By PHILIP HOPKINS
CONTESTING climate policy over energy reliability and high bills for working-class people is not extremism, according to the head of the Labor Party’s intellectual think tank.
Dr Nick Dyrenfurth, the executive director of the John Curtin Research Centre, said this was the threat that Liberal Party backbencher Andrew Hastie posed to the Labor Party.
“Andrew Hastie has done something unusual for a contemporary Liberal: he’s tried to have a real argument about the party’s ideas,” said Dr Dyrenfurth, an adjunct research fellow in the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, writing in The Australian.
“Some colleagues sniped anonymously but not so, to their credit, Liberal moderate elders such as former senators Amanda Vanstone and George Brandis. The latter scolded Hastie for ‘channelling liberalism’s enemies’, effectively saying: Stay in your Menzian lane, talk abstract freedom, don’t touch the free market, don’t sound too patriotic, and certainly don’t go borrowing from dangerous ‘Red Tory’ playbooks. All of this is music to the ears of Anthony Albanese’s ascendant Labor government.”
Dr Dyrenfurth said Hastie’s post-liberal challenge is a reminder that liberty without duty is not freedom but pathology.
“It’s a progressive disease of societies that prize rights without responsibilities,” he said, having written a decade ago of how “liberalism is killing us”.
“Economic and social liberalism had become too thin to bind people together and provide meaning. Since the 1960s, they had both delivered choice without security, diversity without solidarity, free markets without reciprocity. That argument was made in 2014 – not 1954 – and it was aimed just as much at Labor as the Coalition,” he said.
“Brandis misses that post-liberalism is not fringe Trumpian cosplay. It is a mainstream response – of the left and right – to economic insecurity, cultural churn and eroding democratic trust, trends battering both major parties’ bases.”
Dr Dyrenfurth said post-liberalism starts from a simple insight: people want to be protected as much as they want to be liberated.
“They want good, steady jobs, not just ‘opportunities’; homes they and their kids can afford; migration set at a level infrastructure and wages can handle; their country to make things again; a healthier environment for their grandkids to inherit; and civic order, not permanent cultural revolution.”
“Post-liberalism pays homage to both Edmund Burke and Eduard Bernstein – respectively the fathers of modern conservatism and social democracy – conserving what matters most while daring to reform what’s broken.”
Dr Dyrenfurth said Hastie had been saying this as a Red Tory rather than a market-worshipping Thatcherite.
“He speaks of reindustrialising Australia and warns of big tech-corporate power. That’s not ‘illiberalism’, but an attempt to rethink failed orthodoxies and restore a sense of shared national purpose in an era of fractious geopolitics, exposed supply chains and brittle social capital,” he said.
“Just because the Liberal Party has the word ‘Liberal’ in its name doesn’t mean it must forever prioritise free markets, high migration and hyper-individualism. Liberal doyen Robert Menzies’ achievement was precisely a fusion – of liberal aspiration and conservative belonging – not neoliberal autopilot.”
Dr Dyrenfurth said a party thumped at the last election is obliged to reconsider its purpose, personnel and very place in a country that’s moved on without it.
“Hastie is a threat to Labor too because he speaks to the same outer-suburban, patriotic, economically interventionist voters it depends on. A Liberal who says ‘rebuild industry, control borders sensibly, take culture seriously and reward work’ is harder to caricature than a climate-culture warrior from Queensland. That’s also why some Liberals – Brandis and Andrew Bragg – are keen to police his thought. They sense an ideological realignment they can’t control,” he said.
Dr Dyrenfurth said the roadblocks Hastie faces in trying to remake the Liberal’s echo Labor’s own struggle for ideological renewal after the Hawke–Keating years.
“A gold-standard government in policy and governance terms became ideologically untouchable, even as the world moved on. The irony is that Hawke and Keating themselves were revisionists who had distanced themselves from Whitlam’s chaotic, if reformist, government to rebuild Labor’s credibility.
“Whitlam, in turn, had earlier reimagined the party through Fabian social democracy, reviving its intellectual core after decades of drift. Mark Latham tried to update Laborism but lost his bearings in the process,” he said.
“It took a new generation – figures like former leader Bill Shorten, with intellectual ballast from Jim Chalmers and others – to cautiously modernise Labor’s 21st century mission, a project that culminated in Albanese’s steady, unifying 2022 election pitch: not revolution, but renewal.”
Dr Dyrenfurth said that doesn’t mean Hastie is right on every policy.
“His hard line on net zero won’t fly in metropolitan electorates. Yet contesting climate policy from the perspective of energy reliability and working-class bills is not extremism – social democrats and liberal conservatives are arguing over this across the West,” he said.
“Then there’s the risk of alienating key ‘small-c’ conservative constituencies of ethnically and religiously diverse Australians by invoking the inflammatory language of becoming ‘strangers in our own country’. Hastie’s project will fail if it defines these citizens as strangers rather than as allies and fellow builders of our shared national home. Still, it isn’t intellectually honest to pretend that ‘liberalism’ is some timeless philosophy.”
Dr Dyrenfurth said what Brandis is defending is a pre-Global Financial Crisis settlement: high financialisation, mass inward migration as an economic lever and tool of wage suppression, and an uncritical embrace of globalisation.
“That settlement broke down years ago – post-liberals simply saw it first.
“In this sense, the so-called Liberal centre and the progressive left are mirror images: both worship the self, mistrust the past, and deride ordinary virtues of continuity and common sense. Whether it’s mindless consumerism or social media-driven identity politics, the story is the same.”
Dr Dyrenfurth said for all their mutual loathing, they belong to the same post-communal, post-Christian order that measures progress by the distance travelled from obligation.
“That’s why the real divide in politics is no longer strictly left versus right but liberal versus post-liberal: between those who still fantasise over a society of atomised individuals and those who want to rebuild a common life,” he said.
“From my side of politics, the most interesting thing about Hastie is not that he once wore camouflage but that he keeps circling back to collectives: family, church, community, nation. When he says leadership is a battle of ideas, he means it and knows the Liberals cannot be the party of big business but for the people who work, raise, build and serve. That’s a Labor insight too, and why Team Albo should treat him as seriously as Brandis and co-evidently do.”
First term Federal Member for Monash, Mary Aldred, clashed with Hastie in a Liberal partyroom meeting this year after he quit the frontbench.
