Mr Conviction: What’s behind Andrew Hastie’s new crusade?

When Coalition MPs were jostling for fresh positions after their shattering election loss this year, Andrew Hastie had one request of new leader Sussan Ley. The West Australian MP and former soldier wanted to branch out of the security space.

Hastie had felt pigeonholed during his three years as defence spokesman under Peter Dutton. Colleagues say the WA frontbencher, one of the few opposition MPs to improve the Liberal vote in his electorate, grew increasingly frustrated as Dutton, himself a former defence minister, kept Hastie out of the political fray, partly so he didn’t emerge as a rival. Hastie used his spare time in the previous parliament to study for a graduate diploma in economics online through Harvard Extension School and expand his credentials.

So when it came time for Ley to reset the frontbench in May, Hastie asked to spread his wings. He requested either an economics portfolio or something firmly outside national security, such as health or education. Ley gave him home affairs.

Several close colleagues say this grievance is one driver of Hastie’s bullish activity in the past few months. The frontbencher, 42, is building a brand as a conviction politician by commenting on issues outside his portfolio in a steady stream of provocative social media posts and radio interviews.

“He’s been terribly frustrated at a personal and professional level,” says a friend and political ally. Now, he’s refusing to be boxed in.

Observes one Liberal colleague: “It’s like he has just decided to say what he thinks from now on, to speak his mind.”

As Hastie outlines a new direction for the Liberals, he’s activating a cheer squad among elements of the party’s right, who are pushing his leadership potential. Other colleagues are suspicious of his strategy. Hastie is not cowed by their criticism; he’s called Liberal MPs who background against him “nameless cowards” and “muppets”. His actions have fuelled speculation of a leadership challenge, and Hastie is doing little to douse that.

But those close to him say his mission is much broader. His endgame is a re-booted Liberal Party that stands for family, community and nation, rather than worshipping at the altar of globalisation. If that means splintering the party or losing his seat, so be it.

Hastie has thrown down the gauntlet on energy policy, threatening to quit his position if the Coalition did not abandon the net zero by 2050 emissions target – and launched his own “Australia First” campaign to bring back local manufacturing.

The themes of sovereignty, national identity and Western decay – which have dominated Hastie’s reading over many years – are central to his vision for the party.

This masthead requested an interview with Hastie, but he declined, saving his policy positions for brief radio interviews or for his Instagram account.

Slick new social media posts lament a lost Australia, decry the “radical left” as “evil”, and call for a return to family values. Much of this language echoes that of contemporary right-wing speakers and influencers in the UK and the US, while his protectionist slant mirrors Donald Trump and European populist movements.

When Hastie made his run for the outer Perth seat of Canning in a 2015 byelection – shortly after key backer Tony Abbott was ousted as prime minister – posters pictured him in military uniform and cradling a baby with his wife, promising he “was not another politician”.

He was soon dumped by the Army Reserve because he refused to remove photos of himself in uniform from campaign material. Hastie’s 14 years of military service included time as a Special Air Service commander in Afghanistan, where he served at the same time as disgraced soldier Ben Roberts-Smith. Hastie testified against Roberts-Smith in a drawn-out defamation trial, and hailed the “moral courage” of other SAS soldiers who entered the witness box. His successive appointments to security portfolios started with his role as assistant defence minister in the Morrison government, in 2020.

But Hastie also described himself in his first speech as a keen student of history. Before joining the ADF, he started a bachelor of arts degree in history, politics and philosophy. While he resisted his family’s religion as a teenager – his father was a Presbyterian pastor – Hastie has a deeply held Christian faith. He was in the headlines as a candidate for refusing to be drawn on his father’s views on creationism.

Colleagues say he continues to wrestle with how, as party leader, he would explain his positions on same-sex marriage, abortion and women in military combat roles to an increasingly secular Australia.

