Liberal renewal in an era of realism: respect, reward & resilience

Address to the Young Liberal Federal Convention, Marriott Flagstaff Courtyard, West Melbourne

Saturday, 7 February 2026

Acknowledgements

Thank you.

Thank you to Federal Young Liberal President, Victorian President and Federal Convention coordinator for the invitation.

And thank you all for choosing to take responsibility for Australia’s future.

Introduction 

Let’s not dance around it. Dickens described our political moment well:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair”.

The last Federal election delivered our worst result. And if you believe what pollsters are saying: we are still falling.

Yet there has never been a time where the answers are more obvious and Liberal.

There are no miracles, nor genius answers. There is only work.

Others are for the organised, we must be the organised for the disorganised.

They mobilise to favour the few, we are for the many.

We must be the Liberals for our time.

Labor’s values are about changing Australia, ours are of Australia.

In government, in parliament, as a Party, and as a movement: we stand for all of us.

Our return

Resilience is an important commodity in politics. The born to lead normally wait for deliverance and falter. History shows grit and determination matter more.

People have written us off before. And we came back.

People wrote me off before. And I came back.

To win Goldstein we accepted voters got it right, respected their choice, and listened so we understood it.

Voters needed to know we heard their message, that we were prepared to validate it. It is why I said “defeat was a gift”.

Once they were prepared to listen to us again, we then connected on values, aspiration, and hope of what we could achieve together.

We focused on rebuilding our mainstream movement of Australians standing up for the type of community and country we wanted to be.

And that’s the formula for every successful winning campaign.

Our tone

Liberalism is a profoundly optimistic view for Australia and Australians because we fundamentally believe in people and their potential.

Our path is not through hate, but hope; smiling, not shouting.

To be Wordsworth’s Happy Warriors that is “generous in spirit” with “inward light”, “diligent to learn” and “rendered more compassionate”, that “keeps faithful with a singleness of aim” and “finds comfort in himself and his cause” only knowing “Heaven’s applause”. 

Or, as Menzies put it more succinctly of “lively mind and a forward-looking heart”.

Our people

To win again we must confront reality.

Sometimes the Liberal Party has not sufficiently recognised the importance of appreciating our history and heritage. We don’t always do what we should.

And we have sometimes just flat out got it wrong. Errors happen. The critical lesson is whether we learn.

Most errors stem from doing what we don’t believe. But that is also because we limply say “we need to get back to our values” thinking that is enough. It isn’t. Values are static. You need them to come alive.

In this room we have no identity crisis. But that is not the view in the community.

Some say they don’t know what we stand for.

We won’t disabuse them through our words, but our deeds.

You reveal what you stand for by what you fight for.

And more importantly, you reveal who you stand for by who you fight for.

When the founder of our Party compiled his famous radio addresses they were not called ‘the forgotten ideas’, they were called ‘the forgotten people’.

Once you know who you are fighting for, you will know what you are fighting for.

Voters are the hero at the ballot box, we must be the enablers of their better life. 

And that happens when we spirit Australians to take responsibility and back themselves to contribute to our shared success.

Our moment

Australians don’t feel that confidence. Australians know our nation is not heading in the right direction.

As a former Shadow Minister for my portfolio, Sussan Ley and I often talk about the declining confidence of small business.

Families are anxious that their household budgets will be eaten by inflation and interest rates.

And the next generation do not believe the Australian promise will deliver for them.

When a system doesn’t work for people, their logical solution is to change the system.

And when they don’t trust the institutions to do so, they’ll change those in the institutions to do it for them.

We see this most glaringly in the United States and the United Kingdom, but we are not immune.

Some say the answer is to meet resentment where it lives, naively thinking that feeding resentment will earn its trust and become its gatekeeper.

As Kennedy said “those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside”.

There is only one way through this moment: leadership.

Our leadership

Leadership is not occupying a chair, nor being telegenic for election posters.

Leadership is uniting people around vision, projecting a program for delivery, and our message and our tone.

The next election is likely only two years away, and I absolutely believe we can win it. 

Australians want change.

The next election will not be won in the final months. The seeds of our success must be sown now.

Perceptions are quick to form, and hard to shake.

If we continue on our current course where pride and emotion transcend cooperation and reason: we are not just failing ourselves, we are failing Australia and Australians; and they will have every right to judge us harshly. 

They already have.

We will win if we have clarity in our vision, we have built the 21st Century infrastructure to communicate it, and given Australians a clear choice with policy that corrects our national course.

Too much is at stake: for them, for us, for our nation, for future generations to tolerate indulgences.

