Liberals Turn On Their Own

Note: This article first appeared on our sister publication NationFirst.com.au

The Liberal Party just told its own voters to get stuffed.

This weekend, while Australians are crying out for lower immigration and real representation, the Queensland LNP voted against reducing migration. At the same time, they sidelined conservatives, stacked tickets with insiders, and continued their quiet purge of anyone who actually stands for something.

If you’re wondering why voters are walking away, you’re looking at it.

And it’s not coming from nobodies on the fringe. It’s being called out by people who’ve been inside the fight.

Scott Challen, a conservative anti-immigration activist who goes by the social media name Shallow Chal, posted on X over the weekend, reacting to what unfolded at the Queensland LNP State Council.

He pointed to the party voting down a motion to reduce immigration, and the repeating pattern of the party sidelining conservatives.

Challen said he had spent two years inside the Liberal Party trying to “help rectify it from the inside after Covid”. Since being kicked out, he says he has watched them “boot more people and sell out Australia even harder”, warning that many within the party must know it is now “finally cooked”.

And the examples are piling up.

Matt Canavan, the Nationals leader and Queensland senator, has been pushed into a number two Senate position many believe is no longer safely winnable.

Meanwhile, James McGrath, the Liberal senator who helped orchestrate Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership coup against Tony Abbott, retains his place at the top of the ticket.

And then there’s Victoria.

Moira Deeming, a rock solid conservative and Victorian State Upper House MP, has now been dumped in preselection.

Who replaced her? Indian-born Dinesh Gourisetty, a Victorian Liberal candidate and businessman, courtesy of what seems to be a moderate faction that’s heavily populated with ethnic Indians.

Now here’s where it started to raise eyebrows. Back in 2019, Gourisetty was reported by SBS News as the owner of an Indian restaurant in Melbourne’s west that was fined $25,000 after council inspectors found serious hygiene breaches. According to that report, inspectors identified issues including rodent droppings, unsafe food storage, grease build-up, and failures to maintain basic cleanliness standards over an extended period. Gourisetty pleaded guilty to eleven charges related to food safety.

That alone was enough to make some within the party question how he had been elevated. But it didn’t stop there.

Within a day of winning preselection, the situation exploded. Gourisetty withdrew as a candidate after it emerged he had provided a character reference for a man later convicted of child sex offences. In that reference, he attested to the man’s “good character”, despite the offences involving the grooming and assault of a 15-year-old girl. That reference was provided less than two years ago as part of court proceedings. And yet this man made it all the way through Liberal Party preselection and was used to remove a sitting MP.

So again, the question becomes unavoidable. How does that happen? Was it incompetence? Or something else entirely?

Because according to reporting in The Australian, a theory is now doing the rounds in conservative Liberal circles that senior figures within the party may have known about this damaging information beforehand. The theory goes like this: Gourisetty’s strong factional numbers were used to knock out Deeming first. Once she was removed, the damaging information would surface, forcing his withdrawal and leaving head office to install a preferred replacement. If that theory is even close to true, this isn’t just dysfunction. It’s a stitch-up. And if you’re a rank-and-file Liberal voter, you have every right to ask whether the game was rigged from the start.

Because from the outside, this doesn’t look like a party trying to win. It looks like a party trying to control itself, even at the cost of its own credibility.

This entire saga only reinforces what voters are already seeing. Stand firm on issues that matter, and you’re pushed out. Play the internal game, and you’re elevated. Until you become inconvenient. Then you’re gone too.

And if you think this chaos is contained to Victoria, think again. The polling tells the broader story. A RedBridge Group and Accent Research poll conducted between 23 and 27 March 2026 with a sample of 1,003 has Labor on 32 percent. One Nation on 29 percent. The Coalition on just 17 percent. Seventeen.

When Peter van Onselen, a political reporter with Daily Mail Australia, says One Nation is now effectively functioning as the opposition, it reflects what the data is showing. And when Rowan Dean, a Sky News Australia commentator and editor in chief of The Spectator Australia, suggests Deeming could leave, join Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, and win, it shows how fluid this situation has become.

Which brings us to Angus Taylor, the Liberal leader. The Liberal Party’s problem is not that it has been too conservative. Its problem is that it stopped giving voters a reason to believe in it. If Taylor drags the party further left, he will not win left-wing voters. They already have parties for that. Labor, the Greens and the teals own that space. All moving left would do is further alienate the conservatives the Liberals cannot survive without.

This is not a battle for the centre. It is a test of whether the party has the courage to stand for anything at all. And right now, voters are making their judgement. They are leaving.

So where does that leave you? Do you keep backing a party that sidelines your values, elevates insiders, and then wonders why support is collapsing? Or do you start backing people who actually represent what you believe? Because this moment matters more than most realise. This is how political movements end. And it is also how new ones begin.

The only question is whether you are going to sit back and watch it happen, or be part of what comes next.

“If you try to be everything to everyone, you become nothing.”
– Yuri van der Sluis