The split in the Right has emerged and is reshaping the party

There hasn’t been a week since Sussan Ley seized the Coalition’s top job that people haven’t speculated about a leadership challenge.

But in the five months since the last election, a new group of conservative MPs within the National Right faction, with a distinctly Trumpian-populist flavour, has emerged to challenge accepted Liberal dogma. Its members are determined to speak out, and are not afraid of using incendiary language.

The last month has been disastrous for Ley, losing two high-profile shadow ministers – Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price – both of whom are from the party’s “new right”.

The party’s largest and most restless faction, the National Right Conservatives, is divided (though not formally split), with a new sub-faction taking shape in the last five months.

This group, led by people including Hastie and Price, wants to upend Liberal orthodoxies and tack towards the MAGA movement. The “old guard” – think Angus Taylor, Michaelia Cash and rising star James Paterson – are the standard-bearers for smaller government, lower taxes and other conservative orthodoxies.

At present, the numbers break down like this: Ley’s Moderate faction has 16 members. Shadow minister Alex Hawke is Ley’s closest political ally and his Centre Right faction, which has played kingmaker on more than one occasion, has four members, while six MPs are not aligned with any faction.

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Combined, those groups deliver a likely 26 votes in a 51-member party room – which means Ley is safe for now, barring a catastrophic gaffe or misstep.

In addition, many of the 14 members of the more pragmatic old guard do not want a challenge, at least right now. This further bolsters Ley’s position.

This is my fourth piece on the Liberal Party’s factions in the last 11 years (2014, 2021 and 2023 are here), and the ideological divisions within the party have never seemed sharper.

The 2022 and 2025 elections wiped out a generation of talent for the Liberal Party, and Ley has taken control of the party at its lowest ebb in decades.

As an optimistic senior figure in the Coalition said to me, “once we deal with this outbreak [of disunity], we are actually ready to be a proper opposition”.

That remains to be seen.

National Right (old guard)

Peter Dutton and Michael Sukkar were the leader and convener, respectively, of the National Right until May 3, when both men lost their seats.

The old guard is more pragmatic. It believes the party has to have some semblance of a credible climate policy, that to tear down the party’s first female leader after just five months would be a disaster, that the party needs to restore its economic credibility and that Ley deserves a proper go in the top job as the party picks up the pieces from the 2025 election.

Angus Taylor was the group’s candidate to be leader in the post-election run-off against Ley and lost, 29-25. Since then, as a Ley ally who doesn’t want to be named puts it: “Angus was OK to begin with, and he has been extra helpful recently as Hastie has imploded.”

Taylor presents himself as above factional politics, but his enemies (and some of his friends) claim he is involved, usually through surrogates, in preselection battles for lower and upper house seats in his home state of NSW. Born in September 1966, he is a generation older than Hastie, who was born in September 1982. Taylor does not have time on his side.

Other senior members of the old guard include frontbenchers Michaelia Cash, Dan Tehan, Jonno Duniam, Claire Chandler and the most obvious candidate for future faction leader, James Paterson, who wants to take over the franchise and reunite it.

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Some Moderates friendly with Paterson joke that he is a Moderate and just hasn’t realised it yet, but the IPA alum tells colleagues he is a pragmatic conservative whose first priority is getting the Liberal Party back into government. That includes backing some sort of credible climate policy.

Paterson voted for Taylor, but he supports Ley as leader. As a measure of her confidence in him, he recently returned to the leadership group after a post-election exile and has now also temporarily taken over Hastie’s portfolio in addition to holding finance, government services and the public service.

It’s important to note that while the old guard and new right are divided on policy, in the event of a leadership challenge, both groups would almost certainly unite to vote for the same candidate. That would most likely be Taylor or Hastie, but it’s not impossible to see a third option, such as Tehan, coming up the middle, as Scott Morrison did in 2019.

National Right (new right)

While some MPs claim the new right isn’t a “thing”, it most definitely is.

While you could not say there are now two conservative or Right factions in the Liberal Party, there is a generational struggle between the old guard and new right over economic policy (Liberal orthodoxy versus government intervention in markets), pragmatism versus populism, and support for globalisation versus an Australia-first approach.

