LATIKA M BOURKE: Malcolm Turnbull declares One Nation’s Farrer win shows ‘chickens are coming home to roost’

Malcolm Turnbull says his criticisms over the far-right direction of the Liberal party have been vindicated, declaring that One Nation’s capture of its first lower seat in the formerly Coalition-held seat of Farrer is the “chickens coming home to roost.”

“The Liberal party in Australia, the large-L Liberal party, has made a very big mistake by going further and further to the populist right-wing, culture-war stuff that does well on the Australian equivalent of GB News, which is sort of Sky News After Dark in Australia, that sort of anger-tainment media ecosystem,” the former prime minister said.

“That move has been happening pretty much since I was defenestrated in 2018, and it’s intensified under Mr Dutton.

“And the problem is that the more you move into that space occupied by the far-right wing protest party, One Nation in Australia and say Reform in the UK, the more you validate them.

“Now this is the trap for the Conservatives, it’s a trap for the Liberals in Australia. So you are not going to outflank Pauline Hanson on immigration because whatever your policy is, it’s never going to be enough.

“I’ve been warning … I’ve been making this point for some years, but the chickens are really coming home to roost there.”

Ahead of the byelection, Liberal Leader Angus Taylor released a hardline immigration policy in an attempt to woo back disenfranchised One Nation voters.

But the move failed. The Liberals suffered a 31-point swing against them, while One Nation’s David Farley picked up 32.86 per cent of the vote, giving him a 57-43 per cent lead on a two-party preferred basis over the independent Michelle Milthorpe.

The byelection was caused by the departure of Sussan Ley from federal parliament after Mr Taylor challenged her for the leadership, because of her poor polling.

Ms Ley said the result showed that Mr Taylor’s claim that the party needed to “change or die” was “far truer today than it ever was then.”

The Liberals’ loss of the seat made for One Nation’s first victory in a lower-house by-election. The Nationals-turned-One-Nation MP Barnaby Joyce has warned his new party is coming for Western Sydney seats.

Liberal strategist Tony Barry, who served as an advisor to Mr Turnbull and Director of the apolitical research firm RedBridge Group, said the Coalition was most successful when it operated as a big tent party.

“But it’s now a party without an identity and has turned itself into a small tent with a focus on internal audiences and some whose desire to be seen as a party powerbroker exceeds their desire to win elections all while the electorate has completley moved on,” he said.

Mr Turnbull was speaking in London, where Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership is in crisis, following heavy defeats for Labour in last week’s local, Scottish and Welsh elections to both Reform on the right and the Greens on the left.

Dozens of MPs have urged the UK prime minister to quit and hand over to someone who can lead the fight against Nigel Farage, who is leading in the polls and dominated the council results.

Mr Turnbull served as Liberal leader and Prime Minister between 2015 and 2018. He ousted Tony Abbott for the leadership but suffered the same fate in 2018 when Scott Morrison claimed the top job.

Mr Turnbull noted that Sir Keir was “preoccupied with leadership issues” which he said was “a state of mind, I’m not unfamiliar with.”

He was in conversation at the foreign affairs think tank Chatham House, speaking on Indo-Pacific policy.

In further criticisms of the Liberals’ performance since Scott Morrison ousted him for the prime ministership in 2018, Mr Turnbull said that his successor’s policy on China got sucked into “right-wing China-bashing” that was politically catastrophic at the ballot box, given Australia’s multicultural society.

“With respect to my successor Mr Morrison and his defence minister Peter Dutton, I think they overdid the bellicose rhetoric,” he said.

“You can be strong and take a principled position that your counter party doesn’t like but you don’t have to fling it in their face or be rude about it.

“Don’t get sucked into that lure of right-wing media to get China-bashing, there’s no point doing that, absolutely no point. The Americans can get away with it because they’re American but for a country like Australia and the UK, the China-scare stuff, you should just stay well clear of.

“And it was catastrophic politically for the Liberal party, the last election — it really hurt the Liberal party in a number of electorates where there were large Chinese communities, or Australians with Chinese heritage.

He said two of his own grandchildren were part of the 1.5 million Australians with Chinese heritage.

“Multicultural society – you’ve got to speak respectfully about people with every background.”

The Liberals Deputy Leader Jane Hume was publicly blamed for contributing to the loss of Chinese votes when she accused volunteers campaigning for the Victorian Cabinet Minister Claire O’Neil of being Chinese spies.

Mr Turnbull said Australia did not have to make a choice between China and the United States and that both relationships were to be managed.

“If the Americans said for example, you’ve got to stop exporting iron ore to China there’s no way, no Australian government would ever agree to that,” he said.

“Western Australia would secede for a start!”

He doubted that Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is due to host US President Donald Trump in Beijing this week, would start a military conflict over Taiwan.

“A very senior Chinese official said to me a while ago, he said: ‘You should never forget that every soldier in the People’s Liberation Army is somebody’s only child,’” he said.

“I was struck by it.

“I think a conflict is unlikely but that China is in a much stronger position to wage it now than it ever has been.”