As he freelances outside his home affairs portfolio, Hastie is homing in on energy, domestic manufacturing and Western values. Ten days ago, he drew attention with a declaration that he would quit the frontbench or be sacked if the Coalition retained a target of net zero emissions by 2050.

“My primary mission in politics is to build a stronger, more secure, more competitive Australia. Energy security is a vital input into that, so that’s my bottom line,” he told ABC radio. “I’ve nailed my colours to the mast.”

At the end of the week, he pitched his vision for that Australia in a social media video filmed next to a red 1969 Ford Falcon. “We’re a nation of flat-white makers, when we could be making beautiful cars like this again,” he lamented. “It’s not just about the cars. It’s this sense that we’ve lost something, that we’re now just helpless consumers. The Australian people are at our best when we unlock our innate God-given drive to design and build complex things.”

When colleagues questioned what he was doing, in anonymous quotes to newspapers, Hastie bit back. “Nameless cowards briefing in the paper,” he posted to Instagram.

But politics, for Hastie, is not just about economics. “Politics is now firmly a contest of ideas for our way of life, and we need to fight for our Western ideas and values,” he told his mailing list in a message sent after US conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination two weeks ago. He asked subscribers to examine Raphael’s Paul Preaching at Athens, painted for the Sistine Chapel in the early 1500s, to see the best of Western civilisation on display: faith, reason, inquiry, debate and persuasion.

Young people around the world were being severed from this Christian tradition, he wrote, and universities were repudiating Western values. “That’s why we see the pronouns, the grievance, the tantrums, and the violence ... The radical left are evil and will use violence to win. Let’s stop pretending they act in good faith.”

The answer, he said, was to be bold, courageous and grow a movement. “If we don’t get moving, the West will continue to decline,” he wrote.

That extends to the Liberal Party. “The Liberal Party will be in exile for a long time until we act in the interests of the Australian people,” Hastie wrote in a separate social media post about immigration on Wednesday. “If we don’t act, we can expect anger and frustration. We might even die as a political movement. So be it. What is the point of politics, if you’re not willing to fight for something?”

As the Liberal Party searches for its purpose after the May 3 federal election, leader Sussan Ley is trying to bring it back to the political centre. Hastie has different ideas. He wants to reframe the climate change conversation as one about energy security. He believes the Australian economy was opened far too wide in the 1980s, and it is time for a correction.

“A lot of people would like us to stay exactly where we are, including some people on our party side, but we can’t,” Hastie said on radio station 2GB on Thursday.

“The world has changed since the Howard and Costello years. We’ve had the global financial crisis, we’ve had Brexit, we’ve had the rise of Xi Jinping and China. We’ve had Trump. Had the pandemic. The world has changed, and we have to change with it.”

Bringing back manufacturing for Australians who lost out when the car industry left the country is a key part of Hastie’s pitch. But it’s anathema to the free market consensus that has dominated Liberal thinking for five decades. One of the Liberals’ leading moderates, NSW senator Maria Kovacic, said Hastie was a respected and hardworking colleague, but she disagreed with him on the issue.

“I’m a liberal, not a protectionist,” she said, in response to a Hastie post. “We need to focus on delivering outcomes for the realities of modern Australia ... Our existence isn’t threatened by not looking backwards; our existence is threatened by not looking forwards.”

Nor are Hastie’s ideas neatly at home with the conservative, or right wing, element of the party. Some of the group’s leading members, such as finance spokesman James Paterson, are traditional champions of free market liberal economics, not government intervention.

But that right-wing faction, the largest in the parliamentary party, is itself divided over social and economic policies. It lacks the coherence of previous terms, after leaders Peter Dutton and Michael Sukkar were booted from parliament in the election. In that vacuum, conservative MPs are experimenting with new ideas.

Hastie saw Dutton as a continuity candidate who was more conservative in tone than substance. He has no intention of imitating the former leader. “He wants to do it his own way,” one ally said.

