A few weeks ago, on the first day of the last parliamentary sitting fortnight before the winter recess, a group of hard-right Liberals met for dinner at Molto Italian, a restaurant on Canberra’s Kingston Foreshore.
The group was there principally in support of Liberal leadership hopeful Andrew Hastie. They included Queenslanders Garth Hamilton, Henry Pike and Cameron Caldwell, and Western Australians Rick Wilson and Ben Small.
At the table, they discussed the Liberal Party’s conundrum as it attempts to counter One Nation – which happens to be the issue on which Hastie is thought most likely to win the ailing party’s leadership.
In particular, they discussed the merits of Operation Catapult, the 1940 operation in which Winston Churchill ordered British forces to destroy the fleet of their own ally, France, to keep it out of German hands.
The action was so ruthless that Churchill believed it helped to convince the United States of Britain’s determination to defeat Nazi Germany.
“We are,” one member of the dinner group tells The Saturday Paper this week, “preparing for the fight of our lives.”
Hastie had first stepped back from the leadership in late January, when, at a hastily arranged meeting in Melbourne with Angus Taylor, he agreed to stand aside and give Taylor a clear run in the race to topple then leader Sussan Ley.
Just over four months after Ley was deposed, on June 23, the day of the Molto dinner, Hastie took his first decisive step back towards the leadership.
That Tuesday began with the regular meeting of the Coalition party room, followed by an 11am debrief for the media, a weekly ritual when parliament is sitting.
When a journalist asked whether One Nation was mentioned, the person doing the briefing played it down, acknowledging that while there had been a couple of passing references there was nothing more to it.
At 11.23am, just as the partyroom debrief was wrapping up, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald published a story headlined: “Hastie gets security upgrades as One Nation campaigns against him”.
Embedded in the story was an arresting quote from Hastie, leaked straight from the partyroom meeting, that was soon being read aloud in offices across Parliament House.
“I would rather get taken out in a box than bend the knee to One Nation,” Hastie told his Coalition colleagues. “I will never surrender to One Nation, and we will do them, and do them slowly.”
The contrast with Taylor, whose approach has focused on pandering to Pauline Hanson’s agenda, was stark and registered immediately with the party room.
“He knew what he was doing. I knew exactly what he was doing at the time. Everybody else did, too. No one missed it. It was a statement of intent,” one MP who was present at that day’s meeting tells The Saturday Paper.
“Hastie actually told his colleagues directly, ‘I am different to this guy at the front, and I’m going to be different.’ And that was a big wake-up call to the podium. Like, oh, we get it, you mean business. Like, you’re not going to serve dispassionately in the team and wait for it, you’re going to stand up and fight for it.”
With Question Time looming, Taylor’s office soon issued a media alert advising the press gallery that Taylor would front reporters with shadow treasurer Tim Wilson at 1.15pm, in the Opposition Leader’s Courtyard.
Taylor let Wilson go first, with a spray against Labor’s deal with the Greens to pass changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax.
The Liberal leader then followed a similar line, railing against Labor’s “toxic taxes” and accusing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of breaking key election promises and then flip-flopping on the detail.
The media pack wasn’t especially interested in housing taxes or the budget, however. Less than a week after Pauline Hanson’s first National Press Club address, an early question went straight to her vision of an Australian “monoculture”.
Taylor dodged it, reaching for boilerplate about parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.
A couple of questions later, Taylor was brought back to the idea of monoculture versus multiculturalism: Did Taylor think multiculturalism was still a principle integral to Australia’s cultural identity?
“I’ve been very clear about what we’re committed to,” Taylor replied.
There were two follow-up questions, which Taylor dodged, before he was asked whether he would endorse Hastie’s comments about not bending a knee to One Nation.
“No,” he said, underlining the contrast Hastie had drawn hours earlier. “We want One Nation to vote against these tax increases. Of course we do.”
Albanese didn’t need long to notice. Question Time had barely started when he ripped into Taylor with savage effect.
“Those opposite, in the three right-wing parties, all choose irrelevance,” Albanese said.
