Why Andrew Hastie quit the frontbench
And what it means for the future of the centre-right in Australia
From the moment Andrew Hastie entered the federal parliament a decade ago, he has been considered a future Liberal Party leader (in Australia, the centre-right party is the Liberals, who govern in Coalition with the rural-oriented National Party).
Now, after the Coalition’s two worst losses in their electoral history, the expectations of the war veteran are even greater. Is he the saviour who can and will lead the party out of the wilderness?
If the expectations were great then, they could be insurmountable now. The Coalition under the last leader, Peter Dutton, aped a Donald Trump strategy and was savaged by voters.
Few in the Australian Labor government, from the prime minister down, view the prospect of Sussan Ley, the current leader, leading the Liberals back into government as a very likely one. But as one chief of staff to a cabinet minister privately observed to me before the election, the one opposition figure they truly fear taking the reins is Andrew Hastie.
Which is why in May, many looked to the 43-year-old, wondering if he would contest to be the next leader.
But Hastie decided against running, a decision widely read at the time as a wise one.
As he told me a few weeks later, he has leadership ambitions, but wanted to invest in his young family first.
But this is only partly the story. He wants to be ready when and if that day comes.
After the May wipeout, Hastie asked Ley for an economic job instead of a national security portfolio.
The former SAS Captain has long yearned to be taken outside the box of defence where the Liberals have placed him, seemingly permanently.
Hastie’s desire to be put into a more frontline role that would speak directly to voters’ bread-and-butter issues, such as energy, housing or even something aligned with his native state of Western Australia, such as industry or resources, once again showed his judgment prevailing over ambition.
His body of public work is currently restricted to his time chairing the Intelligence Committee, where he established himself as a leading China hawk and then as a junior defence minister under Peter Dutton as minister and shadow defence minister under Dutton as opposition leader.
But Hastie was straitjacketed in these roles. Remember that Dutton did not even consult him before publicly opposing committing Australian forces to uphold any peace in Ukraine, a position Hastie opposed and one that the Coalition under Ley swiftly reversed.
Hastie doesn’t need any more national security credentials under his belt. But he badly needs economic ones, and he is the first to acknowledge it.
Late last year, he finished an online Graduate Certificate in Business Economics through Harvard Extension School, which he told the head of the ANU’s National Security College, Rory Medcalf, he completed on his long flights between Perth and the East Coast.
Ley would have been investing in her movement’s potential future leadership by giving Hastie a frontline economic portfolio. But by denying him his request, she showed she views him just as much of a threat as Dutton did.
None of this explains why Hastie agreed to serve in her frontbench, only to quit a few months later, visibly frustrated with being denied the freedom to speak about the broader future agenda. In this way, it was hard to miss the sense that both were looking to give each other an out.
The pretext for Hastie’s departure came over the issue of immigration. Hastie believes immigration is ‘out of control’ and, as Shadow Home Affairs Minister, wanted to take ownership of the issue instead of the more junior immigration spokesman, Paul Scarr.
Hastie has not confined his public statements to his portfolio of late. He has taken a lead in calling for the party to dump supporting net-zero by 2050 and spoken about the death of Australian car manufacturing being a mistake.
These positions have earned him many internal critics, some who anonymously attacked him in the media and, rightly or wrongly, are viewed as Ley’s proxies. So being read the riot act on immigration policy gave him the chance, his critics would say, that he has been searching for to leave.
But his potential does not mean leadership is a fait accompli.
For Hastie has vulnerabilities too. Many politicians have entered the parliament as rising stars only to be remembered, if at all, as shooting stars instead.
Critics on the left and right have attacked him in the media for being a lone wolf, not a team player and say he has not claimed a ministerial scalp, for all the hype about his promise. There are also frequent mutterings about his work ethic, citing all of the above.
There is also a prevailing view that, having been in the parliament for ten years, he is still a rookie when it comes to understanding how to navigate and exploit the institution, one of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s greatest strengths.
But most seriously, with make-or-break potential, is how he plans to prosecute the issues that he identified, which have radicalised the right online and overseas.
While he is correct to identify voter concerns with energy prices and the pace of immigration, Australia will never be won over by MAGAism. The last election showed that very clearly.
These issues will only resonate if they are discussed solely through an economic lens instead of the cultural one that preoccupies the populists.
Hastie’s challenge will be to bring together the fractured right and speak to a mostly progressive Australian population that is anxious about their household budgets.
It’s a delicate balance that he must find if he is to succeed.
But he does have electoral victories on his side.
Hastie campaigned at the election on his own brand, not the Liberals. With the state of WA turning red, particularly across Perth, he is the Liberal Party’s only metropolitan MP in the state capital and also the sole Coalition figure in the state to increase his primary vote.
But can Brand Hastie widen this with national effect, or is he a Canning-only phenomenon who has only prolonged his date with the Liberals’ funeral pyre?
These are the questions that he now intends to answer.
‘I think we can win an election, Labor is doing a terrible job on key issues like energy … electricity’s gone up 24 per cent in the last 12 months,’ he said on Saturday at a press conference he called to explain his resignation.
‘Immigration, as I said, is out of control; not enough houses are being built, so I think there is a pathway to victory.’
Reassuringly, he spoke of the party needing to be a big tent. There is no path to The Lodge for any leader in Australia in appealing to the radicalised extremes of the left or right.
But his most interesting signpost was his pointed comment about the ‘period of renewal’ the party is undergoing.
Sussan Ley is 63 years old and entered parliament just after the millennium.
Although she has brought much vigour to the job, compared to her predecessor, who was nearly 10 years younger, it is undeniable that by 2028 and 2031, when the party might hope to be electorally viable, being a member of John Howard’s outer ministry will no longer be a credential but a drawback.
Some suspect the hand of right-wing warriors former prime minister Tony Abbott and his former chief of staff, Peta Credlin, behind Hastie’s move, but this is wrong.
Hastie’s closest confidante is his Canberra flatmate, Tasmanian Senator Jonno Duniam, aged 42.
Hastie was no ordinary frontbencher, which is why his resignation has attracted so much attention, and he will be no ordinary backbencher.
Hastie plans to spend his time doing what the Coalition failed to do immediately after losing government. He wants to be central in defining what the centre-right in Australia looks like and fights for in 2028, 2030 and beyond.
He must spur the debate that the Liberals should have had after they lost power in 2022.
But seduced by the success of their opposition to the Indigenous Voice to the Parliament referendum, Peter Dutton’s Liberals failed to do the work.
He led the Coalition to their most catastrophic position in their electoral history and lost his own seat, the first opposition leader to do so.
Whereas the Liberals were in the emergency department after the 2022 result, after Dutton’s failures and Albanese’s resulting 94-seat win in May, they are now on life support.
Rebooting the Liberals, before the public decides to turn off the switch once and for all, is now an urgent task. And everyone knows business as usual is not the way forward.
This is an adapted version of an article first published by The Nightly.
