“We live in an age of depravity, in an age of selfishness, in an era where morality, decency, ethics, integrity, have all substantially collapsed.”
That’s former Republican master strategist Steve Schmidt on a Daily Beast podcast earlier this month, speaking about his country’s far Right and the breakdown of moral authority in America.
His language is extreme, but so is Donald Trump’s relentless pursuit of political opponents, his abuse of his office to enrich self, family and benefactors, his administration’s seizure of people alleged to be illegal immigrants – mainly on the basis of skin colour – in city streets, his territorial ambitions and his trashing of international agreements and alliances.
While the list of Trump’s wrongdoings is shocking, his worst crime has been undermining our future by removing all US climate mitigation measures and revoking a long-standing finding that carbon pollution poses a danger to US citizens.
Australia may find itself in Trump’s sights as it seeks to improve the viability of green industries with the use of carbon tariffs for selected commodities. Last week’s review of measures against “carbon leakage” – preventing companies shifting production to countries without strict carbon laws – will not go down well in Washington.
The new Liberal leadership team, Angus Taylor and Senator Jane Hume, took a Trumpian stance at the weekend by warning against carbon tariffs and claiming Labor’s clean energy policy was “ideological” because it excluded nuclear.
The complexity of climate policy makes it a prime target for the extreme Right, whose particular talent is to make everything seem simple, as in the vacuous “no net zero” slogan. Australians may be repelled by Trump’s abuses of power, but there are echoes here of Trumpian rhetoric among many in the Coalition.
Those echoes were bouncing around Parliament House walls leading up to Taylor’s defeat of Sussan Ley as Liberal leader after polls put One Nation well ahead of the Coalition. That was a shock for everyone, but it was devastating for the Liberals.
The Liberal Party must now “change or die”, said Angus Taylor on his election as leader. No prizes for guessing where that’s heading. South Australian Liberal senator Alex Antic put up “everyday Australian” Pauline Hanson as a model, and Taylor and at least some of his Liberal Party backers appear to have decided it’s the way to go.
Taylor emphasised immigration issues in his and Hume’s first media conference as leader and deputy leader. In a throwback to former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, he proposed hardline immigration policies to exclude people who “hate our way of life”.
There’s an irony in holding such a position while advocating a return to the values espoused by the party’s founder, Robert Menzies. Menzies was a pragmatic conservative whose beliefs were shaped by both the rise of communism and the world war against fascism. He knew that success for his fledgling Liberal Party depended on confronting enemies on the Right as well as those on the Left.
Menzies’ balanced stance seems to be the last thing on the minds of Taylor and his backers, distracted by all the ruckus on the Right. Sussan Ley might have helped shift them to a centrist position, but she’s gone, and now her entirely predictable retirement forces the Liberals into a battle to hold her NSW Riverina seat of Farrer.
In 2025 Ley held on against eight others. Her closest opponent was independent Michelle Milthorpe, whose two-candidate-preferred tally reached nearly 44 per cent. Closely allied with Helen Haines, independent MP for the next-door seat of Indi, Milthorpe is standing again on a platform of community values and climate action. She has a good chance of winning regardless of any One Nation surge.
Former PM Tony Abbott enthusiastically endorsed Taylor, the energy minister in Scott Morrison’s government who advocated for nuclear power in the face of a deafening silence from the energy sector. On the other hand, another former Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said a lot of people describe Taylor, a former Rhodes Scholar, as “the best qualified idiot they’ve ever met”.
The rising fortunes of One Nation will only increase the noise from the Right of politics about a coming right-wing revolution and encourage some Liberals to aspire to be “more Hanson than Hanson”. But as Turnbull remarked, “that’s a battle you can’t win.”
Political argument is often described as hot air, but outside this bubble a real warming is happening. That reality hit home in Western Australia’s remote Pilbara last week when news emerged that heatstroke was the likely cause of the death of a fit young migrant woman mustering cattle during a 45-degree December heatwave.