The Islamic terrorist attack at Bondi Beach brought us to a crossroad. The tearing apart of the national fabric has, of course, been going on for a long time. If you are a conservative, at least, this modern-day tribalism originated with the identity politics of the Whitlam era and the fiction that multiculturalism was not multi-civilisationism. But the horror of 14 December, judging by the subsequent surge of support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, has finally – if belatedly – convinced many Australians that we go forward as ‘one nation’ or we don’t go forward at all. Where do the Liberals stand in all this? Do they return to the Menzian politics of enlightened patriotism or keep following Labor down the path of sectarianism.

The recent South Australian election, in which I participated as an unsuccessful Liberal candidate in one of Labor’s outer-metropolitan strongholds, is a case in point. One Nation support in the seat of Ramsay soared from zero four years ago to 27 per cent, peeling off votes from both the Liberals and Labor. The Liberal party usually squeezes out 20 per cent of primary votes in this safest of safe Labor seats but on 14 March the count fell to just under six per cent. (I did, to be fair, boost that to 9.2 per cent at the polling booth I manned alone for ten hours on election day.)

As a One Nation volunteer, formerly a Liberal voter, remarked to me during a long day of handing out how-to-vote cards in pre-polling week: her ex-party needed to ‘pick a side’. Standing there at St John’s Anglican Church in Salisbury, feeling a little like Graham Greene’s ‘dumb leper who has lost his bell’, it was hard to disagree. So many Labor and One Nation voters were waving away my Liberal how-to-vote with a look not only of disdain but something approaching pity. Pick a side!

So what, exactly, are the sides? Pauline Hanson, from a Labor perspective, is a racist menace. Everything she has ever done involves dividing Australians against each other. Hanson’s detractors can point to any number of discriminatory remarks, starting with her 1996 maiden speech in federal parliament when she asserted that Australia was ‘in danger of being swamped by Asians’. That said, we are now a long way from 1996. One Nation’s reach, I can report from multi-ethnic Ramsay, now reaches beyond ‘white Australia’.

From the perspective of a One Nation supporter, to take the opposite point of view, it is Labor that pursues a divide-and-rule agenda. Hanson’s generalisation on the eve of the election about no ‘good’ Muslims was indefensible, but what about PM Albanese’s reluctance to appoint a royal commission to investigate Islamic antisemitism in the aftermath of Bondi? Did this not represent the counter-generalisation that there are no ‘bad’ Muslims? And is this not just another form of bigotry intended, in this case, to prop up Labor’s Muslim vote in western Sydney – or, for that matter, Ramsay in outer-metropolitan Adelaide?

Time for Liberals to openly acknowledge that Labor’s identity politics permeate almost everything it does. Consider the ALP’s commitment to DEI, LGBTIQA+, ‘Palestine’, Emily’s List, hate-speech laws and the Voice to parliament. Sixty per cent of Australians – including 64 per cent of South Australians – voted No to the Voice as recently as 2023. Yet on 21 March this year, as a counterpart to the state election, a local version of Albanese’s Voice – First Nations Voice – held a ballot. For Premier Malinauskas, apparently, No does not mean no.

For the Liberals, I would argue, ‘picking a side’ means re-engaging with the party’s Menzian roots. That is, a commitment to the sovereignty of the individual, freedom of speech, respect for ordinary workers, promotion of family values, immigration based on the principles of integration, non-doctrinaire education, a care for economic development and loyalty to the nation. All of this, back in the pre-Whitlam era, would have struck the vast majority of Australians as self-evidently good policies. Not anymore.

SA Liberal leader Ashton Hurn, who now controls five seats in the House of Assembly versus four seats for One Nation, could begin a Liberal revival by pledging to repeal the First Nations Act (2023). Encouragingly, South Australia’s Aboriginals started the pushback when 90 per cent of eligible voters boycotted Malinauskas’ sham election. Hurn, infinitely more impressive than her predecessors, went to the state election with an array of sensible anti-taxation policies, such as abolishing stamp duty for first home buyers. In the future, however, she will need to fight for more than sensible budgetary measures. Protest voters, it seemed to me, were at the same time furious with the cost of living and the on-going challenge to ‘Australian values’.

Albanese’s answer to the deep divisions his party has introduced into Australia is to take the high moral ground – ‘It is clear we need to do more to combat this evil scourge, much more’ – and then push for further hate-speech legislation. Such laws are not about protecting the individual. We already have sufficient rules against defamation and libel to cover that. Instead we are talking about Labor broadening the despotism of group identity, and securing its hold on power. The Liberals picked the right side when they characterised Labor’s new hate-speech legislation as a ‘pseudo-blasphemy law’. But the party – with the exception of Senator Antic – chose the wrong side when it voted for a modified version of the same legislation. The Nationals, we should note, remained steadfast throughout.

It is easy for Labor (and the Greens) to keep their progressive faith since ‘the long march through the institutions’ has bequeathed it the backing of today’s establishment. Hanson, meanwhile, only benefits from playing the role of maverick flouting the rules of PC respectability. Thus, she breezily calls for the abolishment of the ABC. Labor, predictably, responds by declaring its support for a ‘strong and independent ABC’. Caught in the middle – again – the Liberals remain mute for fear of provoking even worse treatment from our ‘independent’ public broadcaster.

So picking a side – the right side – will be tough for the Liberals. But, as I can personally attest from my time on the front lines, it is the only way back to relevancy. The establishment will hate them more than ever and yet as Elie Wiesel observed: ‘The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.’