Last week saw two former Coalition prime ministers offer up their views on the current policy turmoil enveloping today’s Liberal and National parties. Let’s start with John Howard. When I first arrived in Australia in 2005 I used to break up higher level university meetings by saying I really liked John Howard.  There would be a stunned silence and a sort of incredulity that a senior academic could actually support Howard and co. (Remember, politically conservative academics back then in Australia were rarities. Every year since then, though, including all nine years of Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison, things have gotten worse on campus in terms of cratering viewpoint diversity, idiotic social science and humanities big money grants, identity politics, implicit affirmative action at the expense of merit, grade inflation, encampments and on and on. Today, an openly conservative academic is close to being a unicorn. Just look at the number of legal academics, out of 38 law schools, who came out in 2023 against the Voice. You could have counted them on one machine operator’s hand.)

But back to Mr Howard. When he lost to Kevin ‘07, I attended a couple of special events celebrating him as the country’s second-greatest PM, next only to Mr Menzies. Because he was. Sure, I never liked Mr Howard’s centralising tendencies. (The WorkChoices legislation and related High Court case were a disaster). But on the whole, in this imperfect world of ours, he had been outperformed only by Menzies.  Of course, one’s records in office and after retirement are distinct. Last week, Mr Howard counselled Coalition MPs not to dump Sussan Ley. But I don’t recall any similar advice in the months before Malcolm Turnbull defenestrated Tony Abbott – because an outspoken John Howard counselling against the Turnbull coup might, just might, have made the difference. In fact, if anything, the impression he gave back then was that he tolerated the coupsters. Put simply, why counsel leaving the leader in place now, but not then? Does he think Ms Ley a more substantial politician than Mr Abbott? And let’s not forget that Mr Howard famously talked Malcolm out of leaving politics after Mr Giant Ego was first dethroned as party leader. With the benefit of hindsight, I doubt a more consequentially cancerous advice session has ever been inflicted on the conservative side of politics in this country. Because it’s clear to me that virtually all of today’s problems for the right side of politics can be traced back to that Turnbull coup perpetrated by the New Labor wing of the Liberal party room (aka ‘the moderates’ or the ‘Black Hand gang’).  Here’s the truth of the matter: Sussan Ley is a hopeless leader.  She is more likely to oversee the rupture of the Coalition than to win the next election.

Now that said, Mr Howard is correct in implying that it was a mistake by Mr Morrison ‘to embrace net zero’, and he is right to state bluntly that he is ‘very sceptical of net zero’, including being ‘sceptical about the desirability of it in a policy sense’.  He even made clear he ‘would not have embraced net zero in the first place’ and that we, as a country, are throwing away ‘some of [our] natural advantages’.

And that takes me to our second post-retirement, advice-giving, ex-Liberal PM Scott Morrison. This is the man who oversaw the worst inroads on our civil liberties and freedoms, ever. My immediate reaction to hearing from this man or seeing that he’s been invited to some conservative conference is just anger. But assume you are more forgiving than I and you believe – wrongly on the facts – that the ScoMo approach led to fewer excess deaths and also that Covid is some sort of excuse for the thuggish, brutal illiberalism imposed on us all.  You’ve still got the problem that the Liberal-party Covid response blew up the budget and turned the Libs into a huge-spending, big-taxing outfit. You simply cannot, with a straight face, purport today to be the party of low taxes and small government given where ScoMo left the country in 2022. His government’s record in government was woeful. Yes, the Libs can make promises to mend their ways and go down these paths in future. But when last in government the Libs were a party of big, big, big government under Morrison. That is partly why it’s so hard for them to run on their economic credentials. Post-ScoMo they don’t have any.

ScoMo is also the man who opted to take this country into net zero – to be clear, he did what Mr Howard said he, himself, would never have done. Morrison’s excuse for doing so is pathetic. It rewrites history.  And I do not know of a single conservative in the country who believes the then Liberal government had no choice. Morrison had a choice and he exercised it. And now he is counselling a sort of fudge position – get rid of net zero as an explicit goal but keep it as some sort of aspiration.

Unbelievably (well, given recent years, perhaps make that ‘all too believably’), the current Liberal party room seems to be choosing Morrison over Howard on whether explicitly to disavow net zero. It beggars belief. They’re going to try to run the line that the economics of Labor’s climate obsession are crazy but yet, aspirationally, they agree with the general goal. This will win them zero support for bravery. It will not bring over a single Teal voter. And it’s taking place all while the UK Tories are explicitly abandoning net zero; following Nigel and Reform doing the same; while Americans under Trump have burned, blown up and shot to smithereens any net zero aspirations or commitments; and while even Tony Blair and Canada’s lefty PM Mark Carney are voicing massive scepticism about it. But, hey, this party room thinks it can get away with a steroidal fudge. Some trickery. A bit of Penn and Teller misdirection. The old ‘just let us win government and then you can trust us to undo this insanity’. But we don’t trust you.  Heck, the Libs could win government simply by coming out super hard against mass immigration. But instead, the current shadow minister is trying to placate the Guardianistas. So I don’t trust the Libs on that front either.

Look, if you are siding with Morrison over Howard on net zero then you are the problem. The ‘having your cake and eating it too’ approach won’t work. The voters don’t like trickery.