To the day he died in 2015, Malcolm Fraser was working on a plan to start a new political party.
The former Liberal prime minister had become convinced the party he once led no longer represented the liberal tradition he believed in. For more than four years, he convened meetings, drafted a statement of values and canvassed donors for what was to be called Renew Australia – a movement grounded in social justice, ethical politics, climate action and what he described as “genuine liberal values”.
The project stalled after his death. But the impulse behind it – the sense that the Liberal Party had ceased to be the natural home of the centre – never disappeared. Now, nearly a decade later, that idea is resurfacing with a new urgency.
Over the past six months, a series of discussions and approaches – some structured, some spontaneous, all rather informal – have taken shape across Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. They involve former Liberal moderates, ex-Coalition staffers, teal MPs, retired Labor figures, community-backed organisers and donors who once funded the Liberal Party’s business wing.
No one is claiming leadership. No manifesto has been launched. Those most closely involved do not want to be identified. Some are in roles where public non-partisanship is expected. If asked, most people deny any knowledge or involvement.
But all are working from the same diagnosis: the Liberal Party may no longer be capable of reclaiming its centre-right identity. All are worried about what happens to democracy when governments – state or federal – lack effective opposition.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull sharpened that argument recently when he warned the party was heading down a cul-de-sac.
“The right-wing element has taken over the Liberal Party,” he told Capital Brief. “There are very few moderates left in the party room. That’s why the talk of a split misses the point.”
Turnbull did not dismiss the idea of a new political force. A centre or centre-right movement combining disaffected Liberals and teal independents, he said, was “not inevitable but certainly possible” – particularly as the party attempts to chase voters to the right.
“I think there’s people talking about it, but the initiative would really have to come, I think, from the teals because they’re in the parliament,” he later told the Guardian. “To be honest, I think it would be healthy if we had a more effective opposition.”
Recent polling suggests many voters have already moved. According to this masthead’s Resolve Political Monitor, the Liberal Party’s primary vote has slumped to the mid-20s, while One Nation has climbed into the high teens. More than 40 per cent of voters are now looking to non-major parties.
March’s state election in South Australia could, many believe, become a tipping point where informal talks harden into something more concrete. A model emerging from the group borrows heavily from the teal experience: a Senate-first strategy, selective lower-house contests, climate credibility paired with pro-business economics, and deep local organising.
Self-styled centrist independents have already demonstrated the potency of that approach. In 2019 and 2022, community-backed candidates shattered Liberal strongholds including: Warringah, Mackellar, North Sydney and Wentworth in Sydney; Goldstein and Kooyong in Melbourne; and Curtin in Perth. In 2025, independents again reshaped contests, winning Bradfield in Sydney and finishing second in five Labor-held seats — Watson in Sydney, Franklin in Tasmania, Calwell in Melbourne, Fremantle in WA and Bean in the ACT.
Those still inside the Liberals describe a sense of political suffocation: preselection dominated by branch activists, policy narrowed by culture-war signalling, influence concentrated among factions uninterested in metropolitan recovery. As one former frontbencher put it privately: “The party room doesn’t look like the country – or even like the Liberal Party that last won government.”
That mismatch has become the animating force behind renewed discussion of a centrist breakaway. Turnbull, still a Liberal Party member despite attempts to expel him, has been rumoured as a figure in the discussions by Liberal loyalists, but he has publicly denied that.
“Malcolm knows that any new party isn’t going to be helped if it looks like it’s his project,” one organiser, granted anonymity to speak about the project, says.
The yet unnamed grouping is also borrowing from the newly established Prosper UK – a movement attached to Britain’s Conservative Party to drag it back to the centre – and Faculty AI, the start-up hired to work with political guru Dominic Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign.
It has also spoken to leading international government digital services advisers and government transformation specialists.
One prepared to put her name to the project is Hannah March, an Adelaide-based barrister who was a ministerial staffer in the Turnbull and Morrison governments.
“At a national level, it is certainly worth considering a split into the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, with the conservatives to keep what remains of the membership,” she says. “The Liberal, Conservative, and National parties, along with any community independent who wants to help shape Australia’s future should consider a broad coalition to help take Australia forward.”
Those keen on the idea stress that MPs would be given the right to remain independent and able to vote on all laws as a matter of conscience, especially on issues which affected their constituencies.
Several teal MPs, including Zali Steggall, Monique Ryan and Allegra Spender, declined interview requests about the topic. Simon Holmes à Court, whose Climate 200 group gave 35 candidates $10.85 million at the last federal election, did not respond to messages.
But many key questions remain. What’s in it for the teals to align with a party structure? And who could lead the party? Some nominate Spender as an obvious choice.
“But can you imagine that group of people – all with main-character energy – voluntarily ceding the spotlight?” one Liberal wryly observed.
Advocates point to the meteoric rise of En Marche (now Renaissance), the movement that propelled Emmanuel Macron to the French presidency just a year after its inception. Unlike traditional political powerhouses, it achieved dominance without the backing of established institutions, grassroots protest roots, or a pre-existing celebrity figure.
