Taylor’s dilemma is that he cannot get clear political air to attack the Albanese government because the stage is dominated by Pauline Hanson – yet if he cannot win the battle with Hanson to dominate the centre-right of politics then his ability to criticise Albanese is ruined anyway.
Virtually every public performance by Taylor is bedevilled by this dilemma. Taylor, marketing his economic policy, is fighting on two fronts – as the formal opposition against the Albanese government and against Hanson, whose polling support threatens the survival of the Liberals.
This raises the question: how much should Taylor attack Hanson’s party and its policies? Some Liberals worry that being more aggressive against One Nation just alienates Hanson’s voters and keeps them locked into her.
In reality, the Liberals cannot ignore Hanson’s policy incapacity to meet the challenges facing Australia and that means they must prosecute an aggressive line against One Nation – along with the freak show being exposed on the party’s fringes from the activities of One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts.
Virtually every political commentator recognises Taylor’s cut-through problem with his messaging. But Taylor will be the beneficiary of two big trends shaping the next 12 months. The first is the more intense scrutiny being applied to Hanson’s policies and behaviour, with evidence of a degree of internal unravelling likely to result over time in a further fall in her party’s vote.
The second is the grim economic outlook, with the entrenched structural defects from Labor’s policies now far more apparent, leading to weak economic growth, declining real wages, subdued productivity and persistent inflation accentuated by the Middle East war that is exposing our vulnerabilities.
RedBridge director corporate affairs Tony Barry told Inquirer: “At present the Coalition is coming third. It needs to be coming second to be competitive. We are starting to see the contours shifting around the One Nation vote. I think we’ve seen the ceiling of her vote at 31 per cent but that the floor of her vote is going to be higher than people realise. I would think it is still in the teens and that it won’t collapse back to the 6 to 8 per cent levels.
“A recent poll we did showed 63 per cent saying Australia was heading in the wrong direction. The focus groups have people saying ‘my kids won’t have it as good as I did’ and that’s a statement about what’s happening now. There’s a protracted pessimism in the electorate. The key rule in politics is to differentiate from your opponent but the Liberals have still not sufficiently done this.”
Differentiation – this is now Taylor’s focus. Indeed, he is betting the future of the Liberal Party on his plan to build an economic, tax, immigration and climate policy that offers a dramatic structural difference from Labor’s ideology, possibly one of the sharpest policy differences for several decades.
This was apparent in Taylor’s recent speech to the Sydney Institute. It spanned four domains dominated by structural policy changes: lower personal income tax by indexing the rates – that’s an annual tax cut; smaller government driven by a Future Generations Fund that locks away 80 per cent of commodity revenue windfalls annually, which means they can’t be spent, with the proceeds going to debt reduction; tying lower immigration levels to housing construction; and dismantling Labor’s net-zero policies, its renewable energy targets, its EV tax rebate and its extensive bureaucracy, the Capacity Investment Scheme, the Rewiring the Nation Fund and its Net Zero Economy Authority.
This will develop as a comprehensive attack on the ideological foundations of Labor’s economic policy – the complete reversal of the Coalition’s 2025 election agenda. The strategy is to regain the lost Liberal Party strengths on the economy, tax and living standards. The purpose is to challenge Labor front-on and to marginalise Hanson’s party as irrelevant.
It is already obvious, this is a radical agenda with more to come. For instance, the combination of tax indexation and the Future Generations Fund means that fiscal drag is returned to individual taxpayers and commodity revenue surges are largely locked into debt reduction – eliminating the rivers of revenue gold that have financed Labor’s big government.
Like all radical agendas it comes with electoral risk. Taylor is completely right to go bold on policy, but there are now signs of a tactical mistake by delaying rather than unveiling fresh initiatives. Taylor, moreover, has made only limited progress with the public. He lacks skill and impact as a retail politician able to market the policy ideas his leadership has generated. The best policy agenda doesn’t work without communication cut-through.
The past week has further exposed Hanson as unsuited to any role in executive government. Hopes that Hanson might change her behaviour to appeal to a wider public have been spectacularly trashed. There has always been a recklessness about Hanson, who has long traded on the shock value in her populism, and this is confirmed yet again.
