Welcome
Welcome to this 29th edition of the Democracy First Newsletter.
It's Time for a New Centre Party in Australia
The Liberals have collapsed. The Coalition is in tatters. One Nation is filling the vacuum for the time being.
Australia needs a new centre party to take control of the country. It's time for the adults in the room to step up and stop the nonsense.
For years, the political class in Australia has been losing the legitimacy it once had. It has become hollowed out. It has no leaders of substance. It's membership numbers have been in freefall.
For a long time, a stalemate descended on the country. We limped along. Nothing got done. But we all hoped that something, eventually, would happen. You can't live forever with a dull mediocrity all around you. Eventually, something has to happen.
And now it has. The slow demise of the Liberal Party has become a collapse. It is hard to say when it happened exactly. The average age membership of the party has been crawling upwards for decades and eventually it passed 70 in 2024. But even that didn't produce alarm bells. Then all of a sudden, over the summer, the floorboards gave way.
When the once formidable Liberal and National Parties together poll 19%, as they did in this week's Redbridge poll, we know the collapse is no longer coming, it is here.
This week's financial disclosure data from the AEC confirms the humiliation. In 2024-25, the Liberals spent $193 million, the Nationals $19 million, Labor $160 million, the Greens $40 million, and One Nation $3 million.
That is, despite spending $193m in the May 2025 election, topping the list, the Liberal Party lost 15 seats and were banished from metropolitan areas.
It is quite an achievement to spend $193m and go backwards.
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We need a new centre party to now emerge and replace the Liberal Party. With the rise of One Nation, the Hard Right in the Liberal Party will now consolidate in competing with Pauline Hanson, allowing Labor a free run in forming governments. Only a new centre party can defeat Labor in this context.
Democracy First is a movement to create a new centre party in Australian politics. We want to represent the 80% of Australians who know our system is broken and has to be fixed.
Join us. www.democracyfirst.org.au/membership
Where Did the Libs Go Wrong?
The Liberal Party was formed in 1944 as a non-Labor party. Its sole purpose was to defeat Labor, but it is now racked by multiple divisions, which make it unable to fulfill its purpose.
Throughout its history the Liberal Party made a number of major strategic and ideological misjudgements:
1. It sided with Big Business and the Big End of Town instead of with market competition to break-up cartels and favour small and family businesses.
2. It didn’t take enough interest in the well-being of workers and their families.
3. It overlooked the importance of civil society in creating sustainable, self-reliant families and communities, and became too comfortable with Big Government and Big Bureaucracy.
4. It swallowed the mantra of neo-liberalism that economics is the only thing that matters, and allowed the Left to take over the humanities and cultural institutions.
5. It aligned itself with career politicians and forgot that the core idea of democracy is citizen self-government.
6. It was too slow to embrace the multi-ethnicity, multi-faith character of our country
7. It accepted high levels of government debt, transferred responsibility for debt repayment to the next generation, and abandoned the prudent conservative practice of living within our means.
8. It was born in a time of Imperial loyalty to Britain, then transferred its loyalty to the US Empire. It never committed itself to Australian national sovereignty.
9. It was too slow to embrace the digital revolution and the innovation imperative, and still longs for an economy based on wool, wheat and gold.
10. It ceased being pro-active in ordering society, and became reactive and defensive, locked into negative politicking as its only modus operandi.
These historic misjudgements have taken their toll over decades. The party no longer has the capacity to reinvent itself for a new time. It will now die.
Have we missed any big blunders and failures? Let us know if you think we have.
The Key Elements of a New Centre Party
The elements of a new centre party are in place. The form of coming together is not yet known, but it will comprise the following key elements:
1. Selected Independent MPs around the country.
2. Still-sane Liberal Party members tired of the Hard Right.
3. Ex-ALP members tired of mediocrity
4. SME proprietors and leaders tired of being ignored.
5. Sensible Greens who want to govern.
6. Migrant communities who want to break the Bamboo and Teak ceilings
7. Innovators and Entrepreneurs in all fields.
8. Regional and Community leaders tired of inertia
9. Reformers in service delivery tired of stagnation.
10 Citizens tired of pointless polarisation, identity politics and culture wars.
These 10 constituencies collectively constitute the mainstream centre of Australia. The fringes can go and do their own thing.
Become involved in Democracy First and help bring people together in creating a new politics. 2026 is the year of change.
Join us. www.democracyfirst.org.au
Local Innovation Hubs
In 2026, we are establishing a Local Innovation Hub in each of Australia’s 150 federal electorates. The old parties organised their people in tedious, bureaucratic branches. They met monthly and did nothing. They passed resolutions and changed nothing.
In the new politics, we will organise in each electorate through Local Innovation Hubs. Their purpose is to create local solutions and better ways of doing things.