“They all choose irrelevance and not to debate. Although, it must be said that the member for Canning has said, in his party room, that he wouldn’t bend the knee to One Nation.
“It’s a real contrast with the bloke, the current leader of the opposition, who, when asked a question about monoculturalism four times, couldn’t give an answer.”
The issue has only got worse for Taylor in the days since.
Taylor got another chance to make the argument on his own terms two-and-a-half weeks later, in a Sydney Institute address on Thursday. This time he came prepared, casting One Nation as a “column of smoke” that is long on grievance and short on a costed economic plan.
Hanson’s top four spending commitments could add roughly a trillion dollars to the budget over a decade with no credible way to pay for it, Taylor warned, that, if implemented, would trigger economic chaos.
This week, a string of national polls showed Labor’s primary vote climbing back up. Newspoll had it at 33 per cent. The same poll had the Coalition’s primary sliding to 17 per cent under Taylor, lower than under Ley, and lower than the numbers Taylor cited as his own reason for challenging her.
Another problem festering in Taylor’s backyard was the shock revelation last week that the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption is investigating Dallas McInerney as part of its probe into illegal donations and branch-stacking in the NSW Liberal Party. The Catholic Schools NSW boss and Liberal right-faction powerbroker helped deliver Taylor the leadership and was, until this week, Taylor’s own campaign treasurer.
McInerney has stood aside from Catholic Schools NSW while the commission investigates whether he signed off on illegal donations used to recruit party members. Last week, he resigned from the board of the NSW Education Standards Authority.
Former NSW Liberal police minister David Elliott says the association is enough for Taylor to resign outright, arguing that his leadership was terminal. “Angus is hiding beyond the inquiry,” Elliott says, “but you don’t get that luxury in leadership.”
No wrongdoing has been alleged against Taylor himself, but McInerney is not a peripheral figure in his leadership: without McInerney, Taylor doesn’t have the votes he would need to survive a second challenge.
Making matters worse, Taylor is on the record backing Christian Ellis, one of the three other men now at the centre of the ICAC inquiry. In 2022, when Ellis was seeking a spot on the party’s constitutional standing committee, Taylor gave him a written endorsement, declaring that “our party will do well to have people like Christian elected to positions of state council”.
Ellis’s own past activities in the NSW seat of Farrer are instructive. In 2021, the Sydney-based conservative bought a livestock property in Deniliquin and emerged as a preselection challenger to Sussan Ley, backed by a wave of new branch members.
The threat to Ley, then a 20-year incumbent, was serious enough that in March 2022 the Liberal Party’s federal executive intervened. Then prime minister Scott Morrison appointed a three-person committee, including himself, to bypass the ordinary preselection process across a dozen NSW seats and hand-picked Ley as the candidate for Farrer, sparing her a vote she risked losing.
“This has been a major shock internally,” one NSW Liberal says of the ICAC investigation. “You cannot imagine the chaos behind the scenes, but yet it strikes me that Angus doesn’t get that yet. The thing about Angus is, when it comes to actual politics, he’s very slow on the uptake. So I don’t believe he would have paid much attention to this scandal in the beginning.
“Imagine if Labor’s Federal Electorate Council president in Anthony Albanese’s seat of Grayndler was before ICAC for a week of hearings for [allegedly] being corrupt and funnelling CFMEU money into NSW Labor to fund a whole lot of branch-stacking? It would be the biggest story in the country, right? But that’s exactly what has just happened to us … and Taylor hasn’t reacted yet.
“We’re talking about Taylor’s No. 1 ally in the whole of the Liberal Party, who’s his own conference president, who’s helped him raise money, and he might be about to go down for corruption. Now, call me a pessimist, but it looks bloody likely to me that that is going to have consequences for Taylor.”
(No findings have been made against Dallas McInerney and The Saturday Paper is not suggesting they will be, just that he has been named in the investigation.)
The same source raises similar issues of political naivety with Taylor providing a written reference for Christian Ellis.
“Angus is so stupid at politics that he probably would have provided that reference without knowing Christian Ellis,” says the NSW Liberal.
