"Under both Abbott and Turnbull, there has been a lack of a clear sense of purpose and values," Barnes says, expanding on an argument he made in the literary journal Meanjin in 2017. Then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton on August 20. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The Liberal Party was "riven by ideological factions, personality cults and power struggles", Barnes wrote in his essay. He argued that the party founded by Robert Menzies in 1944 had become "rudderless, racked by factionalism and internal tensions". He is not alone. In a book published last year, Abbott’s Right: The Conservative Tradition from Menzies to Abbott, Australian Catholic University lecturer Damien Freeman argued "the Liberal Party is groping for its lost identity as the dominant centre-right party in Australian politics”. John Roskam, executive director of the free market Institute of Public Affairs think tank, this week argued the party "was verging on an existential crisis".

"For a decade the Liberal Party has struggled with the question of what should be its philosophy and its principles," Roskam wrote in The Australian Financial Review. Since its founding, the Liberal Party has combined two distinct political philosophies that in many other countries are represented by competing parties: conservatism and liberalism. The former emphasises a respect for traditions while the latter stresses the freedom of the individual. John Howard famously described the Liberal Party as a "broad church", saying the fusion of conservatism and liberalism explained why the party had been so electorally successful over many decades. “We do occupy as the Liberal Party of Australia a special position amongst centre-right parties around the world," he said in 2005. Howard warned that the party must "care for both of those traditions" and "never see it as our role as Australian Liberals to see the triumph of one of those traditions to the unfair detriment and certainly not the obliteration of the other”.

It's advice many of today's Liberal parliamentarians seem to have ignored. In a leaked speech last year, cabinet minister Christopher Pyne boasted that moderates in the party were in the "winner's circle", a turnaround from the days the party appeared to be "swinging to the right". It is now common for Liberal conservatives to privately deride colleagues as "left-wingers" and for moderates to call the party's right-wingers "reactionaries". A winner takes all attitude has become pervasive, and the sense that colleagues with different views are not just wrong but illegitimate. "This can be seen as a revolt against the moderate control of the Liberal Party," Liberal Party historian Gregory Melleuish says of the push to replace Turnbull with Dutton. "Hardcore moderates and conservatives are now knife-fighting each other," Barnes says.

In a letter to Malcolm Turnbull this week NSW frontbencher Concetta Fierravanti-Wells spoke for many on the party's right when she said: "Our conservative base strongly feel that their voice has been eroded ... They needed some demonstrable indication that there are conservative voices around your Cabinet table. Tim Wilson, a moderate MP from Victoria, shot back at those who said the party had drifted too far to the left. "People need to sit down and actually read some philosophy and actually understand what the words 'conservatism' and 'liberalism' mean," he said. "The Turnbull government was actually very consistent with those values." Turnbull himself, in a speech last year to a London think tank, stressed that Menzies deliberately did not call his new political party "conservative" and wanted it firmly anchored in the centre of Australian politics.

As Prime Minister, Turnbull proudly argued he pursued an agenda that is pragmatic and evidence-based; in his lexicon "ideological" is a negative term, often followed by "idiocy". Barnes believes that the only thing Turnbull truly believed in was "his own genius" and that he ran government as a day-to-day proposition focussed on narrowing disputes with the opposition. A Liberal MP agrees: "The measure of success better than Labor, not as good as we can be." One of the issues that contributed to Turnbull's downfall was school funding. The Abbott government initially wanted to slash spending on schools, and argued that money had little impact on students' results. Turnbull then suggested, seemingly on a whim, that the federal government could stop funding public schools and hand over responsibilities for the states. A year later he announced the "Gonski 2.0" funding package that delivered a big increase in spending, but enraged the Catholic schools sector. Independent experts thought it was an improvement on the status quo. But exactly what the government stood for - besides neutralising a Labor policy advantage - was unclear.

On economics, the Liberal Party regards itself as the home of small government and lower taxes yet the Turnbull government has implemented a tax on the banks and taken an interventionist approach to energy prices. Turnbull's first major policy move as PM, the national innovation and science agenda, was supposed to launch an "ideas boom". But when the government realised all its innovation talk actually scared voters, rather than exciting them, it was shelved. Similarly, the idea of handing out tax cuts to big businesses - with the benefits to flow down to workers - proved a political dud and had to be abandoned. Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating last year said that liberal economics - based on privatisation and minimal government intervention - had gone nowhere after the global financial crisis. "Liberal economics has run into a dead end and has had no answer to the contemporary malaise," he said.

The problem is not just isolated to Australia. In Britain, Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May is struggling to hold together her party, split between "soft" Brexiters on the left and "hard" Brexiters on the right. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn almost won the last election on an unabashedly left-wing platform including a major expansion of the welfare state and renationalisation of key industries. Even in the US, the orthodoxies of conservative economics no longer hold, with Donald Trump carrying out his threats to introduce tariffs on imported goods from China and Europe. “Just as Reagan converted the GOP into a conservative party, Trump has converted the GOP into a populist working-class party,” policy analyst Stephen Moore, a long champion of free market economics, said following Trump's election. Tom Switzer, a former Liberal policy advisor and executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies, says the big new cleavage on the conservative side of politics is immigration.

"Liberals have generally supported a big Australia but something has changed in the past year," he says. "There is a lot of support among conservative voters for slashing immigration." Gregory Melleuish says the party's ideological divides are significant, but blames a lack of leadership for the infighting. "It's a people problem," he says. "This goes back to 2008 when Howard's natural successor, Peter Costello, said he didn't want to be leader. No one has had the authority to bring people from both sides of the party together. School yard fights break out when nobody can send you to detention." Switzer points out the party has survived bitter disputes before, like when John Gorton and Billy McMahon clashed bitterly over free trade and deregulation in the 1960s. Terry Barnes is more pessimistic.