Why Australia’s legacy Liberals don’t get the ‘new right’
Both the more progressive and conservative wings of the Liberal Party have recently worked themselves into a lather, convinced that where they stand on “net zero” is the key issue which will determine their electoral future.
While not unimportant, neither side has really understood what is driving the “new right”, pro worker conservatism that has proven so politically successful in the United State, Britain and elsewhere in the West.
Malcolm Turnbull recently labelled the decision by Sussan Ley to drop the 2050 emissions target as “Trumpian”. But the fact is climate change played a relatively minor role in Trump’s campaign. Instead, the heart of his agenda was a reassessment of US trade, immigration and foreign policy. Marco Rubio and JD Vance – initially hostile to Trump and now his strongest defenders and likely successors – have repeatedly stressed the centrality of these matters.
James Orr, the head of the national conservative movement in Europe and now senior adviser to Nigel Farage, does the same. Yet these are the areas in which the legacy right in Australia largely refuses to accept the need for serious readjustment.
Instead, they continue to want to run on a platform that resembles something Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain or David Cameron would approve of – cutting taxes and regulations, budget repair, rolling back DEI, more flag waving patriotism, increase in defence spending and the like. There is nothing inherently wrong with these positions. But they are not new, nor are they sufficient to win.
The tragedy of Peter Dutton’s election campaign was that it embraced some second order MAGA issues, but ignored the far more important and popular ones. For example, there was much enthusiasm for Elon Musk’s cost cutting program, DOGE. Yet the program was only announced after the US President was re-elected. Similarly, the slogan “Drill baby, drill!” was not used at all until 2024 and was a rehash of a line first popularised by Sarah Palin. Trump was broadly supportive of nuclear power, but did not lead with it.
The Dutton campaign thus managed to attract all the opprobrium of the Trump brand but got none of the upside of his more salient core policies.
Trade policy was not mentioned in any significant way by Dutton. Yet it was the first thing Trump mentioned when he launched his initial campaign, and this ultimately proved crucial in electorally significant blue collar industrial Midwest seats and elsewhere. Now there is a bipartisan position in Washington for at least some level of tariffs on China and many other countries.
In Australia, by contrast, the centre-right continues to support an agreement, signed by Tony Abbott’s government (on almost the same day Trump first came down the escalators in 2015), that allows 100 per cent of Chinese manufactured goods to come into Australia duty-free. If that stays in place we will largely remain, in Andrew Hastie’s words, “a nation of flat white makers” and never have any sort of substantial industry in Australia ever again.
Scepticism about past foreign policy was also a key factor of Trump’s appeal. His harsh criticisms of Iraq and other interventions were a direct repudiation past Republican administrations. These were popular with the public who had grown tired of the misguided and pointless “forever wars”. Yet there has been no real evidence of reflection or contrition in this area from the Howard era right, which appears stuck in the age of George W. Bush.
Hastie seems to get change is required. Other Middle East war veterans who now occupy senior positions in the White House, such as Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Jamieson Greer, certainly recognise that a new prudence and realism is needed compared to the last 25 plus years.
Immigration is another area that is central to the rise of the “new right” across the Western world. But it is a subject that has moved well beyond “stopping the boats” of the Howard era. Back then there was an oft-repeated mantra that because our government was able to control illegal immigration Australians welcomed higher levels of legal immigration. If that was ever actually true, it is not true now. Now the far bigger issue is legal immigration numbers.
“Mass migration poses an existential threat to Western civilisation and undermines the stability of key American allies”, Rubio’s state department recently announced. Yet the shadow Immigration Minister Paul Scarr refuses to even use the term “mass immigration” and reprimands people like Hastie for their language when they try to talk seriously but sensibly about it.
The Liberal Party does not need cosmetic changes, more attractive candidates or better rhetoric. The problem is it continues to cling to a stale consensus which is increasingly out of step with successful centre-right political parties across the rest of the world.
Dan Ryan is executive director of the National Conservative Institute of Australia.
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