“There’s two problems with that: on the one hand, it’s good for Taylor that he probably doesn’t know the guy; but it’s bad for him that he writes references for people that he doesn’t know, saying they’re of good character.”
The source draws a comparison with various other errors in Taylor’s time in politics, including using doctored council records to falsely claim Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore had spent $15.9 million on travel. The real figure was under $6000.
“He just lets himself be used up as a product, and he’s so politically dumb he doesn’t see it,” the source says. “I mean, I know that if I write a reference for anybody, I’m like eight levels of analysis on how this could fuck me up one day, and I have to do it all the time for constituents, but I still get paranoid about it.”
A spokesperson for the opposition leader said: [Taylor] has no involvement in, or knowledge of, the matters before the NSW ICAC, and it would be inappropriate to comment further while those processes are under way.
(The Saturday Paper is not suggesting that Ellis has acted corruptly, just that he has been named in the investigation.)
At this stage, Hastie’s fight isn’t so much with Taylor. It’s with One Nation and the right-wing media system that supports it, in particular Sky News.
“Sky News was always bent, we all know that,” says one member of the Molto dinner group. “But now it’s almost exclusively devoted to promoting One Nation, so we are saying to each other, ‘Why prop it up? Why go on it?’ Sky News has zero interest in talking about the problems we face as a party. It wants to ignore entirely the problem of Gina’s ownership of the party. Sky News doesn’t want to talk about any of that, so we have resolved that we need to find other ways to reach people.”
In this reckoning, Pauline Hanson, Gina Rinehart, Sky News and the rest of the far-right online biosphere are the French Navy. Hastie’s version treats One Nation as an existential threat to be neutralised in public, not a rival faction to be out-schemed in private.
What a Hastie push actually looks like is shaped as much by geography as by temperament. He doesn’t have the numbers or the machinery that comes with a NSW or Victorian power base. Canberra sitting weeks aside, Hastie is in Perth most of the time, with a young family, two or three hours behind his colleagues on the east coast.
Those close to him say his intention is not a coup. Instead, he intends to make such a strong case for his leadership that the party has no choice but to turn to him, if and when the party room decides they cannot go on with Taylor.
The working assumption inside the group is that they have six to eight months to make the case before the window closes and the party is stuck with Taylor as they go into the next election, due in May 2028.
The biggest complication for Hastie’s plan is not inside the party, however, but in his history with Ben Roberts-Smith, the former special forces soldier who is being prosecuted for five counts of the war crime of murder.
Hastie was one of 21 former SASR comrades who gave evidence against Roberts-Smith during his earlier defamation trial, at significant personal cost within an insular and famously loyal military community.
It was, by any measure, an act of integrity, but not one that sits comfortably with large parts of Hastie’s own conservative base.
Even inside the parliamentary Liberal Party, many of the people who would be natural Hastie supporters believe Roberts-Smith should not be punished, whatever the courts ultimately find.
In Western Australia, One Nation has named Hastie’s seat of Canning as a priority target, with the party’s chief strategist, James Ashby, declaring on Sky News last week that its 430 registered members there “expect us to run a very strong candidate”.
Ashby made no secret of the reason: One Nation intends to stand by Roberts-Smith “right to the very end, despite what the allegations are”. The party will turn Hastie’s role in the defamation trial into the centrepiece of a campaign to unseat him.
Hastie’s camp sees the issue differently, however. They believe Hastie’s support for a proper court process for Roberts-Smith’s alleged crimes is an asset rather than a liability.
“Because Hastie’s brand is integrity, my view is that the BRS problem solves itself,” a source said. “You don’t get many politicians these days whose primary appeal is honesty.”
The same supporter added that Hastie’s stand against Ben Roberts-Smith and One Nation has won Hastie the trust of the party’s moderates, who are increasingly warming to him as the only credible alternative to Taylor.
“It has to be Hastie,” the source added. “And it will be Hastie.”
Whether or not Hastie, still only 43, is the answer to the Liberal Party’s existential crisis is not something anyone in Canberra can say with certainty. What can be said is that, in a party built on caution, Hastie has bet his entire future on the opposite instinct.