Liberty Can’t Win If It’s Not on the Ballot

They’re still counting ballots, but it’s clear the 2025 Australian federal election has delivered a thumping defeat for the Liberal Party. Apart from a Greens wipeout, including their leader Adam Bandt who appears to have lost his seat, there’s not much for liberty-lovers to celebrate. Labor leader Anthony Albanese is the first Prime Minister since John Howard to win a second election, and the victory is emphatic.

As others have already expressed, the armchair experts are out in force. The Liberal Party will receive plenty of advice from people that have never, and will never, vote for them. It’s one thing to critically examine a political loss, but no party should take advice from ideological enemies whose only goal is to ensure it never succeeds.

Pundits and lackeys will frame this rout in the tired left versus right narrative – a progressive swing, a rejection of conservatism, too right-wing, not right-wing enough. In my view, this framing misses the real story: the forgotten Y axis of the political compass, the one that plots authoritarian versus libertarian. In 2025, liberty and small government was almost completely absent from the lower house ballot paper.

Has the Liberal Party moved too far left, or too far right? On balance it’s probably net-neutral. Depending on the policy or candidate, it’s a little bit of both. You can easily point to some incongruous, left-leaning economic policy or some overly prescriptive, conservative social policy. There’s no shortage of bad ideas that should have been quashed at inception. However, one thing is certain, the Liberal Party is now firmly on the authoritarian end of the Y axis. At this election voters had a choice between Big Government in red, or Big Government in blue.

Unfortunately, most of our media treats ideology as a one-dimensional line – or horizontal axis – from left to right, typically referring to either economic or social policy positions. They’ve over-simplified it. A more accurate analysis would consider the vertical axis, which typically refers to government control at one end, and political freedom on the other. The simple left-right frame ensures people don’t see, hear or consider the alternative. We’ve got our blinkers on, and now both major Australian political parties sit in the upper quadrants – favouring authority over liberty.

By ignoring the authoritarian-libertarian spectrum, we’re holding open the gates to barbarians who seek to seize control of an all-powerful state and use it to impose their top-down vision of how we should live our lives. Big Government proponents can hide behind labels like “moderate” or “centrist” if we fail to measure them against the Y axis to determine where they truly sit.

This way of thinking has become so entrenched in Australia, that even the Liberal Party favours tax-and-spend policies and government intervention over low taxes and individual liberty.

The Liberal Party claims to stand for small government, free enterprise and individual responsibility. But over the course of its previous three terms in office, the Coalition presided over an explosion in the size and power of government. In opposition, they doubled down. We were promised spending sprees, sweeping new surveillance legislation, social media bans, government-owned electricity generation and – most bizarrely – higher income tax.

The Labor Party, for its part, has never pretended to favour small government – it wears its collectivism proudly, and their socialist objectives are written into their constitution.

Given a choice between Big Government red and Big Government blue, swinging voters chose the party that is, at the very least, true to its stated platform. Australia re-elected a government that readily promised to deliver everything you ask, and fix every problem you encounter, for free. Of course, as we know, nothing is free. But why would someone vote for a pale imitation of Labor when they can get the real thing?

Increasingly, both major parties subscribe to the view that more government is the solution to every problem. It’s become the default, it’s reflexive; if there’s a problem, the solution is a new law, a new tax or a new, bureaucratic department. Australia’s political class is united in expanding Canberra’s reach, regardless of the colour of the flag they fly. The result? Uniparty.

No Liberal Party frontbencher stood up in 2025 to argue that maybe, just maybe, government should do less, spend less, control less.

We must demand that the authoritarian-libertarian axis be part of the conversation. Imagine if future elections debated questions like: How much should the government do? Do we need a government response to that problem? Should we trust individuals more and bureaucrats less? Does this policy increase or decrease the size of the government? Currently, those questions are ignored by the two major parties. It falls to us, the voters, to put them on the agenda.

We need to educate our fellow Australians that politics is not a one-dimensional contest between left and right. There’s a whole other dimension that affects our daily lives: how free we are from our rulers? We must fight to carve out space in our national conversation for the virtues of small government, freedom, and individual liberty. Otherwise, we’ll continue to be stuck choosing who gets to hold the whip.

It's hard for liberty and small government to win if they are not on the ballot paper. Libertarians must act before it’s too late. Because the bigger the government, the smaller the individual.