plausibly pretend he inhabits a quota-free political universe, because the Coalition agreement proves otherwise. Apparently numerical guarantees are an affront to Liberal values when they might benefit women, but an indispensable instrument of stable government when they preserve the National Party's share of power. Federal Liberal president Tony Abbott performs a similar manoeuvre. He decries gender quotas as 'fundamentally illiberal', yet champions the British Conservatives' A-list model, under which the party centrally identifies and privileges supposedly desirable candidates. An A-list is not a quota because it doesn't guarantee a numerical outcome, so Abbott is at least more intellectually consistent than Taylor. But it's still central intervention in local preselections, which sounds illiberal to me. Abbott's objection is therefore not to party management overriding a completely free contest. It's to an intervention that binds the party to an outcome its existing powerbrokers can't control. By releasing this report and then having Taylor immediately shut down its most contentious idea, the Liberals have engineered the worst of all possible worlds. The report advertises the party's demographic and organisational obsolescence, agitating conservatives who fear another lurch to the left. Taylor's response simultaneously confirms to women, younger voters and metropolitan Australia that the party remains congenitally incapable of change. And everyone can now use the circus against the Liberals to benefit themselves: Labor, Greens, teals and One Nation. Who ever said the Liberal Party can't unify the nation (albeit against them)? The Liberals should have undertaken these reforms when they possessed the political capital to absorb the internal backlash and the time to wait for the electoral dividends to start flowing. Back then, reform might have broadened the party from a position of strength. Instead, Liberals are now trying to rebuild their metropolitan flank while their right flank collapses. At this rate, the quota they will soon need won't just be for women. It'll need one to guarantee a minimum number of Liberals remain in the parliament.