LATIKA M BOURKE: Is Josh Frydenberg the answer to the Liberal Party’s Angus Taylor emergency?

When Angus Taylor appeared on Kitchen Cabinet, the television show where the ABC presenter Annabel Crabb is served a meal by a politician, he decided to impress her with a “Dad dinner” of damper — flour and water — and scrambled eggs.

“Scrambled eggs — what I love about them is you can have them for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he told Crabb.

If you rocked up to a dinner party and were served bread and eggs, you would assume your host couldn’t really be stuffed, and was just going through the motions.

“Pretty plain,” Mr Taylor conceded, as he tucked into his culinary creation.

It serves as a metaphor for where the Liberals find themselves, after two near-extinction election results and three equally aimless leaders.

This is not the time to be dishing up dull and uninspired offerings to the electorate, yet that is what the Liberals seem to be doing.

Their two key policies include a Labor-lite pledge to cut fuel excise whenever global supply shocks send the price above US$100 per barrel, and a cap on net migration to 100,000 that belatedly addresses immigration, an issue One Nation has put on the national agenda and dominated.

Mr Taylor seems incapable or unwilling to set the political agenda. He has a media strategy of workmanlike press conferences and interviews on mostly right-wing outlets that go nowhere.

Ask yourself this — with all of the Labor government’s missteps, can you think of one instance where the killer blow has been delivered by Mr Taylor? The travesty is that history has never called upon the Liberals to get it right more than this moment.

The political landscape is being rewritten and the Liberals must shape it if they are to survive.

Labor’s ratings are tanking. As are the approval ratings of its frontmen, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers.

Interest rates are rising; voters feel like their household budgets cannot cope with the soaring cost of living and they are becoming increasingly angry with an economic model that they feel no longer rewards however hard they work.

It is an open goal. Yet when has Mr Taylor managed to score?

Instead, he wanders onto the pitch with a plate of scrambled eggs.

Mr Taylor was Peter Dutton’s shadow treasurer between 2022 and 2025.

He should be owning and dominating the economic debate the country desperately needs to have. But his promised fuel excise cuts are just more tinkering at the edges; me-tooism that has turned voters into “double haters” — despising both sides.

When voters grew fed up with their governments in 2007 and 2013 the oppositions of the day stepped upgf, and both Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott led their parties out of the wilderness into government.

Is Angus Taylor capable of doing the same?

On paper, he still has time, roughly another 18 months or so. But unless the Liberals want populism to permanently enter the political bloodstream, the Liberals need to act like they have none, and they need some imagination.

One option could be to do something so daring, unprecedented and bold that would make the public pay attention.

It is something the Queensland LNP did when faced with the prospect of a resurgent Anna Bligh after Cyclone Yasi. Party bosses recruited an outsider to run as leader — Campbell Newman.

He won a landslide election in 2012 and lost government a term later. Because history wells on the latter, it forgets the success of the original move to recruit him to run for government, despite not holding a seat or being able to sit in the Parliamentary chamber.

Newman initially rebuffed the attempts to get him to run, but when Cyclone Yasi hit, he knew Labor would get a boost in the polls. So he met the Parliamentary leadership team, and after negotiations with party bosses, a deal was struck between all three.

It was automatic energy for the opposition. “When I announced my candidacy, it reset things,” he told The Nightly. The formula only worked due to the triumvirate of the parliamentary leadership accepting that Mr Newman was the de facto leader, would do the media messaging and attend partyroom as a “guest” and all work together as one.

This consensus might be impossible for what remains of the Liberal Party to agree to now at the federal level. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin, his former chief of staff, hold enormous sway over the party and back Mr Taylor. They advocate right-leaning policies targeted at One Nation voters, as opposed to trying to pitch to the overwhelming majority of voters that have abandoned the Liberals for Teal and Labor.

But in the event that it became obvious to all that Mr Taylor’s leadership might aid Labor holding on, thanks to their 94-seat majority, one emergency option that would warrant consideration is Josh Frydenberg.

The former Treasurer is, to date, the only Liberal who has landed any meaningful blow against Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Having warned repeatedly since October 7 that Australian Jews were not safe, he provocatively — and outrageously to Labor supporters — effectively accused the Prime Minister of responsibility for the Bondi Beach massacre

In that speech, he described it as a fight for the “soul of the nation”.

It left Mr Albanese a permanently damaged figure and contributed to the start of Labor’s ten-point slide in the polls. But it did not benefit Mr Frydenberg’s former colleagues, only Pauline Hanson.

After Bondi, One Nation’s primary leapt from 18 per cent in November last year to 29 per cent according to the research firm Redbridge. The Coalition’s standing slid from 24 per cent in November to 19 per cent by the time Mr Taylor decided to knife Ms Ley for the job.

It was a moment rare in Australian politics and revealed a never-before-seen side of Mr Frydenberg, who was often seen by his colleagues as too much of a people pleaser to be a good, low-spending, tax-cutting Liberal Treasurer, let alone a decisive leader.

Mr Frydenberg then went on to lead one of the most extraordinary whipping campaigns in Australia’s political history, mobilising day after day different sections of the Australian community, from sporting heroes to business leaders, national security public servants, and so on to call for a royal Commission, something Mr Albanese refused until he could no longer, in light of all the pressure.

Mr Frydenberg has long held leadership aspirations. But his political dream was cut short by the Teal surge in 2022 when Monique Ryan booted him out of Kooyong.

After Bondi, he retreated from the public limelight again. But in the coming weeks, expect to hear a lot more from him as he releases his book. It will be only partly a memoir as it will canvass Australia’s future direction.

This will naturally invite the public to assume that he will recontest Kooyong and try to make a comeback for the Liberals and then the leadership.

Mr Frydenberg tells friends he still has not made up his mind about that but he is going to a lot of work and seeking a lot of publicity to merely record his legacy if he eventually decides to sit another election out.

Indeed, he should be encouraged, whether he ever realises his leadership ambitions or not. The Liberals cannot hope to govern without securing the support of voters who abandoned them.

And the party should see that history is calling it to stand up or be swallowed whole by One Nation, just as Donald Trump gobbled up the Republican Party and spat out the MAGA movement in his name.

The Liberals are in an emergency situation. They should consider breaking glass and reaching for something more daring than scrambled eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner.