Should Australia's Liberal Party be more conservative?

However, for the most part, the best way conservatives can contribute to influence the mainstream political parties is to keep utilising public forums to inform the public of its ideas.

While the liberal think tanks may not be as conservative as some would like, there is no doubt that the right today has much greater mainstream exposure/influence given the contribution of liberal think-tanks (IPA and CIS) in recent decades, with Sky News (now also on mainstream television) also attracting a significant audience.

As argued in 2018, Australia's "right-of-centre political community is not so large as to have exclusively libertarian or conservative think tanks", with every Liberal prime minister mostly maintaining "a sort of centre-right middle ground that kept everyone equally disappointed and dissatisfied", yet most Liberals work together "around economic issues (taxation, regulation, privatisation) or basic shared liberty issues (like freedom of speech) rather than the thorny moral debates that might divide the two camps".

Only occasionally will there be polarising issues. For example, conservatives may oppose same-sex marriage while libertarians are generally in favour, and libertarians are more likely to favour freer immigration with conservatives wanting greater control over borders.

But in the end, assuming that Australia maintains a decent economic and social policy mix, the influence of conservatism in Australia's political system will be limited as policy outcomes continue to evolve in a way that demands a pragmatic response from any centre of the road political party/force hoping to win or influence government, whether it be centre-left or centre right.