It will not be enough that people like the idea of what we offer. Our vision must be sufficient that Australians want to fight for it.

Our vision

Labor's vision is often defined by the size of a bureaucracy or government program. 

Our vision must be defined by outcomes: the resilience of our citizens and the quality of their lives.

From the quality of educational outcomes, their capacity to form a family, own a home in a safe community, and their capacity to get ahead.

Intrusive government imposes conformity and control. Empowered citizens live out their aspiration.

From the spark of aspiration that compels a young farmhand to milk cows before sunrise so they can save to own their own dairy farm one day.

The fuel of a young tradie, caffeinated to clock on at seven so they can surf by four. It's the sobriety of a new Australian nurse, late after sunset, so they can own a one-bedder and not face renting in retirement.

It's the ambition of two young mates hawking a slice of their start-up to venture capital, in the hope that one day it will list.

It's the risk of a CEO reinvesting to navigate competition because they understand change is the only certainty.

It's the drive of a mum working in legal, while working from home on Fridays, so they can have independence and career.

And it's the energy of her husband and his small business that sponsors the local netball team because his success is tied to a thriving community. 

Individually their stories are not heroic.

But it is from their determination that the energy comes to drive the cogs of our mutual progress together.

We understand that our nation’s success is built from the foundations of resilient and confident individuals, families, communities and enterprises; not Canberra, CBDs and corporates.

We are at a Menzian moment.

To appropriate a recent Prime Minister: We need a triple bypass that renews our party and our country – by focusing on what works.

First, the foundation of our compact with Australians must be our shared love for our country.

Second, living respect through the equality of our citizenship – by living and celebrating the democratic beliefs we share, the rights and liberties we respect and the laws we uphold and obey.

Third, by building an economy where hard work pays off – for the small and family business owner, the tradie and anyone who is willing to put the effort in.

Fourth, by giving Australians more control over the lives - let’s give Australians more choice. Because Australians know what’s best for them and their families.

Creating: Respect. Reward, and Resilience.

Loving our country

And never have Australians needed us to be our best Liberal selves more than now.

Australians are rightly concerned about migration levels and the capacity to integrate new Australians into a cohesive and sustainable society.

As previous Liberal governments have shown, we meet this challenge by controlling our borders, controlling legal pathways for migration, enforcing the law to build confidence, and putting a much heavier emphasis on integration.

Integration in values, integration in language, integration in connection and integration in economic and social participation.

It is not just a conversation about new Australians, but all Australians. We must call all Australians to a shared future that unites us as one people: whether born or new.

As a child I was taught Australian history from 1788 to 1988. Now it is taught as pre-1788, then from 1958 as though Australia was reborn as Menzies and Holt unpacked White Australia.

In doing so we ignore one of the greatest achievements of our nation: we were the first to provide full universal suffrage: the right of women to vote and stand for office – as my electorate’s namesake honours.

Some are fond of Australia’s history in three chapters: our indigenous inheritance, British institutions, and our multicultural triumph. The first two chapters are right, but our third must be our united future.

We must thread a story of Australia that is bold, confident and honest. A story that enlivens who we are as “one people, one land with one destiny”.

We cannot expect Australians to love their country if we are not proud of our full heritage and history.

And we cannot expect new Australians to integrate into a story that we are not proud to tell, that we enliven in our civic rituals and that we sing.

This love has never been more important than now.

Respect each other

Over the past two years we have seen the greatest spike in social division in our nation’s history that has violently torn our social fabric. It is most obvious from the rise of antisemitism that started on the steps of the Sydney Opera House on 8 October 2023.

The phrase might have been contested but we know it was said in the celebration of the murder.

But the real tragedy was it was met by silence in condemnation by our nation’s leaders.

Silence in the face of extremism tacitly permits it, and we are seeing parallel attacks: from homophobic harassment and violence in Melbourne to an unexploded ordinance thrown at indigenous protestors in Perth.

And while we now know where the road has already led, we cannot say with confidence we have reached its end.

We cannot tolerate this indecision from our leaders, nor this direction.

We know we are in the most dangerous strategic environment since the Second World War. Our unity is the first line in our national defences, and is a strategic and security necessity to confidently meet this challenge.

Social fabric is fragile. It will take years to repair. But we must.

Only liberalism’s commitment to the equal dignity and worth of all people can bring our nation together in defence of who we are.

These are not idle principles. They are central to who we are.

People shall not be judged based on their bloodline, ethnicity, gender, marital status, who we love and the faith we worship.

Tolerance is different sides of the same coin named respect. Respect for everyone’s right to live their fullest lives. Respect that acknowledges difference, and anchors our equality our citizenship and common humanity.

