Centre Right (Liberal Party of Australia)
The Centre Right Faction or Centre Right Group[6][8][9] is a faction within the federal Australian Liberal Party that makeup one of its three major factions.[a] It holds the middle position between the three factions: Moderate being to its left, the National Right being to its right.[6] Beginning in 2009, the faction held its most dominant position in 2021–2022, and, as of 2023 only has a total of six federal MPs.
Centre Right Faction Centre Right Group
2009
The faction's main ideology can be seen as a soft mix of both the adjacent factions' ideologies. As noted by The Sydney Morning Herald in 2021: “The [Centre Right] group's unifying philosophy is pragmatism – that means an adherence to free-market economics (but with enough flexibility to splash billions to prop up the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic) and relatively conservative social values.”[6] The ideological position, and pragmatism ("to yield results"),[10] of the Centre Right Faction, is one of the reasons Scott Morrison was appointed leader of the party in 2018.[10] As its nickname under Scott Morrison (Morrison Club) signifies, its figurehead was then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison, with Alex Hawke known as the leader of the faction.[1]
During the Morrison government years, the Centre-Right was the largest faction, with 32 of 91 Liberal MPs belonging to the group.[11] However, the 2022 Australian federal election saw a significant realignment of factional affiliations within the Liberal Party, with the Centre-Right going from being the largest faction to the smallest faction, plummeting from 32 members to just 6, caused by a combination of members losing seats as well as members moving to other factions; the aftermath of the election saw the emergence of a "Centrist" faction consisting of former Moderate and Centre-Right MPs, mostly hailing from Victoria, with this group espousing similar ideological leanings to the Centre-Right faction in being more economically dry than the National Right and more socially conservative than the Moderates.[12]
In 2021 it was reported by The Sydney Morning Herald that the Centre Right Faction of the Liberal Party was the most dominant within the party,[6] having thirty-two sitting MPs at the time (including the then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison),[6] ten more than the Moderate Faction and three more than the National Right Faction.[6] However, following the Liberal/National defeat at the 2022 federal election (including five factional MPs) and the resignation of Leadership from Scott Morrison, the Centre Right lost vast factional power, with six Centre Right members moving to the National Right Faction.[13] Most of the factional power following the election defeat and leadership change was transferred to the Conservative Right led by the new Party Leader Peter Dutton.[13]