Pity Barnaby Joyce in his quest to impose discipline and coherence on One Nation’s policies, a task even more forlorn.
In Britain, Hanson teamed up with convicted criminal, thug and racist Tommy Robinson in a campaign of mutual praise and support, provoking a devastating critique from Sky News host Andrew Bolt. It is past time Hanson was held to account for her behaviour. Can you imagine the calls for their resignation as leaders if Albanese or Taylor behaved like this? It prompts another question: For how long will a number of prominent Australians persist with their support or apologies for Hanson as an acceptable figure in a future government?
Hanson retreated from Britain to Sicily for a luxury break associating with her prime financial backer, Gina Rinehart, while lamenting the cost-of-living pressures on ordinary people. Hanson has become a cultural celebrity, revelling in its benefits but highly vulnerable to its risks. Above all Hanson, while politically clever, never changes her core character.
Don’t doubt, however, the obstacle she poses to the Liberal Party’s revival. Interviewed last Monday by Sarah Ferguson on the ABC’s 7.30, Taylor kept hesitating before finally ruling out any prospect the Liberals would consider a form of coalition government with One Nation. “There is no plan,” Taylor kept saying, “no plan for a deal with One Nation to form government”.
There is no more critical question for the Liberal Party’s future. Would the Liberals govern with One Nation, as many Hanson supporters delude themselves into believing? Taylor won’t even entertain such an idea. Finally, he told Ferguson: “I’m ruling it out.”
The only plan is for a Liberal and National Coalition. Frankly, Taylor needs to keep ruling it out until everybody gets the point. The Liberals have an obligation to make clear to the Australian people who they are prepared to govern with and who they won’t govern with.
That means a veto on governing with Hanson. If that upsets some One Nation voters it can’t be helped. It also means rebutting Labor’s propaganda that the Liberals would only form a government in partnership with Hanson. Of course, having One Nation offer confidence to a Liberal-National Coalition government is a separate and understandable position; likewise preferences arrangements.
Nobody could doubt Taylor’s real attitude towards One Nation given his Sydney Institute speech. Having declared Australia is “in the grip of an economic crisis”, Taylor lumped Hanson with Labor and the Greens as leading a party that will “only make things worse”.
His message was defining and defiant – that One Nation is the problem, not the solution. Taylor listed One Nation’s policy sins: that the party “would send us broke”, that its real beliefs reside in “big government interventionism” (like Labor) and spending tantamount to an extra $1 trillion over 10 years, that its promises would trigger higher inflation, the jacking up of interest rates, punishing the household budgets of ordinary workers and provoking a financial crisis with an explosion of spending and debt. Taylor warned voters that “an eternity of pain” would follow a One Nation government. He invoked a truism: when governments cannot finance their policies it is the citizens “who ultimately suffered the consequences”.
Most reactions to Taylor’s speech missed the point. Many people seemed to think he was merely putting some tactical distance between himself and Hanson – and that this was most unwise. Yet his real point was obvious: the Liberals would not tolerate Hanson’s economic policies. This was a rejection of One Nation on policy and philosophical grounds.
Taylor said Hanson’s party was “a lot like the Greens” – they made irresponsible promises because they had no governing mentality. You can agree or disagree with Taylor, but there’s no dispute about what he meant. Casting One Nation as a problem for Australia meant any prospect of forming a coalition government with Hanson was inconceivable. While Taylor didn’t say this, the implication from his remarks is that One Nation’s economics are worse than Albanese’s.
In the moral and intellectual turmoil of centre-right culture, many people will no doubt conclude such sentiments mean Taylor should be ditched as Liberal leader. Yet the warning signs are flashing on Labor policies where it is trapped by its beliefs. Its commitment to bigger government has throttled productivity levels. The recent budget revealed Australia locked into slow economic growth fluctuating about 2 per cent but this weak performance now looks too optimistic.
The recent Deloitte Access Economics report predicted the longest stretch of sub 2 per cent growth since the 1990s recession and identified the vulnerabilities of rising inflation, weak living standards and the resurgent energy crisis from the Iranian war.
