Our political foes have chosen the same outfit. Sadly, it doesn’t look good on either of them

April 19, 2026 — 5:00am

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There have been a couple of corker lines delivered over the last couple of weeks to underscore the fact that no politician with a yen to continue his or her career wants to be seen dead wearing last season’s economic consensus.

I especially liked the line from Nationals’ leader Matt Canavan at the National Press Club last week, criticising the economic sentiment of the past 15 years as “microwaved Milton Friedman” (the economist who promoted deregulation, small government, and free-market capitalism).

Liberal MP Andrew Hastie also got in a good one on the ABC’s Insiders when he declared that voters wouldn’t reward the Liberal Party for “a final stand for neoliberal politics”.

How fashions change. It feels like just yesterday that I was mocking the earnest libertarianism espoused on the Australian right, especially by young men. In the “noughties”, the unrealistically individualist philosophy had really caught on. I blame the lack of social media. Back then, boys were still reading the politically libertine Playboy for the articles. They even read books.

Like Ayn Rand’s novels. After being told dozens of times that it was necessary to read the Russian emigre to understand the world, I did. Hoooh boy. From then on, I understood what had captured those young men’s imaginations. Let’s just say that sections of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which didn’t start off sealed, would have become fused by the sticky panting fingers of their........

© The Sydney Morning Herald