In 2001, John Howard told the Liberal Party’s federal campaign launch that we would decide who came to this country and the circumstances in which they came. It won the election.
In the first week of June 2026, Newspoll put One Nation on 31 per cent of the primary vote. Labor was on 30. The Coalition was on 18. One Nation polled 6.4 per cent at last year’s election and most of this has arrived since the May budget, so the 31 may not hold. But it was the first time One Nation had led Labor in a Newspoll.
It was no outlier. YouGov and Redbridge found the same lead the week before. The Coalition’s 18 per cent took twenty-five years to produce. Twenty-five years on, one party will still commit to Howard’s sentence, defend it, and decline to apologise for it. It is the party currently leading the national polls.
Howard’s sentence was about immigration, but it was never only about immigration. It was about who decides. And about whether a government will hold a line it knows it will be attacked for holding. That instinct is now Pauline Hanson’s inheritance.
Tony Abbott has described the Liberal Party as the party of tradition, patriotism, and freedom. Take the three in order.
Tradition first. The Coalition voted in 2013 for the amendments that wrote gender identity into the Sex Discrimination Act, then governed for nine years and never narrowed them. On 15 May this year, the law it left standing delivered its verdict. The Full Federal Court found that Giggle, a women-only app, had directly discriminated against a biological male by excluding him, and doubled the damages to $20,000. It held that the Act’s special-measures provision, the clause that permits measures for women’s equality, could not excuse discrimination on the ground of gender identity. A women-only service was run as women-only, and that was the offence. Sall Grover says she will take it to the High Court. Whatever happens there, the law she is appealing is the law the Coalition helped legislate, kept, and left armed. The party of tradition had the vote and the numbers for nine years and used neither. Within days of the judgment, Hanson announced she would back Grover in Parliament and move to amend the Act. The ground the Liberals declined to hold did not stay empty.
Patriotism next, which is where Howard’s sentence lived. Asked through 2025 and into 2026 what the Coalition would do about immigration, Angus Taylor said he wanted to stop “bad immigration,” and added that the Liberals were not “One Nation lite.” He does not say what the Liberal Party is. He says what it is not, and what it is not is the other party. One Nation’s position is a cap of 130,000 a year, which it says would push net migration below zero. The number is rough. Hanson has given more than one account of what it measures, and there is fair argument about whether it could be delivered as stated. But it is a number, defended in public, by a party willing to be called extreme for saying it. Howard told a campaign launch that we would decide who came and on what terms. His successors define themselves by their distance from the only party still saying it.
And then freedom, where the party did not surrender ground so much as fence it. In 2015 the Coalition created the Office of the eSafety Commissioner: the world’s first national online-safety regulator, a description the agency wears with pride. Its remit was children. In 2017 the Coalition government extended it to all Australians. In 2021 it passed the Online Safety Act, which gave the Commissioner standing power over lawful speech and a mechanism to have it removed. None of this was forced on the Coalition by Labor or the Greens. The apparatus conservatives now complain is used against them was conceived, legislated, and widened twice by their own side.
The same Coalition government bankrolled the lockdowns it now disowns. When the Delta lockdowns came in 2021, the Morrison government created the COVID-19 Disaster Payment: $750 a week to anyone who lost work under a premier’s stay-at-home order, paid for as long as the order remained. Two million Australians received it. More than $9 billion went out in the first four months alone. Whatever entered a state premier’s calculations about extending a lockdown, cost was not one of them. The Commonwealth never ordered a state shut. It made keeping one shut affordable.
Voters have been asked about all of this, directly. The same Newspoll that put One Nation on 31 found almost 70 per cent of Australians agreeing that politics is overdue for a big shake-up, and that the people who built the mess will not be the ones to fix it. One Nation is not right about everything; a rough number is still a rough number, and voters can see it.
Voters have decided that a party which defends something beats a party which administers everything. When voters walked out on a bad budget, they did not stop at the Opposition. They walked past it, to a party the Liberals had spent twenty-five years calling disqualified, because they have judged that the Liberal Party will no longer defend what it inherited: not tradition, not patriotism, not freedom.
The party most willing to say Howard’s sentence is no longer Howard’s, and the country has noticed. This is not an argument for One Nation. It is an account of what the Liberal Party has stopped being. A party no longer recognisable as the thing it is supposed to be is a party with no particular reason to exist.
The freedom party is dead. Long live the freedom party.