And that means more than our rhetoric, but that we should take responsibility and be the upstanders for the type of nation we want to be: and that starts with our leaders.

Hard work pays off

Respect isn’t just lived in how we treat those based on their origin, but also generations.

The promise of Australia is that everyone can cock their head to the horizon regardless of their beginnings because they know hard work pays off, and where savings and sacrifice delivers results.

Yet Australians are living the consequences of an economy that isn’t working. It’s distressing. Particularly for parents who want to give their children the best start.

The Treasurer used to talk of a “well being economy”. Let’s take him on his word. That starts with an economy working for people to get ahead.

Yet Jim Chalmers is inducing a palliative care economy where fiscal policy has become a feeding tube and monetary policy is used as morphine.

We all know where a palliative care economy ends.

When government's indulge debt spending they're borrowing from tomorrow, to pay for today and only fuelling inflation, and with it price rises. 

This week the consequences of the Chalmers rate rise cycle has been revealed, and the Reserve Bank Governor says it may be just beginning.

Containing inflation must be our critical mission. Because inflation is the silent tax on aspiration.

Under Labor you pay three times over: your taxes, debt and servicing it, inflation and interest rates.

Under Labor, they spend and you pay.

And with indexed taxes, we are suffering under taxation inflation in addition to their legislated industrial relations inflation.

Inflation destroys small businesses, family businesses, sole traders and the self-employed.

That’s why we have record small business insolvencies and the private sector jobs that go with it.

We are now living the reality of low productivity and centralised wage fixing: higher inflation, higher interest rates and higher unemployment.

That's why analysis shows 8 in 10 jobs created are from direct and indirect public spending. 

The government is borrowing to hide the private employment crisis.

When Labor is in office they use public policy to enlarge the number of Australians dependent on the taxpayer, our policy should enlarge a constituency of small businesses and the self-employed.

We need an economy explicitly geared to Australians backing themselves. We need meaningful reform that puts small business at the heart of the economy.

In generations past families made money buying a home. The next generation will grow wealth because they pursue a small business, side hustles or shared equity scheme.

We know that our economy will succeed by releasing human potential: enterprise and its energy, capital for construction, ingenuity for intellectual property.

And on the horizon is the potential that artificial intelligence will reset the economic environment to unleash young Australians further.

We must back them in. We must back their grasp for opportunity and success. We must back their productive capacity and unleash their enterprise and endeavour.

These are our people. And they will be the wealth creators for themselves and for all of us.

Low incomes guarantee dependence, high incomes liberate.

Control over our lives

And that is how we empower people to take control over their own lives.

From workers that don’t feel in control over their employment, to parents that don’t feel in control of the digital safety for their children.

And in Victoria we know the explicit lack of control we feel over community safety and crime.

We need our institutions and our economic system to align with Australians to apply their productive effort.

The distrust so many feel toward institutions designed to support them, necessitates dynamic thinking about whether they’re fit for purpose, and innovate.

In the call of Burke “a state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation”.

When young Australians cannot get ahead they lose control of their lives today, and also their future.

Simple logic says young Australians should buy a home because the benefits compound for your working life and retirement.

Yet Labor legislates an economy that works for Labor, and empowers them to control your life.

They legislate young Australians’ savings into industry funds to inflate the bonuses of their mates, while the average age of buying a first home blows out.

For your parents’ generation the average to buy their first home was in their mid-20s, today we are heading to 40. And delayed home ownership correlates with delayed family formation.

Labor put super ahead of home ownership because we apparently cannot afford the aged pension, but they can finance taxes to buy equity in your first home.

Labor opposes young Australians using their full savings to buy your first home, but approves union-controlled funds doing so; and renting it to young Australians. 

Labor engages in economic social engineering so Australians become serfs to union-controlled super funds they control.

If we accept being a nation where home ownership is beyond the next generation, that forming a family is a premium, and that security in retirement is uncertain we have failed in our stewardship and our responsibility. Liberals will have chosen defeat.

Conclusion

This is not a future I am prepared to accept.

Failure means a divided nation, economic defeatism and declining confidence.

Australia’s destiny is not to work for Labor. It is not even there to work for us. 

Our task is not to inherit Australia — but to pass it on stronger than we found it.

We have an historic mission that we must confront – united, together.

Renewal is not something a leader delivers to you. It is something a generation builds.

This mission will not be easy, but it is vital. And it falls to us.

We can be the stewards of our inheritance so the next generation can be resilient and meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

We did it in Goldstein. We can do it in Victoria. And then we must do it for Australia.

Thank you.

ENDS