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Menzies’ Liberal Party is dead. Long live ... what?

Waleed Aly Columnist, author and academic October 17, 2025 — 5.00am

Eighty-one years ago yesterday, Robert Menzies founded the Liberal Party. Today, it faces the most severe crisis in its history. This is not simply some garden variety post-election soul-searching of the defeated. This is a party figuring out whether it can go on. A party where its members are so plainly canvassing the possibility of the splitting permanently that one of its rising stars, finance spokesman James Paterson, was moved this week to deliver a major speech imploring his colleagues not to divorce one another. Its leader Sussan Ley on Thursday declared the party had strayed from its foundational values a

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