Thread by @adamliaw

Win or lose, this #auspol election is an existential threat to the Liberal party. The political calculus of sacrificing moderates to teals might seems like a handful of seats that they hope to win back with conservative candidates elsewhere, but it’s much more than that.

The Liberals have already lost one generation of moderates in the era of Turnbull, Bishop, Pyne etc.

Add to that the likes of Berejiklian, Banks and soon possibly Zimmerman, Wilson, Sharma and even Frydenberg and what’s left?

The right will welcome that shift, but centrist LNP voters won’t stick by a coalition where the defining voices are the likes of Dutton, Morrison, Canavan and Joyce, or culture warriors like Hastie and Paterson. To imagine they will is dreamland stuff.

The LNP can’t count on rusted-on moderates if they are deliberately excluded, particularly where the teals have shown a real alternative to centrist incumbents marginalised by a right wing agenda.

And if the PM is spending his time defending the likes of Deves (who has no chance of winning) than moderates who do, and the party’s most prominent moderate pro-climate voice is a single state treasurer, that is a massive gulf between voter sentiment and intra-party power.

But the problem for the LNP is bigger than moderates not having sway. It’s that the LNP doesn’t care.

The right will be overjoyed at losing moderate MPs, but beyond the MPs there’s a huge number of moderate, centrist voters the right are somehow imagining will still vote for a party that literally doesn’t do anything to address their interests beyond being “not Labor”.

Lose the centre and you lose elections. Fail to address the centre and you become, by definition, a fringe party. And that seems to be what the LNP wants.

This election will likely see a few teals picking up seats, but what about the next one? If people like what they see from the teals (and why wouldn’t they) it’s possible that this is the start of something much bigger for the centre - and much smaller for a further right LNP.