The potential splits wracking the opposition Liberal-National Coalition have hardened since one of its most right-wing Liberal Party leaders, Andrew Hastie, quit the shadow cabinet last Friday.
The survival of the Coalition, a mainstay of capitalist rule since World War II, alongside the Labor Party, is being thrown into doubt following the further collapse of its middle-class urban base in its devastating defeat in the May federal election.
Hastie, a former Special Air Service (SAS) military officer, is openly pitching for far-right support on a Trump-like platform, similar to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party, of seeking to divert growing social and political discontent in a reactionary, anti-immigrant direction.
Hastie resigned as the shadow home affairs minister, demanding a far greater cut in immigration, on top of a previous threat to quit unless the Coalition dropped its previous support for the policy of supposedly seeking to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
An avowed Christian, Hastie also used his social media platform to pay tribute to the far-right US commentator Charlie Kirk and claim his murder was part of a left-wing attack on Western civilisation.
Hastie’s resignation is a further blow to the efforts of the current Liberal Party leader, Sussan Ley, to hold the Coalition together and win back electoral support in the Liberals’ former heartland seats in affluent areas of the main cities.
This is a political crisis of historic dimensions. In the May election, the Coalition was reduced to a parliamentary rump, especially in the capital cities, holding just nine out of 88 metropolitan seats. The Liberal vote fell to its lowest level since it was formed in 1944. The rural-based Nationals’ vote stagnated, but the Nationals gained greater relative numbers inside the Coalition’s shrunken parliamentary bloc.
The Liberals lost more—now nearly all—of their once blue-ribbon city seats in wealthy areas to “green industry”-backed “Teal” independents. Well-resourced by corporate donors, the Teals support “net zero” and promote the underlying myth, together with Labor, that catastrophic climate change can be reversed by the capitalist profit system itself.
The Liberals’ rout permitted the Albanese Labor government to win a commanding majority of seats in the House of Representatives, despite obtaining only about a third of the primary vote—its second-lowest support since the 1930s.
Far from a sign of political strength or stability, this was a win by default. Labor benefited from the widespread opposition to the Trump-style policies espoused by then Liberal leader Peter Dutton, which featured the establishment of an Elon Musk-type “Department of Government Efficiency” and the sacking of thousands of public servants.
Even after last-minute backpedalling, as the popular hostility to Trump’s fascistic agenda became obvious, Dutton lost his own seat. That triggered a fractious Liberal Party parliamentary ballot for a new leader.
Ley, a member of the Liberals’ small Centre Right faction who had been Dutton’s deputy party leader, narrowly won the leadership with the backing of the supposed “moderate” wing, against the formerly Dutton-led most right-wing faction.
Generally seen in ruling circles as a stopgap leader, Ley has tried to hold the opposed party factions together and maintain the coalition with the Nationals, while seeking to moderate the party’s image to appeal to urban voters.
But this political crisis goes deeper. It reflects the disintegration of the Liberals’ post-World War II social base among middle-class layers, including professionals and small business operators, who are under mounting financial pressure, while billionaires’ fortunes soar.
Hastie’s resignation has brought the resulting party rifts to a new level. It came less than a month after Ley was compelled to sack from the shadow ministry another “hard right” figure, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. An open advocate of a Trump-style “Make Australia Great Again” agenda, backed by billionaire iron ore magnate Gina Rinehart, Price had railed against Indian immigrants in particular.
The extent of Hastie’s base of support within the corporate elite is less clear at present, but he holds a seat in Western Australia, the state that is most heavily dependent on iron ore, gas and other mining revenues.
For months before his resignation, Hastie sought to carve out a right-wing platform, repeatedly declaring his ambition to one day be Liberal leader. Reflecting the interests of the mining conglomerates and Trump’s rejection of all climate change policies, he denounced his party’s support for the net zero target.
Prominent Nationals are also agitating for this shift, including former party leaders Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack, and resolutions to ditch net zero have been adopted by Liberal Party state branches.
Hastie then posted a social media video criticising past Labor and Coalition governments for the demise of manufacturing. He vowed to fight for the return of a domestic car industry, which was finally shut down a decade ago.
Above all, Hastie’s messages virulently blame immigrants for the intensifying housing affordability and cost-of-living crisis that is devastating millions of working-class households.
In one post, Hastie insisted that the Liberals would “die” if the party did not slash immigration. Echoing the inflammatory rhetoric of the UK’s Farage and others, he declared: “We’re starting to feel like strangers in our own home.”
“Our infrastructure is under pressure, essential services from schools and hospitals are stretched thin,” he stated in another post. “Australians are locked out of the housing market. Many are house poor, spending most of their income on rent or mortgages.”
According to Hastie, this was all “driven by unsustainable immigration. It’s that simple.”
This is political poison, intended to split the working class along national and ethnic lines and divert away from the actual causes of the social crisis, which lie in the control of the housing market and every other aspect of the economy by the developers, big business and the billionaires.
Far from immigrants being the cause of the housing crisis, it is the domination of the market by speculative investment which has resulted in housing prices skyrocketing by 483 percent over 27 years, with wages increasing by only 125 percent.
Labor and the Coalition vie with each other on their anti-immigrant credentials and policies. During the May election, both parties competed with each other on cuts to overseas student enrolments and net overseas migration, providing fodder to the anti-immigrant demagogy of the far right.
At a media conference last Saturday, Hastie flatly declared the need to regain the votes of supporters of right-wing Senator Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigrant One Nation party.
Hastie is also an ardent advocate of greater spending to prepare for war, particularly a US-led war against China. During the campaign for the May election, he reportedly had a falling-out with Dutton over the latter’s attempt to meet the Trump administration’s demand for much higher military spending, without specifying the weaponry that would be acquired.
Backers of Hastie have told various media sources that he is not making an immediate challenge to Ley’s leadership. Instead, he would wait for her “train wreck” to worsen.
In response, Ley’s closest supporters are making public thinly-veiled attacks on Hastie. In a newspaper column, shadow housing minister Andrew Bragg said “isolationist tendencies that sometimes drive US politics would be poisonous for Australia.”
That reflects nervousness within the corporate, media and political establishment that the breakup of the Coalition could destabilise the political system on which they have relied for decades.
In the Murdoch media’s Australian, national editor Dennis Shanahan warned on Sunday: “Hastie’s actions are undoubtedly a threat to the Opposition Leader whether directly or indirectly, imminently or later but, also, a threat to the wider ‘institutionalised’ political system which includes all the major and minor parties and independents.”
Shanahan voiced fears that Hastie’s moves could fuel the widespread disaffection with the capitalist parties and trigger deeper opposition. “Hastie could be a figurehead or titular leader to an organic movement that he does not or cannot control but which … weakens even further the hold of the Liberals, Nationals and ALP on disillusioned sections of the public.”
The ruling class now depends more than ever on the Labor government and its trade union enforcers, already distrusted by many workers, to impose their corporate agenda, which includes scapegoating immigrants, slashing disability and other social services, aiding the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and ramping up military spending to support the AUKUS pact for war against China.
As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, the militarist, anti-immigrant and rightward plunge of the Labor government and the entire political establishment, paralleling the political processes in the United States and Europe, can be answered only by building a socialist movement of the working class, in Australia and internationally.