The Liberal Party of Australia was founded a year after the 1943 federal election.
Its founder was Sir Robert Menzies who was to become Australia's longest-serving Prime Minister.
Amanda Cavill reports.
In 1944, the Liberal Party of Australia was founded after a three-day meeting held in a small hall not far from Parliament House in Canberra.
The meeting was called by then-leader of the Opposition, Robert Menzies.
Robert Menzies had already served as Prime Minister from 1939 to 1941 but he believed that the non-Labor parties should unite to present a strong alternative to the Australian people.
Eighty men and women from 18 non-Labor parties and organisations attended the first Canberra conference.
As Robert Menzies saw it, they shared a common belief that Australians should have greater personal freedom and choice than that offered under Labor's post-war socialist-leaning plans.
He gave a speech in 1949 that could be confused with something delivered by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott more than 50 years later.
"A policy speech is not just a list of promises. Although there are many people who cry out 'What's your policy?' who seem to think so. We believe that politics is a high and real conflict of principles. It's in this spirit that we approach the most important political contest of our time."
The Liberals are generally advocates of economic liberalism, with an emphasis on encouraging competition in a free market.
The Labor Party has accused the Liberals of moving from moderate conservatives to the far right of the political spectrum under Tony Abbott's leadership.
But Professor John Wanna, from the Australian National University, says both of the major parties have actually moved more to the centre of politics over the past 40 years.
"From the 1970s on, [with] combinations of economic crisis, globalisation, more educated populations, the parties have changed from those traditional models to becoming much more corporate entities and much more fighting over just the middle ground. Clearly there is a union side to the Labor party and clearly there is a kind of small business side to the Liberal Party but if you stand back and look at them they are much more corporations. Their policies are relatively similar. Politics in the party sense has become more a sporting contest between two teams rather than a competing set of visions and ideologies."
The Liberal Party has governed in coalition with the National Party for 41 of the past 61 years, most recently for nearly 12 years under John Howard.
Following the 2004 election, the Liberal Party, with its coalition partner, the Nationals, became the first federal government in 20 years to gain an absolute majority in the Senate.
It lost the election in 2007 to a Labor Party led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Professor Wanna says the way people view the parties and how they vote is changing.
"People are bouncing around in terms of the generations. For example in the 1970s, older people were more conservative than younger people and men by a small degree tended to be more progressive than women who tended as a group tended to vote conservative. That's breaking down enormously. You are finding pockets of progressiveness in the the 45-60 year olds who are voting more progressively than younger people in their 20s and 30s. Older people are still by and large a bit on the conservative side, but the demographics are breaking on the conservative side."
