Taylor. But why?

Twenty years ago, it was the federal Labor Party that was in opposition and looking desperate. Three leaders had departed in quick succession and the incumbent, Kim Beazley, was on shaky ground (he did not last out the year). There was a lot of casting around for alternatives, with some looking towards then union leader Bill Shorten, who had just announced his intention to stand for parliament.

That prompted me to write a piece for Crikey with the somewhat prescient title of “If Bill Shorten is the answer, you’re asking the wrong question.” Conceding that Shorten would “clearly be a valuable addition to the parliamentary ALP,” I argued that turning to yet another union apparatchik would not be the party’s salvation, and that indeed the whole quest was misconceived:

For one thing, leadership just isn’t that important. Yes, a poor leader can drag a party down, but even the best of leaders can’t work miracles.

Back in the 1990s, Gerard Henderson assailed the “Messiah complex,” as he called it, that led the Liberal Party to hail every hot new leadership prospect as the answer to all its woes, and thereby avoid facing up to more deep-seated problems. Now, after a similarly long period in opposition, the Labor Party could be catching the disease.

But at least you could see, in that far-off time of 2006, what Labor was thinking. It may have been the wrong question, but there was an intelligible question to which Shorten was the answer. Twenty years on, with the ball firmly back in the Liberal Party’s court, it’s far from clear what question anyone would think Angus Taylor might be the answer to.

Bernard Keane earlier this week described him as “a management consultant’s idea of a politician, equal parts grey suit and managerialist pabulum.” Does any sane person really think those are the characteristics required of an opposition leader? Yet it was Taylor that the Liberal Party this morning chose as its new leader, by a margin of two to one.

At one level it’s easy to see how things got to here. The Liberal Party has become an echo chamber in which the verities of the hard right cannot be questioned. In the aftermath of last year’s landslide loss, the right was temporarily wrong-footed enough to allow Sussan Ley to become leader by a narrow margin. But her project of returning the party to the mainstream was, in Keane’s words, “dead on arrival”; the right, with the assistance of the National Party, imposed on her a set of policies designed for the opposite effect.

Forced, like Malcolm Turnbull before her, to stand for things she did not believe in, it’s no surprise that Ley did it badly. Change of some sort became necessary, and since the right was never going to give in, Ley had to go. And since Andrew Hastie, who at least has some measure of fluency and brains, was easily convinced that this was not his moment, the choice fell on Taylor.

Yet the air of disbelief remains. There have been dud leaders before – readers will easily collect their own examples – but nonetheless there were reasons, even if bad reasons, why they appealed to some people at the time. If there are any such reasons with Taylor they remain mysterious.

As I tried to convey back in 2006, the problem is not just in the personnel: the personnel are a symptom. The malaise in the Liberal Party runs much deeper than the lack of talent on its front bench. If you haven’t already done so, you can read all about it in my recent series “Crisis on the right” (part five here, with links to the previous instalments). This is not, as some would have it, a routine disagreement on policies; it is, to use an overworked term, an existential crisis.

Dealing with an occasion like this would appear, to put it mildly, to not be the sort of thing that Taylor is cut out for. What, if anything, do they think they’re doing?