Now that Angus Taylor is leader, conservative voters should give the Liberal party a chance to redeem itself: first, because his personal instincts are conservative; and second, because his early statements indicate a determination to lead a party in the best traditions of Robert Menzies and John Howard. Sure, many erstwhile Liberal voters will want to see good intentions reflected in strong policy positions before they forgive the party a decade of philosophical drift; yet Taylor deserves credit for making a strong start. It would be a tragedy for our country if any ongoing conservative grumpiness at the Liberals’ need to remain Howard’s proverbial ‘broad church’ ended up perpetuating the Albanese government, which is the most left-wing in our history.

Taylor says he wants to restore Australians’ standard of living and to protect the Australian way of life. That’s precisely what’s suffered under the past four years of green-left government. OECD figures show that Australians suffered an average five-per-cent decline in real disposable incomes over Labor’s first term, the worst in the developed world. As well, the Bondi massacre was a horrid wake-up call on declining social cohesion and the growing presence in our country of people who reject Australian values. Yet a Labor government, captured by the politics of climate and identity, can’t help but make a bad situation worse; leaving the Liberal-National Coalition Australia’s only realistic hope for better government any time soon.

Much as I admire the resilience and consistency of Pauline Hanson, it’s hard to see One Nation as a credible alternative government. Yet that’s what Australia desperately needs: a much, much better government: committed to less red tape, lower taxes, more reward for effort, much more respect for national symbols, education that brings out the best in our young people, welfare that only meets genuine need rather than encourages victimhood, and much stronger and more self-reliant armed forces vital in a more dangerous world. But it’s not enough for MPs simply to have sound policy instincts. There needs to be enough of them with the intellectual self-confidence, organisational ability, and indefatigable drive to serve as ministers in a government, if the administrative state is to work for stronger citizens rather than just bigger government.

It’s possible to respect Hanson’s durability and be impressed by One Nation’s growing political savvy while being deeply sceptical of its ability to win a parliamentary majority on the back of just one current seat in the House of Representatives; and, in the improbable event One Nation could win a majority, or close to it, to produce a capable dozen or so cabinet ministers out of candidates who are not even currently in parliament. Australians who’d like a more robust conservatism, while understandably excited by the poll ascendancy of Reform in the UK and lately inclined to think that One Nation might emulate it, need to remember that prudence is the cardinal conservative virtue. It might also help to remember what happened when One Nation won 11 seats, with 23 per cent of the primary vote, in Queensland in 1998: Labor formed a minority government and subsequently ran the state for 14 years; while the neophyte One Nation caucus simply disintegrated.

I disagree with my friend Paul Kelly that the electorate has become less conservative since 2013. Sustained disappointment should have made voters more sceptical towards big government, not more credulous, and hence more conservative. Kelly is right, though, when he says that a strong One Nation vote makes a conservative government less likely, not more. This is not Britain, where first-past-the-post voting means that an insurgent party with 30-per-cent support might actually sweep the parliament (although how it might manage to govern is another story). Australia is not the United States where the primary system means a charismatic outsider can capture a major party and go on to appoint like-minded people to his cabinet. Compulsory preferential voting makes it much harder for any insurgent conservative party to win lower house seats; hence the only effective way to get a more conservative government in this country is to get more conservative individuals to join the Liberal party and then to run for parliament.

Again, none of this is to denigrate Hanson whose poll success has been a priceless reminder to Labor-lite and Teal-lite Liberals that conservatively inclined voters can’t be taken for granted. The exodus of former Liberal voters to One Nation, so marked since the 2025 election, is proof-positive that the Liberal party only succeeds federally when it’s a strongly led, clear contrast with Labor – as in 1996, when the Coalition won 47 per cent of the primary vote; and again in 2013, when the Coalition won 46 per cent of the primary vote.

As for the claim that, under Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton, and again now under Taylor, the Liberals had lurched ‘hard right’, its chief advocate, my successor Malcolm Turnbull, has no evidence to sustain his embittered abuse of the party that gifted him the prime ministership. Indeed, it’s hard to see how he can remain a Liberal while campaigning against the party.

Despite saying, in the wake of the Bondi massacre, that newcomers must leave their hatreds in the customs hall, the Albanese government has given tourist visas to some 3,000 scarcely vetted Gazans schooled from infancy in Jew hatred. For someone who’s been sledged as a poor communicator, Taylor got straight to the heart of our immigration mess when he said that ‘the numbers are too high and the quality is too low’. It’s years since any leader has faced up to the fact that some value sets (such as, for instance, support for the leading role of the communist party, or for a caliphate, or for Sharia law) are simply incompatible with life in a liberal pluralist democracy. Yet in his first public remarks as leader, Taylor declared, ‘If someone doesn’t subscribe to our core beliefs, the door must be shut.’

Keeping Australia Australian is Taylor’s mission. After all, Australia is the country its citizens cherish; and it’s the country every migrant has chosen to join. Only a conflicted government, in a bid to please migrants and to avoid stigmatisation as ‘racist’, would want this country to resemble the countries that migrants have chosen to leave. Taylor gets this, so let’s mobilise behind him and give a still-great country the better government that a fine people deserve.