Badly lagging One Nation, the Liberal Party is trying to save itself

The moment was always going to come. After spending his entire, short leadership trying not to alienate the One Nation juggernaut, Liberal leader Angus Taylor was forced this week to get definitive.

“I’m not interested in a coalition,” with the protest party, he said on a trip to Perth. “I’m interested in a better Australia.”

Mr Taylor was pushed into the allies-or-competitors declaration by one of his predecessors, Tony Abbott, and a little-known South Australian MP, Tony Pasin, who might lose his seat to Pauline Hanson’s movement.

Both men had proposed inter-party cooperation, a step that would implicitly acknowledge One Nation’s greater popularity and the dire state of the Liberal-National Coalition.

By going alone, the Coalition will likely have to compete with well-funded and enthusiastic One Nation candidates in every lower and upper-house seat. In the thin ranks of the official opposition, it would not be an understatement to report that the prospect of such electoral competition has left morale low.

Asked what had gone wrong, one frontbencher on Friday cited “20 years” of Coalition policy “failure”, including a reluctance to make workplaces more efficient, reduce the regulatory burdens on small business and introduce fairer, more effective taxes.

Many Liberal MPs presumed February’s promotion of Mr Taylor would naturally plug the votes draining to One Nation. Now that has proven untrue — Senator Hanson’s party has more support than when Sussan Ley led the Liberals — the Coalition is trying to work out how to save itself.

There is no agreement. Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson wants policies designed for self-reliant workers and their families. Others want to fight the culture wars or oppose immigration more aggressively.

“The Liberal Party must be a definable product, with a core constituency, and be fighting for that constituency as the foundation for the type of Australia we want to build,” Mr Wilson told The Nightly.

“That is to have aggressively supportive policy for small business, the self employed and self starters that far transcends anything we have done in the past.”

Economy in stress

Mr Wilson is keeping his specific ideas private, but it is no secret that employing staff in Australia is expensive, onerous and often legally challenging. Many employers will pay off unfair-dismissal claimants, even when they have engaged in appalling behaviour, rather than go through the expense and stress of defending themselves.

At the same time, much of the insecurity from an economy in stress falls on those who work for themselves. They can see the protection given to groups chosen for favourable treatment by the Albanese Labor Government, including public servants, students, welfare recipients, healthcare and childcare employees and some factory workers.

In an earlier era, the Coalition would have been the prime political beneficiary of the economic disruption. But One Nation has picked up voters hurt by the inflation break-out and interest rate rises of the past six months.

They have made Australians poorer and pessimistic. On Friday a Westpac Bank and Melbourne Institute survey found consumers haven’t felt this bad about the economy since the pandemic. Many consider their finances worse than a year ago and anticipate their circumstances will deteriorate over the next 12 months.

Other Liberals have different ideas about how to revive the party. Another shadow minister, who asked not to be identified, said the Liberal Party has to break away from its image as an “establishment” party.

“The strategic question for the Liberal Party is whether we can break away from being seen as part of the establishment while remaining a serious party of government,” the MP said.

“If voters think the system isn’t working for them, we need to show we’re prepared to challenge it, not defend it.”

The new establishment

Going anti-establishment might not be easy, given the Liberal leader was a Rhodes Scholar, boarded at a Sydney private school and was a partner at the McKinsey consulting firm.

That said, Anthony Albanese is the leader of the new establishment from the left, which is reshaping the nation in a way that has left many Australians feeling insecure, afraid and resentful.

The new establishment is epitomised by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody, a former head of the law faculty at Western Sydney University. Two weeks ago she told senators that a transgender woman — a biological male who chooses to appear female — could be subjected to discrimination by an employer for “potential pregnancy”.

“The law as it currently stands is an ass and we will change it,” exclaimed Liberal senator Michaelia Cash.

There is also an argument for the Liberal and National parties to disassociate themselves from the Coalition governments of 2013 to 2022.

Many new One Nation voters are disillusioned Liberals who feel they were let down by these governments. They point to the huge debt racked up during the pandemic, the suppression of civil liberties and the post-Covid immigration wave — about 1.3 million people in three years — that occurred under policies set by the Morrison government and enforced by Labor.

The Albanese Government was too slow to crack down on a deluge of applications from foreign students and working-holiday makers in 2022, when it won power, according to Abul Rizvi, a former senior official in the Immigration Department.

Those extra people created huge demand for rental accommodation, pushing up prices and creating stress for many people not fortunate enough to own a house or apartment. It was a political gift for a party founded on hostility to immigration, which can blame what it calls the “uniparty” for the problem.

“Taylor cannot blame Labor for the peak in NOM (net overseas migration) in 2022-23,” Mr Rizvi said. “But he can blame Labor for the outcome from 2023-24. Labor was too slow to tighten. That remains the case today.”

Abbott comeback?

Immigration is changing the nation, not for the first time. But not since the 1890s have as many people living in Australia been foreign born, according to the statistics bureau.

The Liberal Party is following One Nation to the right on immigration policy, a shift that has not driven up its poll numbers. To win back voters upset about the changing makeup of society, Mr Taylor might have to toughen his anti-immigrant rhetoric.

He is reluctant to do that, given his conventional economic training and the importance of voters of Chinese and Indian heritage. That natural caution may make him vulnerable to a re-emerged force in the Liberal Party in the form of former prime minister Tony Abbott.

Mr Abbott, appointed party president two weeks ago, is a respected figure among cultural conservatives not just in Australia but across the Anglosphere. His suggestion on Monday that the Liberal Party swap votes with One Nation — making it look like a quasi-alliance was brewing — triggered a week of discomfort for the Coalition.

Mr Abbott is too popular for Mr Taylor to rebuke, at least now. But Mr Taylor let it be known publicly that he had called Tony Pasin, the Shadow Minister for Scrutiny of Government Waste and Accountability, and told him his suggestion of a non-compete deal with One Nation was “unnecessary”.

In the recesses of some Liberals’ minds, this week raised a question so unexpected it could barely be spoken aloud: could Mr Abbott’s comments be part of the greatest comeback plan since Robert Menzies was elected prime minister a second time in 1949?

As Mr Taylor distinguished the Liberals as competitors rather than collaborators with One Nation, his party’s future never looked more uncertain.