Assuming that Andrew Hastie is not taken from us by the apparently imminent Rapture, he may soon come up for judgment. It is very hard to imagine him leading the Liberal Party anywhere other than over a cliff.

He seems to have a sense of despair over the Liberals’ lack of direction and current failure to project anything much in the way of ideas or values. But almost all of his moral or political ideas about reviving the party’s fortunes seem certain to make its short- and medium-term future worse: It is, apparently, a sacrifice he is prepared to make. He asks, “What’s the point of politics if you are not willing to fight for something?”

I couldn’t agree more, but it depends a good deal on what that something is. A plan to drop net zero targets: to further alienate the party from an electorate which has already marked down its pathetic performance on climate change. A plan to restore a domestic car industry in an environment where the markets are flooding with cheap Chinese electric vehicles at a price with which no local industry could compete?

The strange thing is how many of his profile-building exercises tick several boxes at once. He wants a crusade to restore the values of Western civilisation to Australian youth. It reminds me of Mahatma Gandhi; asked what he thought of Western civilisation, he said he thought it would be a good idea.

Having such a crusade, hopefully heading towards Jerusalem, will excite Australia’s ethnic populations. Relatively few of the modern arrivals come from the places where Western civilisation, whatever that is, developed. Under a Hastie government there would be very few more immigrants entering the country.

But the talk of values would also bring to mind that he comes from a coercive and preachy tradition that owes more to the American Christian right than it does to ideas that originated in Greece, Jerusalem or from the mouth of Jesus.

A jihad against the Democrats and the godless

Indeed, Hastie’s recent speeches and slogans seem to deliberately borrow from the Trump revolution, right down to the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the jihad against the Democrats, now characterised as dangerous radical left terrorists. And to the outright rejection of truth, facts and modern science that Trump and his team embrace. Hardly from the Western, or even the Scottish enlightenment. Hastie, himself, has always been coy about his own beliefs and values, and, in particular, has sought to deflect questions about whether he agrees with his clergyman father’s belief in creationism. (In the course of pretending to get angry at slurs on his father, he avoids the question.)

In normal Australian politics of the past 50 years, the personal beliefs of Australian politicians have only occasionally been very important, unless one’s religion is a part of their public persona, as with, say, the Reverend Fred Nile. Politicians have differed over abortion, euthanasia and same sex........

© Pearls and Irritations