{"id":206703,"date":"2025-10-12T01:20:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T01:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/206703\/"},"modified":"2025-10-12T01:20:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T01:20:11","slug":"life-of-a-liberal-party-showgirl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/206703\/","title":{"rendered":"Life of a Liberal Party showgirl"},"content":{"rendered":"

The recent departure<\/a> of West Australian MP Andrew Hastie from the Liberal front bench (he resigned last Friday from his position as opposition home affairs spokesman) was only the most recent symptom of a more profound problem.<\/p>\n

As with the sacking (from the front bench) of controversial Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the ostensible differences were policy ones \u2013 like the fight over whether to stick with Australia\u2019s net zero carbon emissions commitment, and differences of opinion over immigration rates.<\/p>\n

But the real divide is ideological. The Liberals\u2019 right-wing flank seems to gaze longingly at the success of the anti-immigration, populist parties sweeping democracies throughout the West.<\/p>\n

\"Current<\/p>\n

Current polls indicate that the Conservative Party could face electoral wipeout by Nigel Farage\u2019s anti-immigration party Reform UK.Credit: Bloomberg<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the moderates within the Liberal party room look to the cautionary example of the British Tory party, which teeters on the brink of oblivion, and see a potential dystopian future.<\/p>\n

The Tories were once the most electorally successful political party in any parliamentary democracy, ever. Now, they hold just 119 seats in the 650-seat British parliament, and they face electoral wipeout by Nigel Farage\u2019s anti-immigration party Reform UK<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Former Labour Party strategist-turned-politics podcaster Alastair Campbell<\/a> calls the Tories the \u201csecond most popular populist party\u201d.<\/p>\n

One of the more embarrassing aspects of the Libs\u2019 internal spats is how thoroughly they expose the poverty of new ideas and lack of intellectual depth within the party. This week this masthead published an extract<\/a> from Niki Savva\u2019s forthcoming book, Earthquake, the election that shook Australia. Savva reports that the chief of staff to former opposition leader Peter Dutton, Alex Dalgleish, pulled together Dutton\u2019s policy advisers for a meeting in February 2024.<\/p>\n

The boss wanted them to work up \u201cnovel and innovative policy ideas\u201d, according to Savva\u2019s report.<\/p>\n

\u201cDalgleish told them this was because, up until then, shadow ministers had been unable to produce anything of quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Loading<\/p>\n

This was little more than a year out from the eventual federal election. The fact that Dutton didn\u2019t, according to this report, trust his own frontbenchers to come up with policies in their own portfolios, is extraordinary. Dutton wanted the Australian people to vote in a ministerial line-up that he, himself, didn\u2019t think was particularly worthy.<\/p>\n

This week Senator Price popped her head up<\/a> again, telling 2GB\u2019s Ben Fordham that she had written to Ley (presumably in a private letter, or private until she talked about it on syndicated radio) about her concerns \u201cabout backgrounding and leaking to the media\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s got to stop \u2026 we look like a clown show,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Like a pop star singing about eating lobster tail in a leather booth, it is not very interesting material. For ordinary voters, it is entirely unrelatable.<\/p>\n

Occasionally, a possible policy debate looks like it might poke its head through the clownery.<\/p>\n

Hastie has said he is interested in the crisis in modern conservatism, and what it looks like in a fractured age. He wants the Liberals to once again appeal to \u201caspirational middle Australians\u201d. Recently, he raised eyebrows with a post to his social media about the nobility of old-school Australian car manufacturing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe used to make complex things in this country \u2026 but that\u2019s all gone,\u201d he said, standing next to a gleaming red vintage Ford Falcon GT.<\/p>\n

\"\u201cWe<\/p>\n

\u201cWe used to make complex things in this country \u2026 but that\u2019s all gone,\u201d Hastie said, standing next to a vintage Ford Falcon GT.Credit: @andrewhastiemp<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just about the cars, it\u2019s this sense that we\u2019ve now lost something \u2026 we are a nation of flat white makers when we could be making beautiful cars like this again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hastie hankers for a past where Australians \u201cbuild stuff with our hands\u201d.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the kind of muscular, male-centric rhetoric that Tony Abbott used to favour, and which is unlikely to win back the female voters who have deserted the Coalition. Let alone the younger voters who also abandoned the Coalition at the election, and who feel little connection to halcyon Holden days past.<\/p>\n

Such voters probably care less about the model of the car they\u2019re driving, or where it was manufactured, than they do about all the other things they worry about on their work commute, or as they\u2019re dropping the kids to school, or, most likely, juggling both.<\/p>\n

They likely don\u2019t have too much time or emotional energy to feel nostalgia for a vehicle. No matter how flash it is.<\/p>\n

Jacqueline Maley is a columnist and author.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The recent departure of West Australian MP Andrew Hastie from the Liberal front bench (he resigned last Friday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206704,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-206703","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}