‘Two former Liberal party heavyweights defect to One Nation,’ read the Sky News Australia headline on Sunday evening as ominously as if Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov had just declared they would not return to the Soviet Union.

The departures of former Liberal senator Hollie Hughes and former Liberal vice-president Teena McQueen were described as a ‘fresh blow to the Coalition’, but Sky News viewers took the news in their stride.

‘Hard to believe One Nation plans to smash the two-party system when their recruitment strategy is just dumpster diving in the Liberal party’s leftovers,’ wrote Jack. ‘At this point, they should just rebrand as “The Recycled Liberals” and put a blue recycling logo on the ballot,’ he mocked.

Others were critical of Hughes, who has spent most of her airtime since her friend Sussan Ley lost the leadership, attacking Opposition leader Angus Taylor.

‘Hughes should get over the fact that Ley is gone and stop rubbishing Angus Taylor for spite,’ wrote Wilma.

Attacking Taylor has become so popular with some Sky News hosts that viewers have diagnosed it as a new form of TDS: Taylor Derangement Syndrome.

James Macpherson suffered an attack this week. After the full bench of the Federal Court ruled that it was unlawful to exclude a biological male who thinks he is a woman from a female-only app, Taylor vowed to amend the Sex Discrimination Act to include a definition of biological sex.

It’s no surprise that the government attacked Taylor merely for ‘focusing on the matter’, but Macpherson attacked Taylor, who has been opposition leader for all of three months, because he hadn’t already ‘done something about it’, declaring that ‘The Coalition lacks any conviction’.

Andrew Bolt seems to have an even more acute case of TDS. He commended Sussan Ley on her election in May 2025 as ‘a woman of substance’ who came to the leadership with ‘less baggage than Angus Taylor, who promised higher taxes than Labor did’.

In reality, the centrepiece of Taylor’s taxation policy as Peter Dutton’s shadow treasurer was cutting taxes by ending bracket creep. It was the faint-hearted Dutton – who took months to oppose the Voice – who put the kybosh on the policy, which was widely praised as a game changer when Taylor announced it in his budget-in-reply speech last week, even by Bolt.

It took Ley six months to adopt Taylor’s policy of abandoning net zero. Bolt praised Ley, conceding that she ‘may have been forced into it’, while observing that ‘the Liberals still haven’t got a worked-through plan to cut the power prices that are strangling the economy’.

Actually, Taylor did. In his budget-in-reply speech, he announced that he will ‘work with coal-fired power plant owners to keep them running as long and as hard as possible, to get electricity prices down’, scrap the net zero power lines to nowhere, and other climate incentives.

You would think that Taylor, consistently conservative, would be more to Bolt’s taste than Ley, who was backed into the leadership by the green left of the party. But you would be wrong. Bolt backed Ley for nine months, even as she took the party to an historic low of 18 per cent in the polls; he wrote off Taylor after only three months. The rout in Farrer, in the world according to Bolt, was the failure of an ‘unfixably uncharismatic man’ whose ‘cringe-making’ speech and ‘pathetically alliterative slogans’ summed up ‘everything that’s wrong with his leadership’. He pronounced Taylor a ‘dead man walking’ and asked impatiently, ‘When will the Liberals bury him?’

Bolt was particularly incensed that Taylor said, ‘For too long we have been a party of convenience, not conviction,’ since according to Bolt, Taylor was a politician of convenience who had no right to attack Labor’s net-zero policies and mass immigration because Taylor had said he was ‘not sceptical about climate science’, ‘we do have to look at ways to reduce emissions’, and ‘went along with the elevated immigration intake under the Turnbull and Morrison governments’.

For anyone not suffering from TDS, Taylor’s acceptance of climate science and some emissions reductions is no different to Bjorn Lomborg lamenting money wasted on ineffective climate action and is not remotely equivalent to endorsing economy-wide net-zero mandates and deindustrialisation.

As for migration, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison all continued the Howard-era model of high legal migration (fluctuating between 180,000 and 260,000) and strong border enforcement. That was fundamentally different from the unprecedented surge under Albanese, with more than half a million arriving in a single year, creating a severe housing shortage and an affordability crisis. It is Taylor’s duty as opposition leader to attack the mess Labor has made and to offer a better alternative, tying future arrivals to housing.

After Taylor’s budget-in-reply speech, Bolt grudgingly conceded that he may have been premature in writing Taylor’s obituary. Sky viewers were more generous with their praise. ‘Angus Taylor’s budget-in-reply was great,’ wrote David, who wanted One Nation and the LNP to work together to get rid of ‘Lie-bor’, not ‘fight each other’.

Yet after watching Taylor take Sky viewers’ questions for an hour, Bolt was again jubilant that Brett Nance from Albury had got Taylor to say that he wouldn’t withdraw Australia from the Paris Agreement. Nance shook his head in disapproval because ‘actions speak louder than words’. In fact, Taylor’s actions – abolishing the Safeguard Mechanism and all Labor’s other secret carbon taxes – speak far louder than withdrawing from the Paris agreement, a collection of aspirations that are honoured in the breach.

Bolt has written that he was stunned by One Nation’s rise since the last election. It was no mystery to Sky viewer Carol: ‘Hollie Hughes voted for a leader who oversaw the break-up of the Coalition on two occasions, threw all the policies up in the air and went on a nine-month “listening tour” during which time the Liberal primary vote plummeted like a rock. And the whole time, Hollie publicly supported her. Now that the Liberal party is in tatters, she just walks away and wipes her hands of it. What a joke!’

But Sky viewer Todd was optimistic: ‘For the past few years, the Libs have been sliding left, but after what I’ve seen from Taylor, I reckon they are back on track. A few weeks ago, I was all set to vote One Nation, but today I am coming around to voting Libs 1, ON 2.’ Sky’s viewers seem resistant to TDS; let’s hope it spreads to the hosts.