This week, after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese failed to secure a meeting with Donald Trump at the G7 summit in Canada, Liberal senator Alex Antic posted a photo of himself standing alongside the US president. He captioned it: “Bad luck @AlboMP, he doesn’t meet with everyone.”

For Antic, Trump is more than a political idol. He’s a blueprint for how to dominate a party from the inside, humiliate opponents and control the narrative. In his home state of South Australia, at least, it’s a playbook that appears to be working.

Antic is now one of the most influential hard-right populists in Canberra. He is a central figure in the fight over the party’s future.

Last March, Antic claimed top spot on the Liberals’ South Australian Senate ticket, pushing former cabinet minister Anne Ruston, a nationally recognised centrist, down to second. The move, widely viewed as a factional power play, was less about tactics than spectacle.

“He’s the most cold-hearted, vindictive person I’ve encountered in politics,” says one South Australian Liberal.

In February, Antic installed South Australian Liberal president Leah Blyth as the replacement for the state’s most prominent moderate, retiring senator Simon Birmingham, boosting his group’s numbers and pushing the party further to the right.

“He’s a very dangerous man,” says another Liberal from South Australia. “He’d make a fascinating case study in psychological analysis because I don’t think the average Liberal has any idea what his endgame is. Is he trying to destroy the party and rebuild it in the image of the Republican Party? Does he actually want to be Australia’s Donald Trump? I don’t know – but it’s very strange.”

Another South Australian Liberal agreed that Antic’s real intentions were not about appealing to the wider electorate but to dismantle the party in its current form.

“I think he wants to burn the place down to rebuild it in his own image,” says a third South Australian Liberal.

When approached for comment, Antic declined to give an interview. Instead, he sent an email that reads as a neatly crafted demonstration of the posture he has built his political career around.

“I am always amused by approaches from journalists looking to write a ‘profile’ piece,” Antic writes, “but I can see why your outlet is so interested in writing about me.”

What follows is a characteristic pivot: the claim that he is, in practical terms, irrelevant. He couples this with the implicit suggestion that the media’s focus on him reveals something more about their bias than his influence.

“After all,” he writes, “I am a backbench Senator, from a political party in minority opposition from a State which has a majority Labor Government. Makes sense.”

It is, however, precisely Antic’s position on the margins that gives him power. Unencumbered by responsibility, he has turned provocation into strategy, building a national profile not through legislative achievement but through cultural grievance and factional muscle.

“You turn up to a Liberal Party meeting in South Australia these days and you get yelled at about late-term abortions or gender dysphoria or puberty blockers or things that normal Liberals are not really interested in.”

That profile is built on three recurring themes: small government, individual rights and family values. The troika dominates his appearances on Sky News, where he is a frequent guest on programs hosted by Peta Credlin, chief of staff to then prime minister Tony Abbott; Rita Panahi, a prominent columnist for Rupert Murdoch’s Herald Sun newspaper; and Rowan Dean, editor of The Spectator Australia.

“One wonders how you will take my advocacy for small government, individual rights and family values,” Antic writes in his correspondence with The Saturday Paper. “Surely you wouldn’t just roll out many of the commonly used phrases as adopted by the left-wing media such as ‘far right’ or ‘hard right’.”

The irony is that Antic anticipates and pre-empts criticism not to avoid it but to frame it as confirmation that he will say what others won’t.

He ends his email with a closing line that is both a brush-off and a wink: “If you can forward me a link, I will read it when I find a moment.”

Antic, 50, is the grandson of Yugoslavian émigrés; his father rose to become director of thoracic medicine at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. Antic studied law and arts at the University of Adelaide, later working as a senior associate at the law firm Tindall Gask Bentley. He served on the Adelaide City Council from 2014 to 2018.

Widely acknowledged as friendly and courteous in his personal dealings with his parliamentary colleagues, Antic is not exactly popular.

One example of Antic’s behaviour that grates with colleagues is his refusal to contribute the couple of hundred dollars a year that other Liberal senators give to the “whip’s fund”, an informal social club that pays for dinners when the Senate sits late and other social events.

“He won’t pay because he said he doesn’t want to socialise with any of us,” says one of Antic’s Senate colleagues.

His ideological stances also put him offside with former leader Peter Dutton, who lost patience with Antic’s provocative stance. Despite holding the No. 1 position on the Liberals’ South Australian Senate ticket, he was overlooked for promotion in Sussan Ley’s new shadow ministry.

Behind the scenes in South Australia, however, Antic has built a formidable power base, aided mainly by an influx of conservative and Pentecostal-aligned members who party insiders say are driving moderates out of local branches and taking control of the state party machinery. This shift in the state branch is giving Antic an outsized influence over candidate selection and internal policy debates.

It’s a pattern Liberal moderates say is repeating across the country – making the party unelectable in the ACT and near-unelectable in Victoria.

In the bruised aftermath of the party’s May 3 election rout, Antic has emerged as a symbol of what the Liberals could become if the party follows his right-wing populist instincts: combative, anti-establishment, unbothered by the political centre, and completely irrelevant when it comes to winning elections.

Since becoming a senator on July 1, 2019, Antic has railed against vaccine mandates, described a drag queen appearing on the ABC as “grooming” children, travelled to the US to meet Trump, appeared on the War Room podcast of former Trump strategist and far-right agitator Steve Bannon, and introduced legislation to ban gender-affirming care for minors.