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The new right is generally younger, less doctrinaire, more open to market intervention by government (such as Hastie’s call for a return to advanced manufacturing in Australia and energy security), focused on cutting immigration levels and determined to fight and win culture wars against the “woke” establishment.

The rhetoric is decidedly Trumpian, or perhaps owes as big a debt to Nigel Farage from Britain’s Reform UK party. New right Liberals believe that, given time and space to explain their message, it will resonate with ordinary Australians who mostly don’t like Trump, but are receptive to messages about restoring manufacturing, clamping down on immigration and national pride.

The two standard-bearers of the new right, Hastie and Price, also have the backing of the conservative campaign group Advance, which proved its skills working for the defeat of the Voice to parliament referendum, and frequently boosts the pair on its social media channels.

The new right doesn’t want to blow up the show – it wants to take over.

To underscore the point that the National Right is not entirely split, it’s worth noting that Liberal MP Tony Pasin is notionally a member of the new right, but he’s also one of Taylor’s closest supporters and was one of his numbers men in the May leadership ballot. Similarly, Phillip Thompson and Cameron Caldwell are close to both Hastie and Taylor and could fit comfortably within either of the Right sub-factions.

Other members of the new right are also Taylor supporters, rather than Hastie supporters. At least for now.

How, or whether, the old guard and new right can bridge their differences and come to an agreement on contentious policy issues remains to be seen. If they do, and if Ley stumbles, it could be fatal for the opposition leader.

Moderates

The Moderates also suffered heavy losses at the 2025 election.

Ley is the most senior member of the Moderates, but she is not the formal lead of the faction – that’s Anne Ruston, the Coalition’s spokeswoman on the tricky portfolios of health, aged care and disability.

Ley is seen as a political chameleon, having previously aligned herself with the Centre Right faction during the Morrison years.

There is some angst internally about her long alliance with Centre Right leader Hawke, and the fact that a key ally of his is Ley’s chief of staff. Hawke is hated by the National Right – both the new right and old guard.

Former Moderate leader-conveners Simon Birmingham and Paul Fletcher quit months before the election and, at a dinner in February, handed on the job to senior shadows David Coleman and Jane Hume.

But Coleman lost his seat and Hume, at least in part because she voted for Taylor rather than fellow moderate Ley, was relegated to the backbench and removed as factional convener.

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The new leader of the Moderates, Ruston, is seen to lack authority by some in the group, and has ambitious young MPs snapping at her heels. These include returning MP Tim Wilson and senators Andrew Bragg, Maria Kovacic and Dave Sharma. Those latter two face an almighty preselection battle for the one winnable NSW Senate spot the Moderates will have at the next election.

Don’t discount Queenslander James McGrath’s influence. He doesn’t have to pretend to be a conservative now that former leader Peter Dutton is out of parliament and, along with fellow Queenslander Paul Scarr, is a trusted hand.

Centre Right

The Centre Right is the Alex Hawke faction and has been since he fell out with his mentor, conservative state MP and kingmaker David Clarke. As the Saturday Paper recently reported, the split occurred after Hawke won pre-selection for the federal seat of Mitchell before the Coalition’s heavy defeat at the 2007 election.

Although small in number, the Centre Right played a key role in replacing Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull.

It was also the Centre Right’s tactical voting that ensured that when Peter Dutton first challenged Turnbull for the leadership in 2019, he had enough votes to fatally wound Turnbull’s leadership, but not enough for Dutton to win.

Days later, the Centre Right switched its votes to Morrison (as planned) and the Moderates, aghast at the idea of Dutton as prime minister, abandoned Julie Bishop and backed Morrison too.

Hawke languished on the backbench for three years under Dutton but is now manager of opposition business in the House of Representatives.

Hawke is a pragmatist with a superb political radar and wants the Liberal Party to win back voters in the suburbs; with him in her corner, Ley should never be written off.

Unaligned

The unaligned faction is a mix of veterans who couldn’t care less for the “who’s up and who’s down” of factional politics – and who are, typically, institutionalists who support the leader of the day, whoever that is – plus a couple of newish MPs who don’t want to show their hand yet, for fear it could damage their chances of promotion. Call them a pragmatic bulwark defending the status quo.

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