I’ve never really thought of myself as a perfectionist. Lord knows my wife of forty years certainly wouldn’t consider me to be one. Which brings me to the freshly announced shadow cabinet line-up of the Coalition’s new leader Angus Taylor.  If you only got your information from Peta Credlin, Andrew Bolt and the Australian newspaper you could be forgiven for thinking this was Team Conservative, a brigade of real fighters, bravely dragging good conservative policies to the door of Labor and Mr Albanese with a preparedness to fight them on the beaches and everywhere else. All this with the added bonus of the ‘moderate’, Labor-lite faction of the Coalition party room having been more or less consigned to some sort of irrelevant purgatory. Alas, I confess to being more than a little dubious.

So call me sceptical, mightily sceptical. And before I say why, let me first get the obvious out of the way. Of course, this Taylor shadow cabinet is significantly better than the one Sussan Ley put in place. I’m certainly not denying we are seeing a notable improvement. Jacinta Price and Andrew Hastie are back in the fold. Alex Hawke is out, as are four or five other Ley-supporting Labor-lites. James McGrath, one of the main schemers for Malcolm Turnbull back when Mr Giant Ego defenestrated Tony Abbott, got demoted. That’s better than nothing. So, yes, this is a big improvement.

Yet all the above concessions can be true and it can still be the case that this shadow cabinet is barely above average for those of us who want conservative outcomes for Australia. (Note: Mr Albanese and big chunks of the left-leaning Coalition party room would call my and many of your substantive political preferences ‘far right’ or ‘hard right’ but as I regularly point out when giving talks, you cannot put a piece of paper between my core political views and preferences and those of John F. Kennedy on immigration, taxes, Western culture, just about everything. Sure, he’d push for more hookers in the White House than I would. But if I’m ‘far right’ then so was he.)

Let’s take a quick look at this supposedly brave, take-the-fight-to-Labor Taylor ensemble. Well, Julian Leeser is still in the band. He’s now the shadow minister for education and for indigenous Australians. Really? The man so wet he came out hard for the Voice as well as pushing hard to have the Libs vote for Labor’s incredibly awful ‘hate groups’ law? Leeser also was against repealing s.18C back in the Abbott days. Now I like to flatter myself and think I have a sense of humour. Had Mr Taylor just made Leeser the shadow indigenous affairs man I could have half-enjoyed that. Let him wallow in his own virtue-signalling beliefs. But one of the most important issues facing Australia is our woeful education system, primary, secondary and tertiary. This country was scoring behind Kazakhstan in education results before the lockdowns. Since then our students’ results have only gone down further. To fix it we need a bruiser, someone prepared to be hated, happy to take on the unions, and without a woke bone in his body. With due respect, that is not Leeser. The man makes jellyfish look like highly developed vertebrates. And I would guess that Angus Taylor thinks much the same. Which means that there are too many Labor-lites in the cabinet.

Then there was a lot of praise for Tim Wilson. Yes, the man is smart. And he is economically literate. He was also a fully paid-up net zero zealot. Sure, Mr Taylor can wholly sideline Wilson on all energy-related issues, but remember that Tim has an incredibly marginal ‘Teal-leaning’ seat. His incentives are those of politicians with those sort of seats. So although it’s not a terrible pick, in no world that I know of can we expect anything remotely brave (as in ‘let’s get rid of all of these woeful economy-distorting renewables subsidies’) from Mr Wilson. If he gets wholly sidelined by Taylor great. But again, this is a sign of the paucity of Coalition talent and perhaps of Mr Taylor’s own vulnerable position inside the party room.

Immigration? That went to Jonathon Duniam, an Andrew Hastie man, I think. Immigration requires bravery in spades to take on the guaranteed spleen that will be daily dumped on the shadow cabinet minister mooting huge cuts to our yearly intake. (And as an aside, the leaked Ley plan to get it down to a bit under 200,000 is laughably too little. If that’s what we end up seeing under Taylor then join One Nation right now and be done with it.) Personally, I would have preferred to put Hastie in this portfolio rather than in ‘Industry and Sovereign Capability’.

Likewise James Paterson. Sure, defence is important. But basically anyone need only pick up Greg Sheridan’s latest article on the matter to have an excellent idea of what to do in defence. We know we need to increase spending big time. And get the woke out of the military, especially from the upper ranks. Ley put Taylor in defence to sideline him. Paterson could have been put to better use.

Ted O’Brien in foreign affairs? Well, this is where you put the Julie Bishops of the world. Just don’t hope you need him to have your back down the road. Andrew Bragg as shadow minister for the environment? Maybe, just maybe, this is a position in which this Labor-lite on steroids man’s support for the Voice and the Uluru Statement can be ignored. But Bragg’s threat in late 2025 to resign from the Ley shadow ministry if the net zero policy were dropped does not shout out to me ‘here is a good shadow minister for the environment’ who will take us out of Paris, restore sanity to the electricity market and ditch all renewables’ subsidies. Surely nobody believes Mr Bragg will be a brave, committed fighter in this ministry.

I could go on. Yes, there are some good picks. And there are other ones that only the messy world of political compromise makes remotely defensible. What this Taylor ensemble signalled to me was that Angus is going to have to do an awful lot of the work himself. It is also pretty clear that there are way too many wets as Coalition MPs. (Party reform and getting NSW under control are medium term necessities.) Meanwhile, we can suppose that Littleproud refused to put Matt Canavan’s name forward, though I would have liked Taylor to tell Littleproud (Godfather-like) that he wanted Matt in and that the Nats needed to make it happen. And what of Alex Antic? Here is the most principled man in the Liberal party. He, alone, actually voted ‘no’ to the awful Labor ‘hate group’ law. (And by the way, have we heard Taylor promise to repeal this monstrosity?)   So why didn’t Taylor at least signal some implicit remorse and put Antic in one of the important jobs that requires that almost unheard-of trait amongst Liberal party MPs, namely values and principles? Whatever the reason it wasn’t the desire to put together a brave, ‘take it to Labor’ team.

For sure, this isn’t the worst ensemble. In fact, compared to the Ley team it looks like the Churchill War Cabinet. But if we set our sights higher than ‘what we had under Sussan’ then it’s a bit above average, at best. I give Team Taylor a B minus. Were this 1995, before grade inflation, I’d be giving a bare C.

Let’s hope I’m being too pessimistic and they all surprise us; but right now I don’t think One Nation need panic that the Coalition is going to steal their territory on immigration, the culture wars, energy and the like. Yep, Angus will move somewhat in that direction. But move far enough? We’ll see.