“Angus set up his own yardstick for success or failure, and at the moment he’s failing.” That is how one senior Liberal parliamentarian described Angus Taylor’s position to Daily Mail political editor Peter van Onselen this week. “He’s got until the end of the year to get it right. If he can’t turn things around by then, he needs to go early in the new year.”
Van Onselen, writing in a column, argues that Taylor now faces the standard he applied to Sussan Ley. Ley, the federal party’s first female leader, had held the job for under a year after a devastating election defeat when Taylor challenged her earlier this year. He launched the move by declaring that the Labor government had failed, that the party had lost its way and that Liberals were “running out of time.”
Nine months against nine months
The column’s arithmetic is blunt. Taylor gave Ley nine months. He has used about half that time already, and according to van Onselen One Nation’s support keeps rising while the Coalition’s primary vote keeps falling. Pauline Hanson is picking up housing shortages, record migration and cost of living pressures that the Coalition has not turned into an argument of its own. If Taylor lasts to the end of this year, he will have been leader longer than Ley was.
Senator James Paterson, described by van Onselen as the key strategic figure on the Liberal right, is the man to watch. 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.” He said the “best way” to show voters the party had changed direction was “to change leaders.” Van Onselen says those words now sit under Taylor’s leadership like unexploded ordnance.
Three possible successors
The alternatives, in the column’s telling, are thin.
Andrew Hastie is the leading conservative option but divides colleagues, and bitterness lingers over the Ben Roberts-Smith saga. Tim Wilson is the moderate alternative. He is articulate, understands the metropolitan seats the Liberals have lost, and won his own seat back from the teals at the last election, but conservatives may see him as too progressive. Dan Tehan comes from the regions and has cabinet experience the other two lack. He is less ideologically provocative, though van Onselen calls him not remotely inspiring.
A former Liberal minister gave the Mail a verdict on the trio: “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.”
Hastie and Wilson might have to run as a unity ticket, van Onselen suggests, and he compares that to Alexander Downer and Peter Costello in the mid-1990s. That pairing did not work. John Howard stepped in and won the 1996 election.
In van Onselen’s view, the real danger to Taylor is not that colleagues fall in love with a rival. It is that they look at the calendar and decide they cannot afford to keep waiting. All three alternatives, he writes, share one motive: self-preservation, since few Liberals and virtually no Nationals would hold their seats on current polling.
