‘Radio silence for days’: The uneasy calm before Hastie’s bombshell resignation

Andrew Hastie’s colleagues had been trying to reach him for days.

The former SAS captain has always been a lone wolf in a Liberal party room full of former staffers, apparatchiks and business people. But he has become particularly dislocated from the party’s centre of gravity in recent months as he’s spent time with his family in Perth post-election.

This week it went to a new level. Calls, texts – nothing. Something was up.

“It was just radio silence for days,” one of his close colleagues said.

That was until late Friday afternoon when Hastie posted on Instagram, the favoured platform for his recent outbreak of policy freewheeling, to reveal he was quitting Sussan Ley’s frontbench.

The trigger for his drastic action is a point of disagreement between Ley and Hastie. It will be furiously debated for days, expose totemic tensions over the party’s direction and stance on immigration, and put more pressure on Ley’s perilous leadership.

Hastie’s silence started soon after he received a letter in his inbox from Ley on Tuesday. First reported by this masthead, Ley used the so-called charter letters – normally a practice carried out by governments rather than oppositions – to set out KPIs and emphasise solidarity and discipline.

Hastie, who held the home affairs portfolio, said in his written statement that he felt compelled to quit because Ley had “made it clear that the shadow home affairs minister won’t lead the Coalition’s response to immigration matters”.

Ley rejects this charge.

She released her own statement after landing on the east coast from Western Australia, where she spent a week with most senior MPs – except Hastie.

“Three days ago, I sent every member of my shadow ministry a ‘charter letter’. They set out key performance indicators, general expectations,” it said

“In each phone conversation, and then in each letter, I made clear that every member of the team was bound by the ‘shadow ministerial solidarity’ convention, both in public commentary and on parliamentary votes.”

“Today, Mr Hastie informed me via telephone, that he would be unable to comply with this longstanding and well-understood requirement, and on that basis he would be resigning his position as shadow minister for home affairs.”

If it were true that Ley had stripped Hastie of control of immigration policy, he would have good reason to protest. The immigration portfolio, held by Paul Scarr, sits underneath Hastie’s home affairs position. As home affairs shadow, Hastie – just like Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke – should have ultimate authority over all policy areas in the portfolio.

The letter sent by Ley remains private. So are their phone calls, firstly earlier in the week to talk about the letter, and the Friday morning call when Hastie blew the issue up.

The fight over whether Hastie or Scarr should handle immigration is symbolic of the bigger debate.

Scarr is a mild-mannered, moderate MP who firmly believes in multiculturalism and is reluctant to emphasise any problems posed by high rates of migration. Right-wingers in the party have distaste for his views. Hastie, meanwhile, echoed controversial Tory MP Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 speech when Hastie said last month that Australians were starting to feel like “strangers in their own home”.

So what next?

Unless Hastie is hiding something from even his closest right-wing allies, there is no leadership challenge on the horizon. He reiterated his support for Ley repeatedly on Saturday. He will likely bide his time.

Quitting the frontbench at 7pm on a Friday, as the news agenda winds down and half the country starts boozing before the NRL grand final, is no time to bring heat and light to a coup.

Hastie did not loop into his resignation news the most senior right-wing Liberals, whose support he would need to topple Ley. Her leadership is backed by the moderates, the small centre-right grouping, and a younger group of influential and less zealous conservatives such as James Paterson and Jonno Duniam.

Ley’s backers point to the solidity of her numbers, which is well and good. She would not lose a leadership ballot if one was held when parliament is back on Tuesday next week.

But John Howard’s broad church required accommodation of the diverging schools of thought in the party. Hastie now joins the other heroes of the populist-right media, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Barnaby Joyce, free to speak out on the backbench.

Ley might remain in the job, but she will appear weak so long as the party fractures underneath her and remains confused about its path forward. With Hastie, Price, and scorned former shadow ministers Jane Hume and Sarah Henderson sitting on the backbench, it will only take one bad mistake by Ley to spark a leadership conflagration.

One MP said on Friday evening that Hastie always had immense potential but lacked political nous.

Far from bringing down Ley, the Coalition MP suggested the Hastie saga showed the party’s right flank was fracturing to the point of no return, with Hastie serving as the emblem of a new breed of MP comfortable with the politics of Nigel Farage than a more mainstream, free-market Liberal like Scott Morrison. It’s possible the gulf is now irreconcilably large as right-wing politics transforms across the Western world.

Ley’s former challenger, conservative Angus Taylor, is now in hand-to-hand combat with Hastie inside the Right.

Hastie seemed to be searching for a reason to quit the shadow cabinet as he embarked on a kind of journey of political self-actualisation after years of toeing the line.

The prospect of a new populist movement to compete with the Liberal Party has come up in conversations surrounding Hastie inside the Liberals. There are no signs such a move is in play. Australia’s voting system, migration policies, and party registration process makes a Reform-style outfit less likely to succeed than in the UK.

Hastie, who until recently has not been an enthusiastic participant in the cut-and-thrust of daily politics, is now positioned as alternative internal voice to Ley. A leadership challenge is not imminent, yet it is hard to see how such an ambitious figure will gain satisfaction from two years on the backbench in opposition.

Listening to the words of the former soldier, it’s not obvious that Hastie will see out what he has framed as a life-or-death battle for the future of the party.

His colleagues are genuinely confused about whether he is laying the groundwork for a challenge down the track or acting erratically without an end game, potentially leading to him quitting politics or charting a new path via a new party, or as a Matt Canavan-style renegade backbencher.

Hastie might not know either.

Speaking on radio last month about his crusade to remake the Liberal Party, Hastie said: “If I go out with the tide ... that’s great. I’ll get a lot more time with my kids back.”

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