Deloitte partner Stephen Smith highlighted the nation’s structural weakness: “For too long, strong population growth has masked a weak underlying productivity performance and lifted aggregate growth while doing less to improve living standards. Years of insufficient investment in housing, infrastructure, energy and the economy’s productive capacity have left the supply side of the economy struggling to keep pace with demand. The result is an economy more prone to inflation pressures at lower rates of growth.”
The OECD has recently found that since 2021 Australia’s post-Covid decline in real wages reached 5 per cent, one of the worst results among developed nations. Australia desperately needs a productivity boost, hence Albanese’s new commitment to artificial intelligence – yet the same risks are apparent: regulatory overkill that limits the benefits.
Pivotal to Labor’s entrenched legacy is its prioritisation of redistribution over growth, an instinct that seems embedded in contemporary Labor; witness the recent budget. Meanwhile the Parliamentary Budget Office has punched a hole in the budget’s credibility, warning that even the long wait to return to surplus in 2034-35 is unlikely and based on unrealistic assumptions.
All these are rich political targets for Taylor and the Liberals. How could they get this wrong? Well, we know the answer from past failures.
Taylor holds the Albanese government to account for initiating “a radical restructuring of Australian society”, its nexus being how much bigger government embeds low productivity and stagnant living standards.
The convoluted state of our politics seems to misread a truth about the Albanese government – that Albanese plays the long game. While the left and many progressives agitate about Albanese being too cautious and devoid of uplifting reforms that excite the true believers, his method is the steady, slow march to reorient the nation.
If Albanese serves three full terms, have no doubt that Australia at the end of this period will be a far different nation from 2022 and stamped with an indelible Labor brand.
Hence Taylor’s campaign to attack what he sees as the root cause of our malaise – the shift from free enterprise to a command-and-control model. He says the public wants change, but the key question is: What sort of change? Taylor identifies three options: sticking with the evolving Labor model; falling for the Hanson trap and blowing up the joint; or backing an aspirational Liberal agenda of lower tax, lower immigration, restrained spending and lower energy costs.
Opposition energy spokesman Dan Tehan told Inquirer the Liberals would engineer a sweeping new energy policy: “I believe energy sovereignty has become a key factor in the public’s attitude. There has been a seismic shift in the electorate’s thinking about climate and energy policy since the second Trump administration and the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz.
“Labor’s energy policy means higher prices and is making the nation poorer. Under our policy, the EV tax rebate (providing an FBT exemption for electric vehicles) will be abolished as well as the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard that is basically a carbon tax (to boost the supply of fuel-efficient and electric vehicles).
“We have oil, gas, coal and uranium reserves that we are more than happy to sell to the rest of the world but put serious limits on their use in Australia. This doesn’t make sense. We will lift the ban on nuclear and establish a commission to advise on a private sector led nuclear industry with strict government controls over safety and capital. We won’t pursue the policy from the last election of six nuclear power plants, government-funded and run.
“On coal, our policy is to sweat the existing plants as is being done by some state governments. We will let the market be the determinant on new coal, the point being our policy will be absolutely technologically neutral.
“We reject Labor’s ideological pursuit of 82 per cent of renewables by 2030 and net zero by 2050. Nobody believes the 82 per cent is achievable. While the Albanese government wants us to lead on emission reductions, our policy is to run emission reductions consistent with what OECD nations are doing. That means we will wait some time and only go into the details closer to the election since many nations are not meeting their targets.”
Tehan said the Capacity Investment Scheme would be abolished. He branded it “a secret fund set up by Labor where taxpayers had no knowledge and no understanding of the liabilities being incurred” given the scheme operated as a commercial-in-confidence support for selected projects.
Branding the scheme a “disgrace” Tehan said in office a Liberal government would make public its overall liabilities (not of individual projects). He said the opposition wanted a policy not just for wind and solar but that prioritised baseload power and technological neutrality.
He said the Net Zero Economy Authority and the Rewiring the Nation Fund would go. Tehan said the RTN providing low-cost finance to build new transmission lines operated “without any social licence and had governments riding roughshod over communities”.
“The bigger point here is that this government won’t put an estimate on the cost of getting to net zero by 2050,” Tehan said. “It pursues an ideological agenda, won’t reveal its cost to the economy and shows no concern about the cost.”
Read related topics:Anthony Albanese
Paul KellyEditor-At-Large