Until early October, Andrew Hastie, a 43-year-old former SAS captain with an honours degree in history, was a frontrunner to ascend to the leadership of Australia’s opposition Liberal Party and become the nation’s alternative prime minister.
Instead, the MP resigned from the party’s front bench, choosing instead to go to the back benches where, unbound by shadow cabinet solidarity, he will be free to speak his mind.
Specifically, Hastie was vexed over his party’s generous immigration policies. He has claimed Australians are becoming “strangers” in their own country.
A month earlier, he appeared in a video lamenting the loss of the country’s car-making industry and urging a revival of manufacturing. Weeks before, Hastie had threatened resignation if his party did not abandon the target of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Comparisons with the populist policies of Britain’s Nigel Farage and Donald Trump are inevitable. Hastie is in the thrall of political charlatans, some suggest, willing to pursue regressive policies that will alienate rather than absorb Australia’s urban conservatives.
It was not lost on Liberal Party observers that Hastie’s comments on immigration recall the infamous anti-immigration speech of British Conservative Party firebrand MP Enoch Powell in 1968. In his “Rivers Of Blood” speech, Powell described a future in which Britons “found themselves made strangers in their own country”.
There are two competing theories to explain Hastie’s resignation; did he merely throw an ill-considered dummy-spit or is there a deeper scheme and intent behind his resignation?
The evidence suggests the latter: that this is a man preparing to take the leadership of Australia’s floundering, mainstream conservative party, a party still shell-shocked by Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s resounding May re-election. That poll left the Liberals with just 18 seats in Australia’s 150-member Parliament.
It’s been downhill ever since. In September, the Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, led the opposition coalition to its worst result in the history of Australia’s Newspoll. Pauline Hanson’s populist One Nation party has been the main beneficiary of disaffected conservatives.
In the most authoritative account yet published of Hastie’s resignation, The Sydney Morning Herald quoted his favourite line from the 2019 movie Brexit: The Uncivil War. Actor Benedict Cumberbatch, playing the pro-Brexit strategist Dominic Cummings, then-adviser to British Conservative leader, Boris Johnson, warns: “The train coming down the tracks isn’t the one that you expected. It’s not the one advertised on the board.”
Hastie is fond of quoting the scene in private. To him, it captures the current state of Western democratic politics riven by the rise of the nativist right – the sentiment fuelling Farage’s Reform Party, Trump’s Maga movement and the far right’s resurgence in Europe.
Hastie argues to his Liberals colleagues that if the same latent forces in Australia are not listened to by the nation’s main conservative party, then others will. The flood of support to Hanson and the violent anti-immigration protests in Melbourne on October 19 would seem to bear Hastie out.
Raised in Sydney’s heavily multicultural inner-west, the son of a Presbyterian pastor who ran a roster of services in English, Mandarin, Korean and Samoan, Hastie is no Enoch Powell, though he does wish to halve Australia’s migration intake from the one million post-Covid blowout it achieved from June 2022 to December 2024. Hastie is not alone; the Albanese government also wants a cut.
Hastie has time to convince centre-right voters that his sterner brand of conservatism can arrest their political freefall. Unshackled, he’s a man to watch.
New Zealander Bernard Lagan is the Australian correspondent for The Times, London.
