The Liberal ‘moderates’ are clearly feeling threatened by Andrew Hastie. How else to explain this alleged ‘post-election review’ savaging the rising centre-right star, which has conveniently dropped out of nowhere nearly six months after the fact.
Defeated opposition leader Peter Dutton has laid significant blame for the coalition’s election loss at the feet of Liberal MP Andrew Hastie in explosive secret submissions to the party’s election review that accuse Hastie of going “on strike” and fumbling key policies.
Oh, ho, ho, ho – now, this is rich. Dutton launched his campaign by bollixing his own signature work-from-home policy, and hastily backtracking in fear of the middle-class female public servant vote. As for Hastie supposedly ‘going on strike’, what does that say about the rest of the party, given that the biggest criticism of the disastrous campaign is that it was almost entirely a one-man show? Apart from Dutton, the only other coalition figure to even get a modicum of campaign time was Angus Taylor, who was also generally derided by observers as fumbling his own policy arena.
Apparently it’s easier to blame one conservative man than the entire ‘moderate’ wing of the party, especially when that conservative is threatening the moderates’ death-grip on the party. A literal death-grip, as the party is slowly garotted to death on the moderates’ watch.
Support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has surged to its highest level since 2017, as Sussan Ley’s approval rating plunges and Labor records its strongest primary vote in 28 months.
An exclusive Newspoll conducted for the Australian reveals core support for the coalition remains at near-record lows while One Nation’s primary vote rose to 11 per cent, which is almost double the minor party’s performance at the May 3 election.
The Newspoll, which was in the field between Monday and Thursday last week before Andrew Hastie quit Ms Ley’s shadow cabinet, shows the coalition’s primary vote remains at a historically low 28 per cent.
The result is just one per cent higher than the 27 per cent in last month’s poll, which was the lowest level of support for the Liberals and Nationals since Newspoll first counted primary votes in November 1985.
It’s worth pointing out that Labor’s primary vote is also at near-record lows. Its 2022 result, which returned it to government, was its lowest vote in a century, only beaten by its record-low of 27 per cent in 1934. Its 2025 result, which delivered a landslide of seats, only rose by two per cent.
So, what’s going on?
It’s simple: voters have deserted Labor, but they’ve deserted the coalition even harder. Because of the ‘moderates’ and their woke, weak, bullshit like this:
Senior Liberal frontbencher Andrew Bragg says migrants are not the cause of housing shortages and suggested Australia would be a global outlier if it walked away from net zero, as supporters of Sussan Ley expect her to defy a push from conservative MPs to walk away from a pledge to reach carbon neutrality […]
One MP said her leadership had been a “train wreck” while another said she was leading the party to “oblivion”.
The fatal conceit of the ‘moderates’ is that they have to reject the centre-right conservativism of Howard and Menzies, in favour of aping every single policy of the radical green-left. They really think that ‘Us, too, but in more expensive suits’ is a vote-winning strategy. As if voters really want two parties offering exactly the same thing.
That there is indeed a massive centre-right voter base drumming their heels in frustration with the major supposedly ‘conservative’ party, is amply illustrated by the surge in the so-called ‘hard right’.
Hard-right minor party leaders Pauline Hanson and Gerard Rennick are on national membership drives and establishing branches to take advantage of voter dissatisfaction with the coalition, as Sussan Ley battles internal discord.
Senator Hanson’s One Nation is setting up branches in Queensland, NSW, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria for the first time in a decade, and is planning to run candidates at the SA and Victorian elections in March and November next year.
One Nation doubled its Senate representation from two to four at the May federal election, adding senators in Western Australia and NSW to its Queensland contingent of Senator Hanson and Malcolm Roberts.
The only reason Labor have won two elections is the same reason the furiously hated Starmer Labor party won in the UK: the mainstream ‘conservative’ party has become a pale-pink shadow of the left, and there is (or was, for the UK) no credible centre-right third party. In the UK, Reform have since stormed to the head of the polls, despite the relentless campaign against them by the legacy media.
The legacy media in Australia are just as feral against One Nation. Slowly, but surely, the legacy media’s malign influence is fading, but it’s still a long road for One Nation.
If, on the other hand, the coalition finally wakes up to itself and ditches the disastrous ‘moderates’, Labor are toast.
