The scene described is viewed across the dining room of the Melbourne Club – a men-only private members’ club on Collins Street. At the table are former prime minister Tony Abbott; his former chief of staff, Peta Credlin; and her husband, former Liberal Party federal director Brian Loughnane.
Their return, according to the Liberal source watching from across the room, is the fulfilment of a plan that began the day Sussan Ley replaced Peter Dutton as Liberal leader following last year’s disastrous federal election defeat. It is about power, policy influence and a purging of moderates.
“This started the minute that Ley took over from Dutton as federal leader,” the source said. “And Abbott is now federal president, Loughnane is now president of the Victorian division, and Peta has her nightly show on Sky and her weekly newspaper columns, which she uses to promote everything those two are doing, as well as absolutely savage anyone who dares cross her, Tony or Brian.
“The missing bit in that is that they also got Angus in as federal leader,” the source says, referring to Angus Taylor.
“He was their candidate, and his policy agenda is their policy agenda. Every single bit of it. It’s their party again. The real worry is that this time they have enough power, and enough muscle, and enough desire, to actually drive the moderates out of the party altogether.”
Credlin’s media commentary, the source says, is clear evidence of the trio’s hard-right agenda.
“Peta doesn’t hide it. The people I would call traditional Liberals are to her just Labor-lite lefty ‘moderates’ – she always puts the word moderate in inverted commas to exaggerate our weirdness – who need to be drummed out of the party. It’s crazy stuff.”
Away from the cameras, the method is more personal.
Another long-time observer of Victorian Liberal machinations says Credlin has been using her new membership of the Alexandra Club, the women-only club diagonally across Collins Street from the Melbourne Club, referred to by its own members as the “snake pit”, to “charm, cajole and coerce” anyone she thinks might stray from her ideological line.
“Peta can be as charming as she can be fierce,” the observer tells The Saturday Paper this week. “So when someone steps out of line, or maybe needs some encouragement to take a position on one of her causes, she’s not afraid to set up a meeting and prosecute her case as forcefully and as passionately as she did when she was running Abbott’s office. And that’s what she is doing.”
In the same week that former federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg called for the Liberals to return to the political centre in his memoir, A Grateful Son, igniting speculation about a comeback, moderates fear that caving in to One Nation’s policy agenda will permanently alienate metropolitan middle-class voters.
That unease is sharpened by how the current leadership came about.
Under Dutton, who in 2025 led the party to its worst election defeat, Abbott was kept at arm’s length, with one New South Wales moderate telling The Saturday Paper that Dutton had repeatedly rebuffed Abbott’s efforts to run for a federal seat at that election. Sussan Ley, by the same account, regarded Abbott as the last person she wanted out front.
Angus Taylor was a different proposition.
According to the same NSW moderate, Abbott’s decision to involve himself in the push to replace Ley with Taylor in February this year was driven in large part by an obsession with stopping the NSW moderates.
A central motive, the Liberal source says, was a fear that Ley would unpick the federal takeover of the NSW Liberal Party, which was at the time subject to federal intervention and being administered by a committee that included two Victorian Liberals – former Howard government minister Richard Alston and former Victorian treasurer Alan Stockdale – who are both aligned with the party’s hard-right.
That takeover followed an urgent review of the NSW division by Brian Loughnane after the division had bungled the nomination of more than 140 candidates for the 2024 local government elections.
“Brian is one of the nicest, most gentle people in Liberal Party politics. And he is an extremely capable administrator and a very effective and disciplined campaign manager,” says the NSW moderate.
“But what all that masks is his quite determined ideological bent, as well as his ability to deliver that ideological agenda. What that all adds up to is that Brian comes across as a neutral player, who just wants to help the party win – and he is that most of the time!
“But what he also wants is for his side of the party to win, and that’s not my side of the party, and that’s how we ended up with two hard-right Victorians running our division and doing everything they could to shut the moderates out. It was appalling, and behind all of it was Abbott and Credlin and Brian.”
The consequences are now visible in policy, says one serving federal Liberal MP.
“They’re not afraid of One Nation’s agenda – they actually want the Liberal Party to be advocating these positions, too, and that’s what we’re seeing on things like migration and energy. Next thing you know we’ll be announcing the abolition of the Family Court, or that we’re going to outlaw no-fault divorce.”
Even Abbott’s strengths may not be enough. His discipline and doggedness still count, the NSW moderate says, but the world “has just moved on”. If a decade ago an opposition leader could simply punch at Labor’s narrative, the source believes that today’s Liberal Party leader should be able to offer voters an alternative narrative that is built on prosperity and opportunity.
“They’re not afraid of One Nation’s agenda – they actually want the Liberal Party to be advocating these positions, too, and that’s what we’re seeing on things like migration and energy.”
The NSW moderate sees a paradox in the trio’s approach to One Nation, too.
While Abbott has warned the Liberals against becoming “One Nation-lite”, the moderate argues that by abandoning net zero and pandering to One Nation on issues such as migration, the Liberals are doing exactly that.
“Abbott is the one who has asked the question of why voters would vote for the fake version – by which he means us – when you can have the real thing and vote for One Nation. But under him and Taylor, that’s exactly what we are doing. So I’m not sure what the logic is there,” the NSW moderate says.
