As Europe falls to the far right, Hastie and Ley are at odds about what it means for the Liberals

Michaelia Cash is not a politician who can be accused of lacking energy. So when parliament resumed after a month-long break on Tuesday, the opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman was raring to go. Senate estimates are under way in Canberra, offering Coalition and crossbench senators a rare opportunity to probe public servants about how government decisions are made. Estimates can be tedious and prone to grandstanding, but still serve as a crucial vehicle for transparency and accountability. This week’s hearings are the first since the Albanese government’s crushing May election victory.

Cash’s focus was the arrival of a group of so-called ISIS brides and their children to Australia last week after they fled camps in Syria. What role did the government play in their return, she wanted to know. And why had Anthony Albanese, just a few weeks earlier, dismissed reports foreshadowing their arrival as “not accurate”? Officials from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet declined to answer simple questions, including about how many women and children had arrived in the country. “This has turned into another Albanese government cover-up,” Cash said in a statement of high dudgeon. “It is an absolute disgrace that the Albanese government refuses to give the most basic details about the return to Australia of this cohort.”

Albanese would have been ready to answer questions about the topic at Tuesday’s question time but none came. Instead, Sussan Ley’s opposition was totally focused on the Optus Triple Zero scandal – an important issue, but not the only topic of national significance. It was a missed opportunity to pressure the prime minister on national security, a traditional Coalition strength.

Sitting on the opposition backbench watching in silence was Andrew Hastie, the man who, a few days earlier, was responsible for holding the government to account on topics such as the arrival of the ISIS brides. Just hours after the news of the return of the women and children from Syria broke on Friday afternoon, Hastie announced he was resigning from his position as shadow home affairs spokesman. It was a moment that laid bare the Coalition’s struggle to inflict damage on Labor as it tears itself apart – and one with resonance beyond Australia as conservative parties battle to respond to the surge of populist sentiment on their right flank.

Hastie’s explanation for his resignation was straightforward: he believed that, under changes announced by Ley in letters to her shadow ministerial team, he would not have leadership over immigration policy. But he acknowledged there were bigger, and more profound, issues at play than a carve-up over portfolio responsibilities. Long discussed as a potential future Liberal leader, the former special forces soldier is deeply immersed in debates about the nature of modern conservatism and knows where he stands.

“I think the centre-right as a movement is fractured at the moment,” Hastie said. “We’re seeing the One Nation vote increase quite significantly. And I think one of the jobs we have to do as a Liberal Party is reconstitute that natural constituency if we’re going to win government. So I think that’s the task going forward. And that means listening to aspirational mainstream Australians who love their country, love their local community, love their families, who want to build a better life, but they feel like Labor has taken control away from them, and who feel like they’re going backwards, and that’s who we’ve got to win back.”

Hastie’s language echoes the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, where the Leave campaign won a shock victory under the slogan of “Take Back Control”. Almost a decade later, the immigration debate continues to roil the UK and reshape British politics. The arrival of asylum seekers on people smuggling boats has damaged Prime Minister Keir Starmer yet produced no pay-off for his Conservative rival Kemi Badenoch. Instead, Brexit champion Nigel Farage’s Reform party is in the ascendancy. The latest YouGov poll shows Reform winning 311 seats, Labour 144 and the Tories just 45 – a dire result for a party that has dominated post-war Britain.

Across the English Channel, polls show France’s far-right National Rally consistently leading in the polls as Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance movement flounders. Macron this week burnt through his fifth prime minister in two years as the populist right and left surge in support. Similarly, the latest polling in Germany shows the far-right Alternative for Germany leading the centre-right Christian Democrats despite being under surveillance by the country’s security services.

Liberal Party politicians are watching events in Europe closely, but are drawing different lessons from what they see. Moderates such as NSW Senator Andrew Bragg – and, in many ways, Ley – believe it is imperative for the party to boost its appeal to migrant communities and tack to the centre. Hastie and Jacinta Price, who was sacked from her frontbench role after making offensive remarks about Indian migrants, believe the Coalition must harness voter anger about high migration levels by embracing populism. Immigration, an issue that should in theory be problematic for a centre-left government like Albanese’s, is instead bedevilling and dividing his conservative opponents.

With his rivals in disarray, the prime minister looks remarkably at ease and in command of the political terrain. Albanese is about to take a week of holidays, his first meaningful break since the gruelling election campaign. Meanwhile, Liberal MP Mary Aldred is warning her colleagues that their status as a viable party of government is not assured unless they cut out the infighting. Political parties can be remarkably resilient institutions, but they can also quickly fade into irrelevance. Just ask the British Tories, and the once-dominant but now largely redundant Israeli Labour Party and French Socialist Party. Things seem permanent in life, until they suddenly aren’t.

Matthew Knott is the foreign affairs and national security correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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