Andrew Hastie’s post-Liberalism is a challenge to the old guard. By Nick Dyrenfurth in The Australian.
Andrew Hastie has done something unusual for a contemporary Liberal: he’s tried to have a real argument about the party’s ideas. …
Post-liberalism starts from a simple insight: people want to be protected as much as they want to be liberated. They want good, steady jobs, not just “opportunities”; homes they and their kids can afford; migration set at a level infrastructure and wages can handle; their country to make things again; a healthier environment for their grandkids to inherit; and civic order, not permanent cultural revolution….
Hastie has been saying this out loud as a Red Tory rather than a market-worshipping Thatcherite. He speaks of reindustrialising Australia and warns of big tech-corporate power. That’s not “illiberalism”, but an attempt to rethink failed orthodoxies and restore a sense of shared national purpose in an era of fractious geopolitics, exposed supply chains and brittle social capital. …
Hastie is a threat to Labor too because he speaks to the same outer-suburban, patriotic, economically interventionist voters it depends on.
The Liberal Party must move, because it is currently in the wrong place:
A Liberal who says “rebuild industry, control borders sensibly, take culture seriously and reward work” is harder to caricature than a climate-culture warrior from Queensland. That’s also why some Liberals — [George] Brandis and Andrew Bragg — are keen to police his thought. They sense an ideological realignment they can’t control. …
It isn’t intellectually honest to pretend that “liberalism” is some timeless philosophy. What Brandis is defending is a pre-Global Financial Crisis settlement: high financialisation, mass inward migration as an economic lever and tool of wage suppression, and an uncritical embrace of globalisation. That settlement broke down years ago – post-liberals simply saw it first. …
On net zero and immigration, you can’t please everyone:
[Hastie’s] hard line on net zero won’t fly in metropolitan electorates. Yet contesting climate policy from the perspective of energy reliability and working-class bills is not extremism — social democrats and liberal conservatives are arguing over this across the West.
Then there’s the risk of alienating key “small-c” conservative constituencies of ethnically and religiously diverse Australians by invoking the inflammatory language of becoming “strangers in our own country”. Hastie’s project will fail if it defines these citizens as strangers rather than as allies and fellow builders of our shared national home.
Opposition to the New Class may finally be coalescing in Australia, as it did around the unlikely personage of Donald Trump in the US.