“You turn up to a Liberal Party meeting in South Australia these days and you get yelled at about late-term abortions or gender dysphoria or puberty blockers or things that normal Liberals are not really interested in,” one member of the South Australian division tells The Saturday Paper.

“And by normal Liberals, I mean people who are interested in developing economically rational policies around good energy policy, or good housing policy, or good taxation policy, and who hold basic views on things like freedom of the individual, freedom of enterprise, personal responsibility, and reward for effort.

“But instead they find that the party they love is now more interested in hysterically pursuing these ideological crusades, things they don’t want to have anything to do with – and that mainstream voters want nothing to do with – and these members are leaving the party because they will not be dictated to by Alex Antic and his supporters, who are probably more suited to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.”

As the Liberal Party’s first female leader, taking over after one of the party’s greatest losses, Sussan Ley has taken on the task of rebuilding the federal Liberal Party.

This week, she oversaw the appointment of former NSW minister Pru Goward and former Howard government cabinet minister Nick Minchin to conduct a formal review of the party’s disastrous election campaign. She also succeeded in reshaping the committee of management that is overseeing the NSW division. Both are signals Ley is serious about reclaiming the party’s traditional heartland.

Her message since taking over is clear: the Liberal Party must “meet the people where they are”. That means shifting the focus back to economics, aspiration and stability – and reflecting modern Australia rather than raging against it – as well as connecting with women, multicultural communities and younger voters.

Ley’s greatest challenge isn’t external – it’s internal, embodied by figures such as Antic.

While she talks about mainstreaming the party’s message, he talks about the “tyranny of political correctness”. While she pitches to suburban families and centrist swing voters, he rides the algorithmic currents of YouTube and X and perpetual outrage over identity and values.

If one issue distils Alex Antic’s disruptive influence on the Liberal Party, it is climate policy – in particular, the future of Australia’s commitment to net zero.

Nowhere is the divide more visible – or more politically combustible – than in South Australia, where Antic’s faction has turned the Liberal Party’s stance on emissions reduction into a flashpoint of internal warfare.

Earlier this month, at a state council meeting dominated by Antic-aligned conservatives, the South Australian Liberal Party formally voted to reject net zero.

The result left the party straddling three contradictory positions: Sussan Ley’s federal wing has net zero under review; the South Australian parliamentary Liberals support it; the state division formally opposes it.

Following the vote, senior Liberals in South Australia fear their 13 lower house seats in the 47-member Legislative Assembly could shrink even further at March’s state election.

Antic, predictably, celebrated, posting a video of Donald Trump gloating about “winning” with the caption: “President Trump when asked about the SA Liberal Party rejecting Net Zero on the weekend.”

In comments to The Australian, he went further: “Net Zero is a threat to our economy, our security and to our country. Australia’s energy policy has got to be more sophisticated than simply adopting a slogan concocted by globalist bureaucrats more than a decade ago.”

For many moderates, the moment was a breaking point. Senior figures scrambled to do damage control. Some agreed to radio interviews to condemn the motion – only to pull out at the last minute after an intervention from the state opposition leader, Vincent Tarzia, who feared a further outbreak of disunity would make things worse.

Upper house MLC Michelle Lensink, a former minister in the Marshall government, aired her frustration in a message to colleagues, accusing the Right of pushing “virtue-signalling motions” that had already been rejected behind closed doors.

“We have people within the Liberal Party who spend all their time pointlessly trying to win culture wars internally,” Lensink wrote. “That is the reason why I will call out such poor judgment every single time.”

Last year, Antic’s camp helped block motions on transgender sex education and a state-based Voice to Parliament. Soon after the party suffered historic losses at the state level, including to Labor in two byelections – a feat not achieved in South Australia for more than a century.

“There are members of [Premier Peter] Malinauskas’s cabinet who are actually concerned about the size of the victory they are likely to achieve next year, that it will be too big,” quips one South Australian Liberal.

At the May 3 federal election, the South Australian Liberals also went backwards, losing the seat of Sturt for the first time since 1972, and failing to regain the seat of Boothby, which the Liberals lost in 2022 for the first time in 73 years.

For Sussan Ley, the chaos in South Australia is existential. Antic is no longer merely an agitator from the fringe. On the issue that defines the Liberal Party’s most bitter divide, he is writing the playbook.

What happens next will depend not just on the findings of Minchin and Goward, but on whether the party has the will or the numbers to confront the forces that dominate it in places like South Australia.

For now, Antic shows no sign of slowing. He is campaigning, consolidating and elevating allies. The old Liberal model of internal compromise and electoral pragmatism is being steadily replaced by something far more combative and far less predictable.

Antic’s rise reveals the extent to which the machinery of the Liberal Party can be captured and redirected by ideological actors who are less interested in governing than in fighting. What he offers is not a path to power but a project of permanent opposition, where provocation is proof of conviction and policy is just another front in the culture war.

There are those in the party who still believe it can be pulled back – towards consensus, towards the centre, towards relevance. Their influence is waning.

If Antic’s playbook continues to succeed, not just in South Australia but nationally, the future of the Liberal Party may look less like Robert Menzies or John Howard and more like the politics of talkback radio: louder, angrier and further from government than ever before.

That, as Antic might say, is what winning looks like.

RELATED READING News Exclusive: How Abbott and Credlin control the Liberals Jason Koutsoukis Liberal MPs reveal how the former prime minister and his close confidante have been at the centre of a string of disastrous decisions that led to the party’s stunning election loss and the collapse of the Coalition.