As John Howard fights for his government and his seat neither of which, according to opinion polls, is safe he is also fighting for another cause that is seldom considered: the future of the Liberal Party itself.
It is one of the supreme ironies in Australian politics that the most successful political party of all is facing a bleak and uncertain future and that after winning four federal elections in a row.
Just how brittle and fragile a creature is the Liberal Party is little appreciated. Its relevance at state and territory level has declined markedly at the same time that the Howard-led federal party has strung together such an impressive set of victories.
While not as numerically strong as Bob Menzies in his seven straight wins from 1949 to 1963, Howard's victories are the more impressive as he was up against a nominally united Labor opposition whereas Menzies had the godsend of the ALP split in the mid-1950s and its spawning of the preference-delivering breakaway group, the Democratic Labor Party.
The undoubted high water mark for the Liberals came for a few brief months in 1969-70 when it held office in all jurisdictions the first and only time in the modern era that a single party has held such political monopoly. Now this looks like being reversed, and serious questions need to be asked about the party's future.
Structurally, it is a party designed for government; policy making is concentrated in the hands of the parliamentary party and the entire Liberal Party has, since its first leader in Menzies, taken on the characteristics of its leader, for better or for worse.
Labor, by contrast, has a permanent continuity in its organisation with its national conference and national executive, each of which has a significant policy role. The Liberals in government rely heavily on the public service.
Historically, the Liberals do not handle losing power. The former deputy leader, Neil Brown, recorded in his memoirs some years back how, after losing to Labor in 1972, some senior Liberals, like the former prime minister, Bill McMahon, did not even know how to answer a telephone in their office.
Two non-Labor predecessors of the Liberal Party simply disintegrated after losing office the Nationalists in 1929 and the United Australia Party in 1943 (which had already lost government when two independents crossed the floor and supported Labor).
Since Howard came to power, all efforts of the party have been focused on Canberra, and while this has paid off electorally, it has generated potentially damaging tensions. Party resources have flowed to the centre at the expense of the states, and once robust political machines in a party that prided itself on state autonomy have grown feeble and impotent.
The fact that the Liberals were unable to lay a glove on an inept and seemingly vulnerable Labor government at the last NSW election is a case in point.
The Liberals in NSW once had a legion of full-time field officers whose job was to collect intelligence, monitor the mood and candidates and generally feed grassroots sentiment back to party headquarters. Alas, that has all disappeared.
Quite apart from corporate donations drying up, a shrinking membership (which the party guards closely) has seen the party vulnerable to takeover by extremists, and nowhere is this more apparent than in NSW, where the unelectable hard right holds sway.
Ideologically, also, the states have suffered under Howard, where his dominant neo-liberal (or economic rationalist) policies might have benefited him, but they have been the kiss of death in the states, where government is all about (and only about) service delivery. The last NSW campaign, in which then Liberal leader Peter Debnam undertook to slash public service jobs, was doomed from day one.
If Bob Menzies was the father of the modern Liberal Party, might John Howard be its executioner?
The Liberal Party is very much the leader writ large. Just as Menzies created a vehicle for his own political comeback, every leader since has transformed the party to his own likeness. (One only has to remember how Malcolm Fraser stood rock solid in his advocacy of sanctions against South Africa, yet after he stepped down after defeat in 1983 it simply vanished from the party 's radar.)
It must not be forgotten that the Liberal Party exists, first and foremost, to keep Labor from office. Should it lose the 2007 federal election it will be seen to have failed comprehensively and this from a party that has governed federally for 42 years of its 62 years of existence.
Whether it will survive or reinvent itself in the event of defeat remains highly problematic. A Rudd ALP government will be more cautious and conservative than any previous Labor administration, thus leaving little if any political space to be outflanked on the right.
The Liberal Party, like the United Australia Party and the Nationalists, might simply disintegrate but only after some violent bloodletting.
Norman Abjorensen is the author of the forthcoming Leadership and the Liberal Revival: Bolte, Askin and the Post-War Ascendancy, to be launched in Sydney on November 17 by former Liberal leader John Hewson.
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