Each hub will comprise a space (a shopfront or warehouse or community hall) in which we can generate better ways of doing things in:
- family support
- small business support
- aged care
- local job-creation
- local power generation
- inclusion of people with disabilities
- natural disaster risk reduction healthy living and illness-prevention
- and many others.
The Process The first step in the process of establishing a Local Innovation Hub is the appointment of a Facilitator in each of the 150 federal electorates.
The role of a Facilitator is to put together a Team of people (up to a dozen) to develop the Hub.
Each Facilitator and Team has autonomy in developing the Hub as they think appropriate for their community. In style and priorities, these will vary across the country.
Express your interest in these roles at www.democracyfirst.org.au/hub/
Participants must be residents in their own electorate.
We Need a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Like Norway.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has reported a 2025 return on investment of $A350 billion, or 15.1%. This return funds 25% of Norway's fiscal budget.
By contrast, Australia's natural resources delivered $59 billion in royalties and company tax in 2023/24.
Bear in mind that Australia's mineral resources greatly exceed that of Norway's, which is limited to oil and gas. We have resources of every type.
In the decade from 2013/14 to 2023/24, Australia derived $395 billion from its natural resources, slightly above Norway's return of $350 billion in one year.
The Norwegian NBIM fund holds assets of $US2.2 trillion, is one of the world’s largest investors, holding on average 1.5 per cent of all listed stocks globally. It invests the Norwegian state’s revenues from oil and gas production in bonds, stocks, property and unlisted renewable energy projects outside its home market.
In Australia, we let Oligarchs like Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer own the bulk of profits from natural resources. We are a mug country.
Three series of the excellent Norwegian drama Lykkeland (State of Happiness) are available on the web. It follows the discovery of Norwegian oil and gas in the 1960s to the idea of creating a Sovereign Wealth Fund.
The final series concludes with Anna Hellevik, daughter of a poor farming family near Stavangar, coming up with the idea of creating the Sovereign Wealth Fund to invest proceeds from oil and gas.
It is a brilliant series. Every Australian politician should be forced to watch it until they publicly confess to their own stupidity in allowing Oligarchs to own our precious natural resources.
Democracy First | Bolder. Smarter. Stronger.
Enquiries: Vern Hughes Convenor 0425 722 890 E: vern@democracyfirst.org.au
(cont.) Using the evaluation results to adjust incentive rewards to build up participants’ discourse merit accounts, thus providing Participants’ ‘Empowerment using merit points to support decisions either fully supported by evaluation results or have to be made by officials, - Automatically Constraining Officials’ Power by means of the requirement of officials’ having to - ‘Pay for decision’ with merit points (their own ‘earned’ points and participants’ earned points) - Thus creating both decisions transparently based on the merit of discourse entries, as well as a better balance between citizen empowerment and official power. The platform for such a system has yet to be developed, though the needed technology and method tools are available today. Realization of such a system should not be done by sudden wholesale ‘reset’ but by small incremental project by project application after ‘testing’ the process by introduction and familiarization of the public as ‘planning games’ or opinion poll extensions.
An invitation to start developing a public planning discourse platform balancing public empowerment and official power control A platform for citizen participation on planning projects is urgently needed (esp. for non-local ones that can’t as easily be settled by voting) including Incentives for citizens to enteri information (proposals,questions, arguments, data) and provisions for evaluation by participants: -of ‘Quality of proposed plans: evaluation results that lead to decision criteria based on the merit of discourse contributions - and Plausibility / merit of discourse contributions (continued)
This is a little off-topic; I appreciate the concerns that make you call for a new party in Australia, and I am not arguing for or against the issues of that situation. My sentiment is that the current governance systems -- even those flyng the democracy flag and striving to meet its ideals, are showing clearly that their governance provisions are inadequate, especially so when they are facing issues transgressing existing national and regional boundaries, and are vulnerable to the abuse temptations of power. This is a global concern; my ideas about 'public planning discourse' with systemati evaluation of discourse contributions apply everywhere; my urge to start thinking about these issues should not be seen as meddling in your local situation but looking for governancen / planning provisions that then also would be useful locally. Below is a brief summary of ideas for this that might be useful as starting point for that larger issue. My longer papers and posts with more detail don't seem to gather the needed attention... Please see next comment
"Where did the Libs go wrong?" Well done Vern. Couldn't agree more!
"That is, despite spending $193m in the May 2025 election, topping the list, the Liberal Party lost 15 seats and were banished from metropolitan areas. It is quite an achievement to spend $193m and go backwards." To me it proves the point that it takes more than money to win seats. I also believe that promoting positivity is far more effective in motivating people than accentuating negativity.