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In an interview that reads more like a leadership pitch, Andrew Hastie has laid out the sort of agenda that might have saved the Liberal Party – if they’d had the guts to adopt it months ago. The Liberal frontbencher was, until recently, favourite to topple the disastrous Sussan Ley. But any hopes that Hastie might throw a lifeline to the dying party ended last month, after a secret meeting cleared the way for Angus Taylor to take the leadership.
Perhaps Hastie, the former soldier, is making a strategic retreat and mustering his forces. Or has he just squibbed it and left his run too late to save the Liberals?
In an interview with the Australian, the coalition’s freshly appointed industry spokesman backed new coal-fired power stations, high wages and potentially tax incentives to increase advanced manufacturing production.
Mr Hastie also said the coalition could win back its right flank by reclaiming the narrative of the Liberal Party’s founder Robert Menzies with compelling policies for families, housing and small business.
Good luck with that.
Although, clearly, he has the legacy media in his corner. Make no mistake, this is the flipside of the normiecon establishment’s hysterical attacks on One Nation.
The former leadership aspirant said his ideological differences with economic liberal and internal rival Angus Taylor had been exaggerated, declaring “markets are always superior to centralised control by government” and he was not seeking to bring back car manufacturing.
He instead wanted to investigate ways – including possible tax incentives – to encourage more companies to set up high-end manufacturing facilities in strategic sectors of defence, health, infrastructure, space, agriculture and energy.
Mr Hastie did not rule out supporting future tariffs for industry while declaring no assistance for manufacturing mattered until the net-zero emissions target was junked and energy prices slashed.
With Mr Hastie’s supporters believing he needed an economic portfolio to broaden his credentials beyond national security, the former SAS commander said he would be on the frontline of the net zero debate in his new role.
“We should be building more coal and gas,” Mr Hastie said.
Where was all this, months ago, when it might have saved the Liberal Party?
As it stands, Hastie looks likely to be king of the ashes, if nothing else, if the polls bear out and the Liberals are humiliated at the next election.
The West Australian MP suggested he retained aspirations to be Liberal leader one day but he would be a team player and support the Opposition Leader in his unlikely quest to win the next election.
Declaring economic dislocation the dominant reason voters were shifting to One Nation, Mr Hastie said: “We haven’t had a political narrative for some time in the Liberal Party. The Menzian settlement – where families were the centre of Menzies’ world view, the family home was the centre of his world view, where small business was the centre of his world view – that settlement feels broken at the moment.”
Well, thanks a bunch, Captain Hindsight.
Hastie’s even, timidly, trying to reclaim some of the narrative ground lost to One Nation.
Mr Hastie said he agreed with Senator Hanson’s concerns about the compatibility of “political Islam” with Australian values, but he did not agree with her suggestion there were no good Muslims in Australia.
Except that, once again, she never said that. Going along with the legacy media’s lies might play well at the dinner party tables of the media chatterers, but ordinary people are seeing right through it. And gravitating harder to One Nation.
These people have learned nothing from the 2024 US presidential election.
