Liberals contemplate a Hastie future

Since we last looked at the fortunes of the Liberal Party, a fortnight ago, things have – perhaps not surprisingly – deteriorated further. Andrew Hastie, whom I described then as “the most likely challenger to leader Sussan Ley,” resigned last week from the shadow ministry. He denies that the move is preparatory to a leadership bid, but he can hardly expect to be believed.

Hastie’s chosen issue was not the hardy perennial of climate policy, but rather immigration: he and his supporters are insistent that the party should brand itself as anti-immigrant. The rosy view is that his resignation has settled the matter and confirmed that the party will do no such thing (James Paterson tried to imply as much this morning). The reality, though, is that there is no hope of a pro-immigration stance being adopted; the most Ley can hope for is to fudge the issue for a time, and the time will probably be short.

Nor does it mean that climate change and other culture war issues have faded from view. For Hastie’s backers, strong as usual in News Corp, it’s a package deal, just as it is for far-right parties in most of the world. But the increased emphasis on immigration is symptomatic of the way that those parties have embraced more explicit forms of racism – aided, as I have argued, by mainstream parties that have conceded them the rhetorical high ground.

Which brings us to Australia’s own far-right party, One Nation. Part of the thinking behind the Hastie push appears to be that the Liberal Party has been losing votes to One Nation, presumably as a result of Ley’s more moderate leadership, and that this could be stopped by a rightward shift in policy and personnel. Peter Brent considered this argument in a typically thoughtful piece last week at Inside Story.

But it reminded me of the long-running debate within the Labor Party about how to respond to the threats on its flanks, whether the Greens to the left or various splinter groups (including One Nation) to the right. Some might remember this post from 2022, when I looked at the John Curtin centre (a Labor right think-tank) and its call for Labor to do more to meet the wishes of Clive Palmer’s far-right voters.

Clearly, both arguments can’t be right. The rise in support for a far-right party can’t simultaneously be hurting both Labor and Liberal parties. Most likely, as I argued then, it makes no net difference at all: “If people vote for a right-wing minor party and then preference the Coalition, it’s most probable that in the absence of that minor party, they would just have voted for the Coalition outright.”

The better analogy to the relationship between the Liberals and One Nation is the relationship between Labor and the Greens. There is some evidence, although it’s debatable, that a stronger Green vote helps Labor: that an appreciable number of Green voters come from the Coalition, and some of them then just follow the how-to-vote card and preference Labor. But the corresponding effect from One Nation to the Coalition would be weaker, if it exists at all, because One Nation voters are less likely to see a how-to-vote card and probably less likely to take any notice of it if they do.

Politicians, though, are mostly uncomfortable talking about ideas, so they will wrap a philosophical argument in terms of strategy. Because Labor’s right sees the Greens as ideological enemies, it insists that they must be hurting Labor’s vote, whether or not that makes any statistical sense. Conversely, the Liberal Party’s right wants to emulate One Nation’s policies because they’re what it believes in – but afraid to openly avow that belief, it instead claims it’s an electoral necessity.

Brent points out that the surge in One Nation’s support is modest at best; the share of it that won’t come back to the Coalition in preferences would be negligible. But as we noted in passing a few weeks ago, the Liberal Party branches are filled with people who don’t really understand the electoral system, and Hastie (who probably does) is happy to exploit that ignorance.

Even if you accept that One Nation is a serious electoral threat, that on its own won’t tell you how to deal with it: it won’t help you decide between the opposing strategies of stealing its policy clothes on the one hand, or sharpening the differentiation and having a good stand-up fight on the other. That choice requires actually thinking about ideas and deciding what you want the party to stand for.

And as for the larger project of winning back the voters in the middle of the spectrum, who deserted the Coalition for Labor or the Teals, Hastie and his people have no ideas at all. News Corp isn’t interested in them; it’s happy just monetising increased angst from the already committed. But without them, the Liberal Party’s future looks bleak indeed.