Keith Wolahan: renewing the Liberal Party’s foundations

Keith Wolahan is a barrister, a former Australian Army commando with four deployments including three tours in Afghanistan, and the former Liberal Member for Menzies—the seat named after the party’s own founder.He won the seat in 2022 by unseating a thirty-year conservative incumbent at preselection. Three years later, he lost that same seat as the Liberal party’s metropolitan vote collapsed beneath his feet.In his essay for Inflection Points, Keith argues that the Liberal Party’s failure is structural, not cyclical, and driven by three forces: migration, education, and home ownership.The party has lost the multicultural suburbs. It has lost university-educated professionals, particularly women. And it has lost a generation locked out of the housing market—people who, as Keith writes, are “not hostile to Liberal values; they simply do not believe the party is serious about the one thing that would make those values real.”This is a podcast about the seriousness required to bring a political party back from the brink.Read Keith Wolahan’s essay, Liberal Foundations, in Inflection Points. Get full access to Inflection Points at stack.inflectionpoints.work/subscribe