“To be fair to Tony, he has calmed down a bit since he took over as federal president, and you can see that he is trying to pull himself back a lot more and try to focus on fixing the party administration, which is exactly the job of a federal president.”
With Victorian state Liberal leader Jess Wilson on track to fend off One Nation and win a parliament majority in her own right in the Victorian state election next month, there are, however, concerns that Loughnane – and by association Abbott and Credlin – will be able to take a significant share of the credit.
“The key to why the Liberal Party is about to win a majority in Victoria is because they were finally able to deal with Moira Deeming,” says a senior Liberal Party source.
Deeming, an upper house MP from Melbourne’s west, became a cause célèbre on the party’s right after a 2023 anti-trans rally that was also attended by a group of neo-Nazis, prompting then Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto to push for her expulsion from the parliamentary party.
Egged on by Abbott and Credlin, Deeming sued Pesutto, claiming he had defamed her, and won $300,000 in damages plus legal costs. The episode cost Pesutto his leadership and Deeming was welcomed back into the party.
Ahead of a preselection vote in March, Abbott, Credlin and Wilson all endorsed Deeming. Credlin had earlier shared text messages with Deeming on how to influence a partyroom vote and promising her a soft interview on her show. “We will work [the interview up] question by question,” Credlin wrote. “We need you to survive this. You will lead the party one day.”
In June, Deeming dropped another bombshell: she made an allegation against another former state Liberal leader, Matthew Guy, claiming he grabbed her violently and put her in a headlock at a gala dinner the previous month.
Those allegations collapsed when CCTV footage of the incident could not substantiate the claims. When Jess Wilson referred the matter to the party’s state executive, Deeming was disendorsed as a candidate. She has subsequently resigned from the Liberal Party and joined Family First.
“What’s missing from that narrative is that it was Abbott and Credlin who created Deeming,” a senior Liberal source says.
“She was such a menace because she was acting with the protection of Abbott and Credlin,” says another Victorian Liberal. “Abbott and Credlin dropped her very quickly, but they have also sort of gotten away with it, and now if Wilson wins, and wins comfortably, my fear is that it will be them who claim the credit.”
As the saga of Abbott, Credlin and Loughnane continues to play out, many Liberal MPs in Canberra this week were directing their ire not at them but at Josh Frydenberg and what is being referred to as “the festival of Josh” that has surrounded the release of his memoir.
In the book’s final chapter, Frydenberg argues the Coalition must restore its primary vote to “the high 30s or low 40s” by returning to the political centre. He also advocates for lifting the GST.
“Endless coverage in The Australian, separate book launches in Sydney and Melbourne that has generated hype and more hype about party direction and raising the GST, and basically just undermining the job we’re trying to do up here, which is get rid of this Labor government,” was how one Liberal shadow minister characterised the week.
“Angus has, over the past month or so, started to show results. We’re releasing policy, we’re getting traction attacking the government, and we were looking ahead at a great week in parliament. But then what happened? Josh. And as usual, it’s all about fucking Josh. It was an incredible lifeline for Labor. It saved them.”
According to another federal Liberal MP, Taylor managed to put together the best week of his leadership despite Frydenberg.
“Taylor did two things that impressed me,” the MP says. “First he dismissed Frydenberg’s so-called manifesto, and second, he didn’t allow himself to get distracted by it. A lot us thought it would dominate our internal conversations, but it didn’t. We grumbled, but we didn’t descend into hand-wringing, and I credit Angus for that. I have no knowledge of it, but I wonder if he also put the brakes on Credlin and Abbott firing back at Josh, too.”
One senior Victorian Liberal sympathetic to the former treasurer says Frydenberg is merely responding to the steady stream of party figures and donors who have been telling him that “someone’s got to rescue this ship”, because the federal team “don’t seem able to rescue themselves”.
The latest published opinion polls explain the anxiety, showing the Coalition on between 20 and 23 per cent, well below the roughly 32 per cent primary vote that saw Peter Dutton deliver their worst federal election result.
“Everyone likes Angus. Everyone likes Sussan Ley,” the Liberal says. “But they’re all thinking, these guys are on 20 per cent. They’re going nowhere.”
Taylor’s team, the Victorian Liberal argues, has no answer.
“These people don’t seem to have any new ideas,” the source says, adding that the one idea they did have, on indexing the income tax brackets to keep pace with inflation, “they’ve buried”.
The cure, the Victorian Liberal says, is to change the subject from Hanson’s favourite topics to subjects the Liberals know better, such as the economy.
“If all you do all day long is talk about immigration and all the Hanson stuff, there’s actually more to life than that,” the MP says.
As for anyone in the parliamentary party briefing against Frydenberg, the Victorian Liberal has little patience.
“Listen, people up in Canberra, you’re on 20 per cent. So, you shouldn’t be backgrounding against anybody at all. If you’re on 40 per cent, feel free to background against Josh Frydenberg. But given that you’re on 20, please keep quiet.”
Another senior Liberal also dismissed concerns that the release of Frydenberg’s book was destabilising.
“Josh Frydenberg is expressing very real concern about the long-term future of the party. This is not a sort of short-term set of considerations. I don’t think he’s trying to put himself up as a figure in opposition to Angus, or for that matter, to Tony, or for that matter, to Andrew Hastie. Potentially, I think he is basically saying, ‘This is what I believe, and this is what I care about.’ ”