Watch Your Step

By John Ogilvie

In 1952, Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” was published.

Set in the year 2055, time travel is a commercial enterprise. A company called Time Safari offers people the chance to travel back in time and hunt extinct animals like dinosaurs. Pay the fee, step into the machine, and hunt a Tyrannosaurus rex that’s already scheduled to die anyway. The rules are simple: Stay on the floating path, touch nothing, and don’t alter a single thing. The guide, Travis, is blunt about the stakes. Even the smallest change in the past can rewrite the future in ways no one can predict.

One hunter, Eckels, loses his nerve when he sees the dinosaur. He stumbles off the path, crushes a butterfly under his boot, and doesn’t notice until they’re back in 2055. The spelling has changed. The election result has flipped. A dictator is in the White House. One dead insect, millions of years earlier, and the whole timeline is different.

It was this story that gave rise to the term “butterfly effect.” One of the fundamental principles of chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the idea that small actions can have big consequences, often in ways that only become obvious much later.

What does this sci-fi story have to do with anything?

The Liberal Party has been stepping off the path for years.

Federally, the numbers are ugly. The primary vote for the Liberals has been stuck in the mid-to-high teens since May. One Nation’s numbers are climbing fast. Plenty of Labor missteps to exploit on cost of living, energy and migration, yet the Party hasn’t converted that discontent into durable support. In Victoria the picture looks better , but that’s mostly because state Labor has been so comprehensively bad. The latest Victorian Government scandal is clocking in at around $15 billion of taxpayer’s money . When your opponent is that unpopular, you don’t need to be brilliant to look competitive.

The Party keeps telling itself the problem is external. Last week, Angus Taylor gave a speech at the Sydney Institute that took a swing at One Nation. He called their policies incoherent and un-costed, their team inexperienced, and warned that a government influenced by them would deliver an “eternity of pain” through higher debt, inflation and interest rates. He pointed to specific pledges (lifting defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP, family income splitting, tax-bracket indexation, net-zero migration) and argued they didn’t add up. He also highlighted Malcolm Roberts describing the United States as, “the world’s greatest terrorist organisation.”

Taylor is right on a few things. One Nation’s platform is lighter on hard numbers than a serious party should be. Some of the foreign-policy language coming out of the party is genuinely extreme, and would make credible national security roles impossible. And yes, promising big increases in defence spending plus new family tax measures on top of everything else carries real fiscal risk. Those are fair points to make.

Unfortunately for Angus and the Liberals, the online reaction was less than positive.

The post linking to the speech got ratioed hard . Plenty of people who used to vote Liberal or were at least open to the idea told him, in so many words, that they didn’t care about One Nation’s problems right now. They wanted to know why the Liberals still couldn’t sort themselves out.

That’s the part the parliamentary team keeps missing.

You can attack One Nation all day. You can talk about their early years, their un-costed promises, their lack of governing experience. None of it answers the question that actually matters: Why did so many people who used to support the Liberal Party stop doing so?

Choices have Consequences

Leadership spills were the first big step off the path. Labor did it first with Rudd and Gillard and paid a heavy price for looking chaotic. The Liberals then did exactly the same thing, removing two sitting prime ministers in quick succession. The rule changes after Turnbull’s removal were meant to stop it happening again, but the damage to public confidence was already done. Voters saw a Party that treated the top job like a game of musical chairs. That impression sticks.

Policy direction has been just as damaging. On freedom of speech and privacy the Party’s record has been less than stellar.

On climate and energy, the shifts have been even more obvious. From supporting an emissions trading scheme to repealing a carbon tax to flirting with net-zero targets and then walking some of it back again. Each move might have made sense inside the caucus room at the time. Taken together they left a lot of people wondering what the Party actually stands for anymore. The same pattern shows up on housing, migration settings and the broader cost-of-living story. For years the message was about aspiration and getting government out of the way. In practice a lot of the structural problems that make life harder for working and middle-class families kept getting worse, and the Party didn’t look like it had a serious plan to fix them.

Each of those decisions felt necessary (or at least defensible) when it was made. None of them looked like the moment everything would unravel. But over time, they’ve added up to exactly the kind of slow erosion the butterfly effect describes. Trust with the lay membership has dropped. A lot of people who used to turn up, donate, volunteer or at least defend the party in conversation have quietly stepped back. For some people these days, it’s less embarrassing to be caught singing in the shower than to be found out as a Liberal Party member.

The public sees the same thing and draws the obvious conclusion: This is not a Party that has its act together or even knows what it stands for.

The effect compounds over time. When the Party makes decisions that contradict the liberal values it is supposed to uphold, more lay members become disillusioned. As more people step back from their involvement in the Party, it becomes harder for the Liberals to run effective campaigns. By being unable to run effective campaigns (due to lack of manpower and financial shortcomings), they don’t win as many seats. By failing to win as many seats as they used to, the lay membership base becomes even more demoralized, and even more people step back.

Criticising One Nation for its contradictions is easy. Explaining why the Liberal Party itself has lost the confidence of so many of the people it used to rely on is harder. Until the parliamentary team stops treating its own record of decisions as someone else’s problem, the butterflies are just going to keep piling up. And the longer that goes on, the harder it gets to walk back to where the path used to be.