Australian conservatism is in a strange place. Not quite dead, but certainly confused, fragmented, and at times, indistinguishable from the progressive establishment it claims to resist. It's fair to ask: Has Australian conservatism lost its way? Or was it ever a coherent movement to begin with?

The Menzian Myth

Conservatives often harken back to the supposed golden age of Robert Menzies, the founder of the Liberal Party and long-serving Prime Minister. Menzies is remembered as the patrician statesman of "the forgotten people," the middle class, defending tradition, enterprise, and family. But even then, conservatism in Australia wasn't so much a principled philosophy as it was a set of pragmatic instincts: support for monarchy, suspicion of socialism, a respect for order and duty.

Menzies blended British Toryism with classical liberal economics, yet never really developed a distinctly Australian conservative philosophy. It was reactive, not visionary, a respectable managerialism rather than a cultural force. And he was a free trade globalist for even those days, selling iron ore to imperial Japan which was fired back at us, earning him the name "pig iron" Bob. He did not oppose the undermining of the White Australia Policy.

Fusion or Confusion?

The Liberal Party, often described as a "broad church," was a fusion of free-market liberals and Burkean conservatives. That uneasy marriage is now in open divorce. The libertarians see government as the enemy. The social conservatives see culture as collapsing. And the moderates see power as an end in itself.

Without a unifying worldview, Australian conservatism often ends up being defined by what it's against, wokeness, big government, political correctness, rather than what it stands for. It has no narrative for the future, no positive vision of the good society.

Culture War Without Ammo

Australian conservatives frequently lament the Left's dominance in universities, media, the arts, and education, but do little to contest it. Think tanks preach to the converted. The Coalition tinkers with tax cuts while the bureaucracy marches leftward. Sky News After Dark hosts rage nightly, but the institutions remain captured. Even the freedom movement does not tackle the threat that the universities pose, with massive international student intakes set to replace, via their inevitable migration, local Aussies. Only this blog and Macrobusiness.com.au, have taken this issue on.

In contrast to the American Right, which at least has a noisy populist insurgency and cultural entrepreneurship, Australian conservatism feels timid, polite, often desperate to be liked by its enemies. It wants respect from elites it quietly resents.

The Rise of the Bureaucratic Right

Today's conservative leaders often sound like technocrats with slightly better manners. They accept the progressive framing on most issues, climate, race, gender, migration, but ask that we implement the changes a bit slower, please, and preferably with economic modelling attached. This isn't resistance; it's managed decline. Howard and Abbott for example, fit this model.

Worse, much of the conservative base is aging, disillusioned, and poorly represented. Their instincts, on national identity, social cohesion, moral clarity, are dismissed as relics by leaders more interested in quarterly polling than cultural renewal.

Was There Ever a Real Direction?

Unlike in the US or UK, Australia never had a religious right of political consequence, nor a deep tradition of conservative political philosophy. There was no Edmund Burke of the bush, no Tocqueville on the Murray. What existed was an instinctive Anglo-Australian nationalism, a quiet pride in country, Crown, and community, which has been hollowed out by globalism, elite cultural self-loathing, and ethno-racial demographic replacement.

Australian conservatism wasn't so much betrayed as slowly bleached. It lacked intellectual scaffolding and failed to regenerate. By outsourcing its values to economic rationalism and bureaucratic gradualism, it lost its soul.

Where to Now?

If conservatism is to recover any relevance in Australia, it must become more than a reflex. It needs to become a counterculture. That means investing in ideas, education, families, and art. It means daring to talk about truth, beauty, duty, faith, and limits, not just tax rates and GDP. It means building parallel institutions, not begging for scraps from hostile ruling Leftist elites.

In short, it needs to stop conserving the status quo, and start conserving civilisation. Start by going to the local university and seeing the Asian future that they bring. I did yesterday, and by a head count found white Australians in a minority, regardless of the "official" stats they put on their website.