At a time when his party has a real opportunity to throw out the playbook of the past, Angus Taylor seems woefully ill-equipped to lay out a vision for Australian goodness.
This past weekend the Liberal leader made remarks about “bad people” coming to Australia from “bad countries”, claiming: “There is a higher risk that some bad people come from those bad countries.”
He has form. In the weeks since the Liberals unveiled their new immigration policy, Taylor has been singularly focused on winning votes from One Nation.
Bizarrely, his strategy has included punching down at communities fleeing harrowing attacks by US and Israeli military forces. He has argued that a small group of people from Gaza who have arrived on visas, present “a high risk to our nation”. At the weekend, he gave Iran as an example of a “bad country” that might send “bad people” to Australia.
The comments are heartless. Fifty-six per cent of the 75 000 people killed by Israeli bombs and snipers in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 5 January 2025 have been women, children and elderly people; in Iran between 175 and 180 people, most of them schoolgirls, were killed by US bombs on the first day of the war.
But at a political level, Taylor’s approach is baffling. At the last election, voters sent Liberals the message that they weren’t interested in division. Women, young people, middle-aged voters with mortgages and millennial renters all abandoned the party, as did many culturally and linguistically diverse communities in outer suburbs across the country. But Taylor and his shadow cabinet didn’t get the memo.
The party’s primary support base is dominated by men aged over 55. With Pauline Hanson riding a new wave of popularity as voters seek options outside the mainstream, Taylor is betting that he can woo some of those supporters. But polling has shown that One Nation is most appealing to baby boomers and gen X. This is hardly the demographic the Liberals should be targeting if they want to grow the party.
Cosplaying Hanson may attract press coverage and social media hits but Taylor’s rhetoric will alienate those it needs to attract. Instead of addressing his party’s very deep problems, Taylor seems hell bent on exacerbating them – driving away younger voters and communities who are traditionally more social conservative.
If Taylor is serious about rebuilding, he will need to focus on the issues Australians care about: creating sustainable and secure jobs, tackling intergenerational inequality and addressing growing poverty.
So far he hasn’t demonstrated the capacity to produce well-researched credible policy positions that speak to any of these problems. This is another issue that dogged the Liberals at the last election: when it comes to policy, they have been remarkably lazy.
Sowing division is far easier than solving problems and, as their infighting in the last year has illustrated, the party prefers to bicker than to build.
The approach is unlikely to appeal voters. Still, it’s important not to underestimate the effect of such shameful rhetoric. Taylor’s words are corrosive and they degrade public discourse. As we have seen in the US and parts of Europe, grievance yields a bitter harvest.
The immediate losers in this war of words are First Nations communities and migrant groups. The disrespect shown to Aboriginal veterans on Anzac Day underscores this, as does the anti-immigrant rally in Canberra, where Matt Canavan appeared alongside Hanson to remind voters: “Tony Abbott and John Howard stopped the boats. They secured our borders. We’re going to do it again.”
Stopping the boats led to a shameful decades-long bipartisan policy of off-shore detention that damaged Australia’s global standing in the human rights arena and created a backlog of temporary visa holders that the Coalition’s new policy threatens to worsen.
Taylor’s new policy and the rhetoric he has used to launch it will have long-term consequences for all of us – not just those who are directly vilified.
Ultimately, the Liberal party’s focus on “bad” people and countries overshadows the much more important conversation we need to be having about what it means to live in a “good” country.
Can we consider Australia to be a good country when it deems children under the age of 14 to be “capable of evil” and has laws mandating a minimum age of criminal responsibility as low as 10 in some jurisdictions? What “good” can the country claim when Indigenous adults are imprisoned at 14 times the rate of non-Indigenous adults? Is a country good when its government approves a massive gas export project for a 50-year period in the face of overwhelming evidence that it represents a “carbon bomb” incompatible with global climate goals?
Simplistic terms like good and bad don’t do justice to the challenges we face. People don’t want leaders who play games and waste time creating imaginary enemies. If the Liberal party wants to win votes, its leader would do well to stop scapegoating those who come here seeking peace and offering up their hopes and dreams and skills.
• Sisonke Msimang is the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018)
