As the Liberal party sets about regrouping from its entirely self-inflicted drubbing at the last election, there’s only one certainty about who’ll be leader going into the next one: it won’t be Sussan Ley.
To be fair, Ley has been handed the most thankless job in politics, taking over the opposition leadership after an electoral rout. But she is also the face of the faction who brought the Liberal party to its current nadir: the woke, wet, weak ‘moderates’. So, the smarter candidates for rebuilding the party are letting her be their human shield for a time.
That time is fast running out. Her demotion of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price sent shockwaves through the centre-right who are the party’s alienated base. But while many see Price as future prime ministerial material, that future is likely at least two elections away.
A more likely contender for the next Liberal PM is Andrew Hastie.
Young, smart, photogenic, a war hero, a scholar and a natural leader, Hastie is still somewhat inexperienced as a politician – but then, so were Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd and Jacinda Ardern.
Hastie is also an actual, centre-right conservative. The sort of leader who represents the coalition’s natural base, who’ve been walking away in droves. Don’t be fooled by the landslide number of seats Labor won at the last election: their primary vote is still dire, barely above record-low levels. Centre-right voters didn’t flock to Labor – they walked away from the coalition in disgust.
If Hastie can win them back, Labor are toast.
It seems he senses that his time is here. To that end, he’s challenging Ley over the one of the defining issues for the centre-right: ‘Net Zero’ and the coalition’s dismal record of me-too-ism on even the most lunatic left policies.
Shadow home affairs minister Andrew Hastie has refused to back away from his warning that he could quit the Liberal frontbench if the party adopts Labor’s Net Zero by 2050 policy.
Mr Hastie, who has long opposed emissions reduction targets, said his stance was consistent with the position he first outlined to workers in his WA electorate back in 2018 […]
Mr Hastie argued the Liberals should not “accept Labor’s framing” of the debate and insisted energy security and affordability must come before international climate targets.
“We should be focused on energy security,” he said.
The rest of the world is waking up. For all their blatherskite, most major nations are walking back from ambitious ‘climate targets’. Demand for coal is higher than ever. Nuclear is experiencing a renaissance and likely to gather more momentum as small modular reactors become more commonplace. It’s so obvious that even the Economist is noticing.
The Economist magazine, the house journal of liberal internationalism, recently recommended that the world abandon net zero by 2050 as a hard target because there is absolutely no chance it will happen. Many nations’ net-zero pledges, it said, “are barely physically imaginable, let alone politically feasible”.
No respectable centre-right party in the Anglophone is now seriously committed to net zero, because it’s an inherently fraudulent concept and entirely unachievable. Trying to reach it involves massive costs.
Only Australia stands out, captured by the demented zealotry of the Greens and our moronic, lying, ‘Climate Change and Energy Minister’, Boofhead Bowen. And a Liberal Party apparently captured by “a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome”, as Hastie puts it.
“They’re hostage to Labor’s framing of this whole debate, which is focused on climate.”
He insisted the party still had time to regroup before the next election, despite Monday’s dismal polling, while also fighting off questions that the shadow home affairs minister is gunning for Ms Ley’s position as party leader.”
Well, of course he says that. They all do.
Meanwhile, he’s backed Ley into a corner.
Hastie has said he’ll go to the backbench if the party sticks with net zero. Other front benchers would follow. The idea of the coalition in opposition with Hastie, Jacinta Nampijimpa Price, Matt Canavan and other high performers all on the backbench is completely untenable.
Ley might win, but she’ll only wind up as queen of the ashes.
If Hastie prevails? The legacy media and the left will squeal blue murder. The ‘moderates’ will bleat that they’ll be rooned, pointing at polling showing heavy support among young voters for net zero.
But young people are stupid and easily led. The only reason they’re so captured by climate alarmism is because no one’s had the guts to tell them otherwise.
In Australia, the herd of unanimous independent minds always bleats with a single voice. One day it’s sure the whole world is going to embrace a carbon tax. That disappears. Five minutes ago green hydrogen was central to everything. That’s all gone.
It should also be remembered that young voters were all the way behind the voice… until they weren’t.
The giant test is whether the coalition is capable of mounting a campaign, on net zero or anything else. Those who say the Coalition must go where the people are forget the voice referendum. It began life with 65 per cent support. The coalition, on that issue brilliantly led by Price, campaigned passionately against and it lost decisively.
To borrow the words of old lefty beardy-weirdies folk-rock band Redgum: If You Don’t Fight, You Lose.
