“He’s got until the end of the year to get it right.” That was the verdict of a senior Liberal parliamentarian on Angus Taylor, in a column by Daily Mail political editor Peter van Onselen. If Taylor cannot turn things around by then, the MP said, “he needs to go early in the new year so that we can reset under someone else and have a fighting chance of saving the furniture at the next election.”
Van Onselen argues that Taylor set the standard himself. When he moved against Sussan Ley earlier this year, Ley was the Liberal Party’s first female federal leader and had held the job for less than a year after a devastating election defeat. Taylor said then that “the Labor government has failed and the Liberal Party has lost its way”, and that the party was “running out of time”. Ley got nine months. Taylor, the column notes, has already used up half that, and if he lasts to the end of the year he will have outlasted her.
The polling, by the column’s account, has not improved. One Nation’s support keeps rising while the Coalition’s primary vote keeps falling, with Pauline Hanson making hay from housing shortages, record migration and cost of living pressures.
Paterson’s own words
Van Onselen singles out Senator James Paterson, whom he calls the most vital strategic figure on the Liberal right. Paterson cannot lead from the Senate, but he is a factional operator able to make and unmake leaders. When he broke with Ley, he said he no longer had confidence in her ability to “turn this ship around” and called it a “change or die moment”. The best way to show voters the party had changed direction, he argued, was “to change leaders”. Van Onselen says those words now hang over Taylor, who may soon get a tap on the shoulder.
Who could replace him
The column names three possible successors, and finds fault with each.
Andrew Hastie is the leading conservative option, but divisive. Lingering bitterness over the Ben Roberts-Smith saga excites some Liberals and alarms others.
Tim Wilson is the moderate alternative. He is articulate, understands the metropolitan seats the party has lost, and won his own back from the teals at the last election. Conservatives may see him as too progressive.
Dan Tehan comes from the regions and has far more cabinet experience than the other two. He is less ideologically provocative, but, in van Onselen’s words, “not remotely inspiring”. Hastie and Wilson might have to run as a unity ticket, the column suggests, though it recalls how a similar pairing of Alexander Downer and Peter Costello failed in the mid-1990s before John Howard took over and won the 1996 election.
A former Liberal minister gave van Onselen a blunt assessment: “None of them particularly excite me, to be honest. Two of them are very inexperienced, and the third is too bland to excite the electorate or reclaim support from One Nation. I’m not sure what they can do, it’s a mess.”
Van Onselen adds that all three have one thing in common, self-preservation, since each would probably lose a seat under Taylor on current polling. The danger to Taylor, he writes, is that colleagues look at the calendar and decide they cannot keep waiting.