The introduction of new federal political donation laws on July 1 has become a complicating factor. The regime caps individual donations at $50,000, lowers the disclosure threshold to $5000 and imposes spending limits of $800,000 per electorate and $90 million nationally.
Several teal independents have criticised the Labor government’s changes, with Zoe Daniel, the former independent member for Goldstein, and Rex Patrick, the former independent senator for South Australia, challenging the legislation in the High Court.
Graeme Orr, a law professor at the University of Queensland, says the reforms cut both ways.
“There are swings and roundabouts,” Orr says. While the system now rewards organisation over billionaire backing, it does not shut the door on new entrants. Donation bundling remains legal, and spending caps are higher than often assumed. “It’s not like the limits are really low,” he says. “It’s like $90 million in electioneering for a party.
“One thing you can’t do is rely on a handful of large donors, which I think is kind of fair, and it wouldn’t be a great perception to be dependent on a billionaire.”
Cathy McGowan, who won Indi in Victoria from the Liberals in 2013 with “kitchen table conversation” campaign and later endorsed independent Helen Haines, says communities are increasingly organising to fill a representational gap.
“I think Australians are incredibly disappointed with the failure of the opposition to articulate alternative policy positions for the country,” McGowan says. “I hear that all over the place where I go.”
McGowan denies any involvement in starting a party but says she is regularly approached for advice.
But she also identifies a tension. “At an electorate level, people are organising. They’re wanting much better representation,” she says. “At a national level, they’re wanting a much stronger opposition … and they feel they’re not getting it.”
Not everyone believes that tension can be resolved through a new party.
Lucy Wicks, who held the NSW bellwether seat of Robertson from 2013 to 2022, says Australia does not need a new centrist party so much as a Liberal Party willing to rediscover its core purpose.
“It needs a Liberal Party brave enough to remember what, and who, it stands for, once again,” she says.
Wicks traces her political faith to learning in her 20s about “reward for effort, individual opportunity and the belief that your dreams aren’t limited by your birthplace or socio-economic status”. She says the party’s rejection by communities like Robertson reflects a loss of connection rather than an appetite for a new movement.
That disconnect became personal in a conversation with her son Oscar, almost 17, who will vote at the next election. During a drive to basketball, he told her: “Mum, if you weren’t my mum, I reckon socialism sounds pretty good.”
“He based his views, when we chatted it through, entirely on TikTok reels,” she says. “Are the Liberals even talking to that generation?”
On housing, Wicks warns policy failure is alienating families the Liberals once championed, saying reform would help women, “including single women with families like myself who … are now locked out of the housing market and face a lifetime of renting and retirement insecurity.”
John Roskam, a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, argues the teals’ success was built on independence – and that formalising an alliance would undercut their appeal.
“The attraction of the teals as independent community-minded advocates would be very substantially reduced if they were formed into some sort of national party,” Roskam says.
He also disputes the idea that the teal surge reflected a mass exodus of Liberal voters. Much of the vote, he argues, was tactical.
“The idea that teals represented a massive disaffected Liberal cohort isn’t really supported by the evidence.”
For moderates inside the Liberal Party, Roskam says the calculus is complex. Leaving risks surrendering influence inside one of the country’s two governing vehicles. “It would require a massive infrastructure effort,” he says, “and while third parties have succeeded in the short term, they rarely last.”
Others are less convinced the party still offers a viable pathway.
Some moderates pin their hopes on Victoria, where Opposition Leader Jess Wilson is seen as a potential circuit breaker if she can defy expectations at the November state election. A strong showing, even short of victory, could bolster the case for recovery. One senior Liberal moderate says there is a reluctance to speak about the future for fear of cruelling Wilson, new South Australian Liberal leader Ashton Hurn, and NSW Opposition Leader Kellie Sloane.
But privately, even optimists concede the problem is structural. The seats that once anchored the moderate wing are now teal. The membership that remains is more conservative than the one that elected John Howard, Turnbull or even Morrison.
“I think the next round of state and federal elections will be the making or the breaking of the party,” says Tony Barry, a former Liberal strategist who now runs political research company RedBridge Group. “Another round of catastrophic results will give a better insight as to whether the party is institutionally broken and the internal will to reform.”
Labor now occupies much of the centre-left. One Nation has carved out a durable slice of the right. And the Liberals have lost the cosmopolitan, urban voters (and their donors) who once balanced their Coalition. In between sits a substantial group of voters – economically moderate, socially progressive and deeply climate-conscious – who feel politically homeless. Some in the party aren’t interested in winning them back.
When Don Chipp walked out on the Liberals in 1977 and started the Democrats, many dismissed it as a footnote. It wasn’t. It reshaped a generation of politics. When Malcolm Fraser quietly tried to build an alternative decades later, few paid attention. Today, their diagnosis looks less like a curiosity and more like a warning.
And for the first time in decades, the question of whether a new centrist force could emerge is no longer academic. It is live.
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