Prime Minister Scott Morrison during his election address at the National Press Club in Canberra this week. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer My dad was a fellow from the bush who feared as a young man that he was forgotten by the wider world ... and here, in Menzies’ vision, he discovered a home where individuals were valued. The forgotten people were, in Menzies’ words, “salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on”. In the political, social and economic sense, they were the broad middle class. Pitifully, you can just about hear the leader of what today is not more than the scraps of that old party leaping onto a stage and crying, in a voice cynically marketed to a dumbed-down audience: “The forgotten people! How good are they?” Menzies’ Liberals, with the assistance of the Country Party, ruled for all of the 1950s and all of the 1960s, and John Howard did it again for a decade through the turn of the century.

Loading This week, within sight of a watershed election, the Country Party’s successor, the Nationals, went to war with the Liberals, threatening to end the Coalition agreement over a couple of unwinnable Senate seats in NSW. Don't be surprised if Barnaby Joyce, leader of this contrived insurrection, challenges for the leadership of his party live on TV on Saturday night if the election count proves dire. It has come to this. The long success of the older Liberal Party, however, was not simply because of the Menzian creed or through staying joined at the hip with the Country Party. The Labor Party had lost its way, mired in factional warfare, its would-be leaders fighting the political battles of a past Australia. Riven by internal hatreds and religious bigotry and its most notable expending their energy on ideological sophistry, Labor altogether lost sight of Ben Chifley’s “light on the hill”, and consigned itself to 23 years in the wastelands.

History repeats. And reverses. In this second decade of a new century, it is the Liberal Party that has lost its bearings. It has forgotten its people. Riven by internal hatreds and bigotry, its notables expending their energy on ideological sophistry, it is fighting the battles of a past Australia. Should the bookies and the polls be right and the Morrison-led Coalition be shown the exit this weekend, you need only search for something the more vacuous of Liberals call “the base” to begin to understand what happened. When you spend your waking hours searching for something that doesn’t exist, you are lost.

Loading Oh, we can hear the screams from here. The base represents the foundation of the party; the thing that holds it up. But today's so-called base explains nothing but why the Liberal edifice is toppling. Those espousing the need to shout out to “the base” are from the hard right. They have bastardised the idea of what constitutes a conservative. My father and vast numbers of Menzian Liberals believed that to be conservative meant valuing constancy and middle-of-the-road traditions and decency.

Those Conservatives who have sought to take over the Liberal Party grant themselves the vanity of a capital C, standing the meaning of the old word on its head. Abbott, Dutton and a slew of lesser Conservative lights are reactionaries, wedded to a fundamentalist view of both economic and social policy. They have inserted their ideology so deeply into the Liberal Party that they had no need to join Cory Bernardi when he defected to set up the Australian Conservatives. Instead, having brought down Malcolm Turnbull (for the second time, both over the signature issue of our times, climate change), and seeing off moderate and progressive Liberals like Julie Bishop, Kelly O’Dwyer and Christopher Pyne, they are left with a convenient and energetic marketer for a leader and bask in the barracking of commentators from Sky after dark, the boosters from the opinion pages of the overwrought Murdoch papers, the hard theorists of the Institute of Public Affairs (“The Voice of Freedom”) and the evangelicals who have taken to filling the party’s aisles. Walking out: The quest for ideological purity has cost the Liberal Party some of its leading figures, such as foreign minister and deputy leader Julie Bishop (right) and jobs minister Kelly O'Dwyer (left). Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Even if you were to accept that these troops constituted a “base”, they are talking to themselves.