Media
|
News
October 15, 2025
Wednesday 15 October
Sarah Ison
The Australian
A “Farage-lite” populist agenda and the rejection of free-market thinking would lead the Liberals to destruction, senior opposition frontbencher James Paterson has declared in a repudiation of conservative allies Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
In a landmark intervention by one of the party’s most well-respected conservatives amid what some Liberals have declared an existential crisis, Senator Paterson demanded the opposition end the “apology tour” and put a clear “time limit” on its soul-searching, warning that the party had a moral duty to prevent Labor “Victorian-ising” the country.
While the party is many months away from having its election review handed down, Senator Paterson said the “ongoing mass public therapy session” that resulted in Mr Hastie and Senator Price departing Sussan Ley’s frontbench was only further damaging the Liberal brand. Restoring that brand meant resisting two “false choices” facing the Liberals, Senator Paterson argued: first, becoming a “free market version of the teals” and, second, settling on a “Farage-lite” conservatism that undermined free trade and favoured nationalism.
He also warned colleagues against focusing on either the base or swing voters, arguing instead that the Liberals must start by locking in its base first before recapturing mainstream Australia. While admitting it was “trite” to suggest the best way forward was the middle path between the two warring factions, Senator Paterson said it should “not be beyond” the Liberals to unite around simple principles.
“A policy agenda (must be) based on limited government, free markets and lower taxes is what will get our economy growing again,” Senator Paterson, the former Liberal Party election spokesman, told an audience in Sydney on Tuesday night.
“It’s the sort of Liberal Party that will be recognisable again to our supporters, who have lost faith in us in recent years.
“And it will begin the process of restoring our past brand equities with the broader public, who will vote Liberal when they believe it will make them better off and our country stronger.”
However, Senator Paterson said the party must also not “shy away from important debates about our culture identity and sovereignty”, claiming that obeying Labor’s demand to stop fighting culture wars constituted a surrender to the left.
“Often we are told we should stop fighting the culture wars. But this wouldn’t mean culture wars stop,” he said. “It would just mean we pre-emptively surrender … them to the left. If we followed this advice we would be left with a soulless, hollow party which spoke to only the narrowest material aspirations of Australians. It would leave us rudderless in navigating an uncertain world.”
As the party formed its next policy agenda, Senator Paterson warned “a copy-and-paste policy and political agenda” would fail in the face of the unprecedented challenges facing the nation.
With living standards due to fall consistently in future generations and economic growth to stagnate, Senator Paterson said only the Liberal party could “save Australia from its fate”.
But drawing inspiration from the policies of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage would be destructive for the Liberals, with Senator Paterson arguing the Reform party had achieved only the “political destruction” of the conservative movement in the UK.
Swaying further to the Left of centre was also not the answer, he said, declaring a “Labor-lite economic agenda would be a disaster politically and economically”.
“If we are in a competition of who can best hand out public money with Labor, we will lose every time,” he said. “A Liberal Party which abandons markets would consign Australia to a poorer future.”
As part of his rallying cry to bring back together the broad church of the Liberal Party and restart momentum in the wounded opposition benches, Senator Paterson said regaining government was not out of reach. “It was only six years ago that the party won a ‘miracle’ election victory federally, one year ago this month the LNP took office in Queensland after almost a decade in the wilderness and it was only three months ago the Tasmanian Liberals triumphed in their election,” he said. “There is nothing fundamentally defective with our values. We are not so diminished that we are incapable of again earning the trust and support of the Australian people.”
In his most broad-ranging assessment of the Coalition’s election loss, Senator Paterson said his party – full of MPs exhausted from managing a pandemic – took an agenda to Australians that lacked ambition. “We have all agreed that one of the lessons of the last term is we put off too many debates and prized unity and discipline above almost all else,” he said. “We can’t afford to make that mistake again.”
Senator Paterson warned his colleagues not to stray so far from the values of unity and discipline that the Liberals were left resembling “a think tank” more than a political party.
In comments that appeared directly targeted at conservative colleagues such as Mr Hastie – who launched his own personal policy campaign earlier this year – Senator Paterson urged for the freedom offered to Liberal MPs to speak their minds to be “exercised judiciously”.
“The Liberal Party is not a think tank. Or an activist group. Or a debating society,” he said.
“We are a political party designed to win and hold government. Those of us who remain in parliament have a special obligation to our party and our country.”
In launching his policy agenda – which focused on lowering migration, bolstering the housing market and manufacturing more in Australia – Mr Hastie declared such an intervention was necessary because of the fragmentation of the right.
Defending himself against accusations he was fighting culture wars, Mr Hastie pointed to the increasing vote for parties such as One Nation and the loss of the Liberal base as justification for his policy position.
Senator Paterson said that focusing on the base and luring back swing voters were not mutually exclusive propositions.
“We need to appeal to both our traditional supporters and swing voters. It is only a question of sequence,” he said.
“We are at our best when we first lock in our base, and then pursue swing voters from a position of strength. If we pursue swinging voters before we have locked in our core support, our right flank will be unstable and sap energy and attention from the contest with Labor. But if we obsess over our base and no one else, we will consign ourselves to permanent opposition.”
While Senator Paterson backed some of Mr Hastie’s views on maintaining the ANZAC tradition, Australia Day and other symbols of national identity, he disagreed with the instinct to home in on the party’s base and the issues that interested them.
He also called for the party to resist the “marginal voices arguing that the Liberal Party should split” on factional grounds, declaring such a move would be “a disaster”.
“They argue that the differences between people who call themselves ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ today are unbridgeable and we should go our separate ways,” he said. “Our task is to make sure these voices remain marginal.”
In his clarion call for the party to begin assembling a compelling alternative agenda for the next election, Senator Paterson said Anthony Albanese was behaving more like “a petty despot than a democratic leader” in his moves to shore up power.
“One of his first acts on returning to office was to arbitrarily slash the staffing allocation of an already depleted opposition, to make it harder to hold him to account,” he said.
“The introduction of a retrograde FOI ‘reform’ bill… would even further diminish the public’s right to know. If you want to understand what the consequences of an entrenched, long term Labor government looks like, just examine Victoria. Take it from me, it’s not pretty. We have a moral duty to prevent the ‘Victorianisation’ of Australia.”
While agreeing with colleagues that it was “right for us to be humble” about May’s election loss, Senator Paterson said he was proud of the party’s stance on issues suc h as anti-Semitism.
“I don’t think we lost a single vote on it. But if we did, I don’t care,” he said.
“Although politicians want to win every vote and every election if we can, there are some things more important than that, and this was one of them.”