Several colleagues are cheering him on. Publicly, they have included outspoken senators Matt Canavan and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, as well as younger Queensland right-wingers Henry Pike and Garth Hamilton. The latter represent a new brand of Coalition MPs who champion conservative cultural issues but not the free market thinking that has been dear to Liberals for decades.

On Thursday former Liberal minister Arthur Sinodinos urged the party to unite behind a centrist message. “If you want to have an effective opposition you have to be united, you have to speak with one voice,” he said on ABC radio. “There’s been too much focus on the culture wars and not enough on the bread and butter issues that impact Australians.”

But Price leapt to Hastie’s defence this week. “At a time when Australians are looking for substance and vision from their leaders, Andrew is demonstrating both vision and substance,” Price wrote on social media. The next day, in an interview with 2GB, she pointed out an alignment in their values. Price said the key institutions of Australian life – family, community and nation – were “at the core of [what] Andrew Hastie’s leading with”.

“I think he’d make a remarkable leader one day,” she said.

Hastie has not been shy about his leadership ambitions. “I’d be foolish to say I don’t have a desire to lead. I do have a desire to lead,” he said on the Curtin’s Cast podcast, released on May 14. He said he didn’t run in the post-election leadership ballot for personal reasons – his children are aged three, seven and nine – but said leadership was not confined to a single role. “We’ve also got to lead in the battle of ideas as well, and I think that’s where I want to make a contribution,” he said.

Ley won the ballot against Angus Taylor, now defence spokesman, by a slim margin of 29-25. Neither Taylor nor Hastie is counting numbers, but both know Ley’s leadership is precarious.

Taylor tells his colleagues that Ley needs to clearly demonstrate she has failed before any challenge is put, meaning any move would likely come next year. Hastie insists he’s a team player. “I’m just being a little bolder in some of the policy positions that I think we should adopt,” he said in the 2GB interview on Thursday, when asked how his interventions were being received by the leader’s office.

“I’m simply stating some positions, mainly through social media, and people can interpret that how they want. But I just think we need to reconstitute our natural consistency on the centre right, if we’re going to be a force to beat Labor in two years.”

Some on the right see Hastie’s posturing as more of an attempt to overtake Taylor than to immediately topple Ley. Taylor carries baggage, having lost the party ballot and failed to deliver an economic message as shadow treasurer. The defence spokesman’s colleagues say he remains intent on becoming leader, but at least three of his previous key lieutenants now want Hastie to be the next challenger instead.

But those close to Hastie say the leadership is not the only thing that motivates him. “If he was this thrusting, egocentric person that people make him out to be, he would have run for leader,” says the friend and ally mentioned earlier. “This is about leadership, to some extent, but it’s a little deeper than that. He wants a debate on direction and values, which has been absent for years.”

One Liberal MP says it is clear Hastie has leadership ambitions, “but I think his mission is ideological, that he is trying to reshape the centre of gravity in the Liberal Party, so it is more conservative, or MAGA-like”.

It might not work. One sceptical MP from the right said: “This MAGA turn won’t help Andrew win votes in the party, particularly not people like Jane Hume and sensible types you need to win a ballot”.

Hastie’s recent pronouncements would create buzz on the party’s fringes, the MP said, but fail to create support among centrists and more pragmatic right-wingers such as James Paterson, Claire Chandler and Jonno Duniam.

Another moderate MP said Hastie’s positions were so divorced from Liberal orthodoxy that they would eventually be held against him. The MP would not fight Hastie in public because, like his ally Price, he was “flaming out” on his own.

Hastie might not mind. “If I go out with the tide in 2½ years, that’s great; I’ll get a lot more time with my kids back,” he said last week.

But in the meantime, he’s preparing for battle. In response to a comment left on one of his social media posts about Charlie Kirk, which asked about the right-wing speaker’s contentious views on race and sexuality, Hastie spoke in life-and-death terms about what he sees as a hinge point in history.

“The next leg of the journey won’t be for the faint-hearted mate,” he wrote.

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