The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity – W B Yeats, “The Second Coming”
How did useless clowns like Anthony Albanese and Keir Starmer come to win such landslide victories? It’s not as if either are hugely popular: Albanese’s approval ratings are almost exactly the same as Donald Trump’s, whom the media never tire of telling us is, like, the worst president, ever. As for Starmer, gigantic icebergs of human faeces dunked in the punch bowl have been more warmly received.
The truth is that neither’s landslide number of seats at their last elections represented a groundswell of voter endorsement. Both won with near-identical first-preference votes: around just one-third of voters in Australia or the UK put Labor/Labour first.
What in fact happened was that centre-right voters deserted the mainstream, supposedly ‘centre-right’, parties in droves. For the same reasons. The same reasons Luxon’s National Party is sinking fast in the polls: the mainstream ‘conservative’ parties have thrown all conservative principles to the wind, in favour of chasing after whatever brain fart the green-left drop next.
Mass immigration? The Conservatives in the UK and the Liberal ‘moderates’ in Australia are just as gung-ho for it as Labor. ‘Net Zero’? Us, too! chirp the conservatives-in-name-only. Digital ID and stifling free speech? ‘Shut up, peasants,’ the ‘conservatives’ chant in lockstep. ‘Palestine’? ‘To hell with the Jews!’ goes the chorus. ‘Rainbow’ groomers? ‘Where’s our drag queens at?’
At least Britain has a credible opposition to the far-left insanity sweeping the Anglosphere. So do the US, where Donald Trump won a historic victory, against everything the left-elite Deep State had to throw against him, including multiple assassination attempts. Even New Zealand has political wind-sniffer Winston Peters.
Where’s Australia’s Donald Trump or Nigel Farage?
Waiting in the wings, if only the Liberal party power-brokers had the sense to see it, instead of persisting with the disastrous failure of the ‘moderate’ bed-wetters like Sussan Ley.
Over recent months, something rare and dangerous for Labor and the left has begun to emerge: a Liberal politician who doesn’t follow neoliberal orthodoxies and speaks credibly to working-class material interests. Andrew Hastie is making serious claims on what many of us thought was Labor business.
It may not show in the disastrous election results or opinion polls, but Labor’s grip on power is tenuous in the extreme. When a 94-seat majority is built on a near-record-low primary vote, it’s a tottery red Jenga tower that only needs a few blocks pulled out to make the whole thing collapse.
Labor’s old base among the fibro-and-mortgage belts, the outer suburbs, and regional Australia is not just drifting; it is in ferment. The working class is no longer monolithic. It is multiethnic, often small-c conservative on culture and national security, more open to left-wing economics, and anxious at being left behind on housing and social mobility. Hastie sees his opening, and Labor must defend the ground with more than mockery on TikTok.
While the likes of Sussan Ley, Tim Wilson and Dave Sharma scrape the bottom of the polling barrel, Hastie, along with fellow small-c conservatives Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Moira Deeming and Claire Chandler regularly pack out town halls. It was Price who spearheaded the coalition’s stunning victory against the Voice referendum – and her reward so far has been to be sidelined then thrown under a politically correct bus.
While the hugely popular Price is at least a term or two from leadership-readiness, Andrew Hastie seems to be sensing that his time is fast approaching. If not to be leader himself – yet – to at least try and save the Liberals from the ‘moderate’ disaster.
Hastie is on to something. From focus groups and polling conducted for the John Curtin Research Centre pre- and post-election, we know many working-class Australians are restless with the political establishment, no matter the size of Labor’s victory. They feel that the left has too often drifted from its core business of material politics, but the LNP has little to offer them beyond post-material culture wars and a reflexive faith in free-market panaceas.
Enter Hastie. He speaks of energy abundance, industrial capacity and national ambition. Not just national security, but economic security: making things here, protecting jobs, producing rather than just consuming, or being a nation of baristas. For working people worried about cost of living, insecure work, affordable housing, the promise of real, physical industry – factories and supply chains – this is music to their ears, coupled with Hastie’s insistence: “We’ve been ideologically constrained; we must break from those constraints.”
Hastie’s call to rebuild industrial capacity echoes an older conservative insight: a nation’s strength lies in its people and the durability of its institutions. Edmund Burke would likely approve. True conservatism means prudent stewardship and the preservation of social bonds – an allegiance to what endures and works, not to laissez-faire dogma or market fetishism.
Labor underestimates Hastie, and what he stands for, at their peril. In their hubris at what they clearly think was a ringing electoral endorsement, they have deluded themselves it represents a permanent realignment. In fact, outside the progressive inner cities of Melbourne and Sydney, a vast urban rustbelt is looking back on the Australia they once knew – an Australia that built things and knew what it stood for and wonders why it had to be destroyed by technocratic globalism and tribal division. More pertinently, they see no real reason, short of political leadership, why they can’t have it back.
Less tangibly, Australian voters are ever-ready to reward a outsider who challenges their own party: whether Hawke or Rudd on the left, or Abbott or Howard on the right. Even Mark Latham, it is conveniently forgotten, upended federal politics. He lost the election, but with a much bigger first-preference vote than that which delivered Albanese a landslide victory.
With the growing threat of China, coupled with the growing failure of the globalist agenda, Australians are ready to heed Hastie’s appeal to industrial strength and strategic sovereignty. Package that with the anti-Establishment appeal of a Trump or Farage, and Hastie could yet pull the coalition from its self-imposed irrelevance.
If only the party can be persuaded to give up its failed ‘moderate’ experiment.
