If you think it’s lonely being a federal Liberal MP in Melbourne, think again.

In Adelaide, the federal Liberals are the true holders of the Nigel No Friends Trophy 2023.

True, after Labor’s victory in last weekend’s Aston by-election, the city of Melbourne has more reds under the bed than the Kremlin.

The demoralising Liberal defeat in the seat in Melbourne’s outer-east marked the first time a sitting government has taken a seat off an opposition in a federal by-election since 1920.

The win by Labor’s Mary Doyle has left the Liberals with only two “blue” seats in greater Melbourne – a city of 5.15 million people, soon to overtake Sydney as Australia’s biggest town.

In her victory speech, Doyle, a former union official, said: “Aston has been Liberal since Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2U was top of the charts way in 1990, when I was just a slip of a girl at 19.”

“We were the underdogs but boy, have we shown that we have a big bite,” she said. No argument there.

The two lonely Melbourne Liberal MPs holding “blue” seats in a sea of ALP red are Keith Wolohan in Menzies and Michael Sukkar in Deakin.

In a serious case of stating the bleeding obvious, Wolohan said the Liberals under leader Peter Dutton needed to “fix the relationship” with the city.

“When you look at the map, there’s now two federal seats – I’m one of them – I’m as close as you get to the city and it’s still a fair distance,” he said. “That wasn’t a swing I or anyone was expecting … I think that the Liberal Party has lost the trust of the people we need to in Melbourne.”

But Melbourne is a right regular knees-up Mother Brown for the Dutton Liberals compared to the party’s standing in Adelaide.

Here, the Liberals hold just one seat in the entire city of 1.356 million people, and then only by its fingertips. Suffer in your jocks, Melbourne.

Liberal MP James Stevens holds the inner-eastern seat of Sturt on the slimmest of margins – a two-party preferred vote of 50.45 per cent. They don’t get much slimmer.

He inherited the seat from moderate Liberal powerbroker Christopher Pyne and promptly managed to achieve a swing against him of well over six per cent after preferences.

His primary vote numbers – the so-called “popular vote” – look even sicker, if that’s possible. He managed just over 43 per cent, a negative swing of more than seven per cent.

If it’s all that simple, how do the urgers explain what’s happened in SA?

To be fair, it was a strange election in 2022. The primary vote for both major parties fell, both were in the low 30s and in all nine seats, every successful candidate or sitting MP – Labor, Liberal and Independent Rebekha Sharkie – saw their primary votes go backwards.

This probably barely warranted a yawn at the major party HQs. Federal elections have never been won or lost in South Australia, and the next one certainly won’t break that record.

But the sorry and rapid decline of the Liberal vote in our state should have seen the party hit the panic button well before last weekend’s trashing in Aston.

In miniature, South Australia’s federal Liberals are not only a petri dish for the virus hobbling the Dutton Opposition, they have been part of the sickness.

It’s as if the struggle in our state between moderate and conservative forces and their seemingly irreconcilable policy differences has escaped from a political laboratory in Adelaide’s shady suburbs and is running riot across state borders.

Dutton is being urged to shift the Opposition to “the centre”, wherever that is, to reconnect with city and suburban voters and so-called “mainstream Australian values”, whatever they are. Maybe we’ll find out when the nation votes on the Voice referendum in August.

If it’s all that simple, how do the urgers explain what’s happened in SA, the factional headquarters of moderate Liberal thought that is also home to many of the party’s leading conservative figures?

Or how, at last year’s state election, a Labor party dominated by a conservative Catholic Right faction wiped the floor with the oncer Marshall Liberals – the most left-wing Liberal government in the nation?

When John Howard led the Coalition out of the wilderness and back into government at the 1996 federal election, South Australia was painted a dark shade of blue.

The Liberals won 10 of the then 12 federal seats in SA. That’s right, Labor held only two seats. It only had a measly four before the election.

Liberal MPs won city and suburban seats regarded as natural Labor territory – Susan Jeanes in Kingston, Trish Draper in Makin, who defeated the darling of the Labor Left at the time, Peter Duncan – Chris Gallus in Hindmarsh, Trish Worth in Adelaide and Andrew Southcott in Boothby.

Then Prime Minister John Howard at the ASC in Osborne. Under his leadership, the Liberals dominated seats in metropolitan Adelaide. Photo: AAP/Alan Porritt

It all seemed much simpler back then. From my interviews with them all, these Liberals never came across as rabid ideologues. They appealed to voters dubbed “Howard’s Battlers”, even though Howard himself struggled to define a “battler”.

It’s not simple now.

Labor’s Louise Miller-Frost won Boothby last year, held by Liberal Nicolle Flint until she decided to retire from politics, partly because she’d had a gutful of the bullying, misogynist abuse from Left-wing numpties.

Flint was a hard-working, attentive local MP and a tireless and smart campaigner. She is also an unabashed, articulate conservative who has a regular gig on Sky News with fellow SA conservative and Liberal defector, former Senator Cory Bernardi.

When Rob Baillieu took to Twitter to call on Dutton to resign after the Aston by-election defeat and for the Liberals to urgently elevate “moderate centrist leaders like Bridget Archer and Matt Kean”, Flint replied: “Take them with you, Rob. Don’t shut the door on the way out. We’ll dead bolt it so you can’t get back in.”

Baillieu, the son of former moderate Victorian Liberal Premier Ted Baillieu, has abandoned the Liberals and helped Independent Monique Ryan turf then federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg from his Melbourne seat of Kooyong last year.

Clearly then, Flint isn’t a believer in shifting her party to “the centre”. But if she’d changed her mind and decided to defend Boothby, she’d almost have certainly held it.

There’s a nice little Liberal factional bunfight about to kick off in the South East.

Katherine McBride, wife of grazier and state Liberal MP for MacKillop, Nick McBride, is trying to roll the sitting federal Liberal MP for Barker, Tony Pasin, a prominent conservative.

She’s challenging him for party preselection because she has “fire in her belly” and wants to give voters an “alternative option”, she told The Advertiser this week.

So, a Liberal married to a Liberal says she wants to give voters a choice between a Liberal and a … err … Liberal.

And keep an eye on hubby Nick. Nobody will be surprised if he jettisons the Liberals to go independent. If so, maybe his wife could stand against him as a Liberal candidate to give voters an “alternative option” at the 2026 state election.

If the Liberals really are worried about losing the trust of people, if they really want to “reconnect”, maybe they could just stop fighting among themselves.

Instead of battles, start worrying about the battlers. It’s got to be worth a try.

Matthew Abraham’s political column is published on Fridays. Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.