I’m busy with a couple of other projects for the next fortnight, so blogging will be a bit light on. But I thought I should quickly report on my experience last week of seeing Andrew Hastie deliver the annual Anzac oration at the Robert Menzies Institute. You can read a transcript of his address here or watch the video here.
Briefly, his argument is that the ANZUS alliance (which he supports) has led to Australia neglecting its need for self-sufficiency, particularly in defence-related matters. He describes America’s interest in the alliance as pragmatic rather than idealistic, saying that it “should not be expected to guarantee much except its own strategic interests,” and suggests that Australia needs more of the same hard-headed realism: we need to “strengthen our animal side.”
I’d have to say I was impressed. The two most revealing moments, to my mind, came during the following discussion. The first was when, without directly commenting on the case of Ben Roberts-Smith, he made it very clear that he supported the prosecution and that it was important to speak out against war crimes. I applauded, as did a few others, but the room as a whole was fairly obviously not on his side.
The second was when, in the course of a broad list of his policy priorities, he referred to the need to cut immigration. That received an enthusiastic round of applause – not from me, but from the vast majority of the Liberal-leaning audience.
So while the party faithful will happily go along with Hastie’s tendency to protectionism and isolationism, on some things he is, from their point of view, dangerously unsound. Defence of war crimes is an article of faith for the far-right pundits on which the party membership now mostly relies. Even on immigration Hastie doesn’t quite sound like one of them: he doesn’t give the impression of someone in the grip of racist or nativist fears. He is also disdainful of Donald Trump, whom much of the base still worships.
Although their politics are quite different, there’s some similarity with Malcolm Turnbull, in that both men are too clever to be tied down to a party line and are not afraid to show it. But cleverness is not what the members are looking for. Angus Taylor, who despite his Rhodes scholarship can give a convincing impression of being no smarter than the average One Nation supporter, is much more in their line.
Back in October, when we discussed Hastie’s prospects, I said this:
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.
Hastie has certainly stolen some of One Nation’s policies, but not all, and he also seems keen to have a stand-up fight with it. As we saw last week, however, with the debate on preferencing the far right, that’s not a fight that either the members or the current leadership are likely to back him on. Their instinct is to take One Nation on as partners, and it seems likely that Hastie’s chance will only come (if it comes at all) after that strategy has been tried and failed.
There’s a dangerous mood afoot in the Liberal Party, of which the attraction for One Nation is just a symptom. Support for war crimes – peripheral though the issue might seem – is a very typical indication. Just as Trump’s problems seem to be deepening, his Australian faithful are clinging to him more doggedly and will not accept inferior substitutes.
Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Peggy Noonan’s wonderful memoir of her time in the Reagan administration, What I Saw at the Revolution. Although herself a conservative, Noonan had little time for many of the “movement” conservatives of the time, whom she describes as “a bunch of creepy little men with creepy little beards who need something to seethe on.”
Almost forty years on we seem to have come full circle. Only last year I remarked to a senior Liberal at a function on the way that the party’s young men were all starting to look like J.D. Vance; he too (though very much on the right) had noticed the signs. This is not likely to end well.
The World is Not Enough 