Andrew Hastie hung out his leadership shingle in a weekend interview that may have a few Liberals wondering if the right’s factional heavyweights made the best judgement in choosing Angus Taylor for the top job.
Hastie wanted to run for the leadership earlier this year but the right’s numbers men decided it should be Taylor, more senior in the faction, who toppled Sussan Ley.
But so far Taylor has not cut through, and indeed, he looks like someone suited to more conventional times.
When Ley was leader, Hastie took himself to the backbench and conducted guerrilla warfare from there. Now, under Taylor, he is shadow minister for industry and sovereign capability, a job he says he is happy in, but, as Sunday’s interview on the ABC’s Insiders showed, he has no intention of being constrained by.
Taylor, who made Hastie deputy leader of the opposition in the House of Representatives (the actual deputy, Jane Hume, is a senator), knows it would be potentially dangerous to try to put a lead rope on the aspirant who will be stalking him over the next 18 months.
In Sunday’s interview, Hastie strongly called out US President Donald Trump’s Iran strategy. On the domestic front, he urged the need for comprehensive tax reform – even sounding open to some of the government’s thinking regarding the taxes on assets – rather than following the Liberals’ talking point that Labor only wants to tax people more.
Like the new Nationals’ leader, Matt Canavan, Hastie comes across as someone worth listening to (agree or disagree with him), not just a politician with a good memory for the cheat sheet.
In common with most Australians, Hastie isn’t a fan of Trump and the way he conducts policy. After a Trump outburst against allies earlier this month, he called the president “petulant”.
On Sunday, he said he had a “visceral” reaction to Trump’s Friday criticism of US allies not stepping up in the war with Iran.
I don’t know why we went in there [to the Iran war] now. I thought last year we did the job [with the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities].
There wasn’t consultation with allies, because had we had a bit more lead time, we wouldn’t be in the current crisis we are now where we’re trying to secure our liquid fuel.
I think this was a huge miscalculation. Iran has managed to pretty much hold the whole world economy to ransom.
While a critic of how Trump has handled things, Hastie is not going so far as to now reject the war.
If I have to choose between the United States and Israel, and Iran, I’m going to choose democracies rather than a murderous regime which has ambitions to build a nuclear weapon and potentially use it against Israel, the US and allies.
So don’t get me wrong here.