Craig Kelly’s Trumpist outbreak puts conservatives on existential alert

Craig Kelly at Parliament House, Canberra, on Tuesday after he abandoned the Morrison government for the cross-bench. Picture: Gary Ramage

The resignation of Craig Kelly from the Liberal Party is the first structural outbreak of Trumpism in our politics.

To be sure, mavericks have resigned from political parties before, but Kelly has gone down a particularly Trumpist road in a particularly Trumpist fashion. This is a much bigger threat to centre-right politics in Australia than it may first appear.

It has been a tremendous strength of national centre right politics in Australia that it has maintained its identity as a coherent single parliamentary block, the Liberal/Nationals Coalition. While Labor dominates the states, the centre right has ruled nationally vastly longer than the centre left.

In the 76 years since World War II, Labor has been in office for just 26 years in total. That is a fantastic record of electoral success for the Coalition.

In many countries, centre-right politics has collapsed or fractured, especially in European nations such as France. The Republican Party in the US is now under tremendous stress between Donald Trump’s populism, which involves some good policy and some disastrous policy, and some effective campaigning and some violent and crude and dangerous rhetoric, on the one hand, and a more civil and traditional centre right, good governance tradition on the other hand.

The most successful centre-right leaders in the world are those such as Britain’s Boris Johnson, who can take on board the best of the populist ideas, in Britain’s case Brexit, while remaining moderate, inclusive, decent and electable.

Until now, Scott Morrison has had remarkable authority in his government, given how very narrow his parliamentary majority is.

Kelly’s action threatens the parliamentary numbers, and Morrison’s authority.

Kelly’s defection is broadly Trumpist in several ways.

First, it displays absolute contempt for the Liberal Party that has nurtured Kelly, provided his political career and allowed him to rise to a national prominence that his intrinsic ability would most likely not have reached any other way. This is just the way many true Trumpists hold the ­Republican Party in contempt.

Kelly apparently has no regard for the people who worked to put him in parliament and the party bosses who saved his preselection. And if Liberal conservatives think the moderates are being mean to them inside the party, they would be well served to campaign to get the numbers inside the party, not try to blow the party up. If Kelly runs for his seat at the election under any guise, he makes it more likely Labor will win the seat.

Secondly, Kelly’s main political argument was against Australia’s medical institutions. I have no criticism of Kelly for holding minority views but he apparently thinks he knows better what medical treatments to advise than do our medical authorities.

For a conservative politician to express that view shows a repudiation of all the traditional wisdom and prudence of conservatives.

More than that, Kelly was often extremely equivocal about vaccination, shared a microphone with an anti-vaxxer, and sent out what were at best very confusing messages on vaccination.

Encouraging Australians to get vaccinated is core government policy and an essential health message. To ask a politician whose career is owed to the party that sponsors him to abide by that minimal amount of government policy is reasonable.

Mavericks can make big contributions in political parties but only if they accept at least some limits on their egos. Jim Molan magnificently pushes his government to do more on defence and security but he doesn’t need to hold the Liberal Party in contempt to make that contribution.

Egocentric populists are seldom really concerned with articulating the people’s view. In the toxic environment of contemporary politics, they are more often about attracting a disaffected 10 per cent who can be prone to conspiracy theories and amorphous feelings of hostility.

That’s not leadership. That’s crude and destructive populism. If it spreads in the Coalition, it will do more than anything to help the left triumph in Australia.