THE HON ANDREW HASTIE MP

SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRY AND SOVEREIGN CAPABILITY
FEDERAL MEMBER FOR CANNING

 

ADDRESS TO CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL ACTION CONFERENCE

 

Friday 7 March 2026

 

We are living through a massive rupture of the world as we know it.

War and strategic competition.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence.

The disruption of local, living institutions by virtual networks online.

Across Australia, I detect an emotional vibe shaped by three things…

Anxiety. Stress. Loneliness.

I’m disorientated because my political vision is being tested by a new reality.

One Nation’s rise in the polls is a symptom of that new reality.

Now what do I mean by my political vision?

This is important, because you have a political vision, too.

So, please listen closely, as this is key to my message tonight.

What is a political vision?

American economist, Thomas Sowell, gives us a clue in his book, A Conflict of Visions.

In it, Sowell argues that reality is so complex that we can’t comprehend it fully.

It’s simply beyond us given our limitations as people, so we develop ways of understanding the complex reality around us.

We develop visions.

A vision is like a mind map that helps to guide us through the complexity of the world.

We all have a vision of how the world works that is shaped by our deep-seated beliefs, and our vison is constantly refined by experience and contact with reality.

Sowell makes the point that visions are indispensable, but dangerous when they override reality.

The first rupture in my political vision began with my two tours of Afghanistan in 2009 and 2013.

Up until that point, I’d adopted – perhaps subconsciously – the End of History thesis that liberal democracy had triumphed once and for all with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Broadly speaking, I was neo-liberal in my view of markets, and neo-conservative in my foreign policy.

They were the two sides of the same End of History coin.

Put simply: there were two main ideas at work.

One, that freedom and markets were abstract commodities that the West could export to darkened corners of the world.

And two, that if freedom and markets didn’t take hold, we could use military interventions to build nations, forcing freedom and markets at gunpoint.

For me, those ideas died in the valleys of Afghanistan, along with the many people who found themselves at the centre of a war they didn’t choose.

We physically built markets they did not want; and confected a democracy they never understood.

That was the first rupture in my political vision.

And it was Roger Scruton and Edmund Burke who helped me climb out of the intellectual valley that I found myself in.

Reading their works, I found a new respect for the power of geography, culture and local institutions.

I also discovered that democracy is long-term cultural project that cannot be easily exported, but can be easily destroyed.

But more on that in a moment.

Back to the present, and the second rupture to my political vision.

The one that we are all feeling and seeing.

It comes after almost seventeen years of expansionary monetary policy, where the Australian money supply has grown by more than 300% since the Global Financial Crisis in 2009 (M1).

Another kind of distortion.

It’s an economic conjuring that creates money where there was none before, where we all agree to pretend there is no reality to our debt.

Now many Australians benefited from the cheap credit boom that came with a decade and a half of unconventional monetary policy like Quantitative Easing (QE) and Forward Guidance.

The housing market took off and has not stopped rocketing up skywards.

Many young Australians missed this cheap credit boom, and are now locked out of the housing market.

But this era of monetary policy was not only about credit creation and housing.

It also fuelled government spending, enabled by the set-up of the monetary system, over successive terms of government.

Here’s the hard truth: when you spike the punch, you wake up with a bad hangover.

Sowell warned us about economic and political ideas that blind us to reality. And the Australian people are now bearing the cost of loose monetary policy, as inflation punishes their living standards.

Inflation remains high in Australia at 3.8%, well outside the Reserve Bank’s target band of 2-3%.

Real wages and productivity have flatlined, and many families are going backwards, and barely staying afloat.

Many people resent having to put their kids into childcare, with the economy no longer working to support the integrity and happiness of their family.

Population growth is up by 1.9 million people over the last four years, despite Australia having the lowest fertility rate in its history.

Immigration is the main source of that population growth, and many Australians are angry with the rate of migration and the low standards that the government has allowed for entry into our shared civic life.

It’s true: immigration numbers are too high, while the standards are too low.

People see this growth pressure on the roads, in our hospitals, and in our essential services.

And it’s also fuelling our domestic inflation which remains at 4.9%.

The anger is smouldering when you talk to people in person, but it’s breaking out like wildfire online when people have the freedom to post what’s really on their mind.

The system is not working for Australians, and they are blaming the uni-party.

The Liberals and Labor.

That’s why One Nation, the Teals and the Greens have risen in prominence: they have acknowledged that the system is broken. That it no longer supports the aspirations of mainstream Australians.

I think it’s time that we did the same thing.

That we acknowledged that we got it wrong, that the system needs a massive overhaul.

The new Opposition Leader, Angus Taylor, has started that process, and tonight I want to build out a few themes for reflection.

But first I want to turn back to a clue from Thomas Sowell.

He argues that there are two main political visions.

The Constrained vision, and the Unconstrained vision.

And those visions are in conflict with each other.

On the centre-right, we’ve traditionally taken a constrained view of the world.

We assume that human nature is the same as it was two thousand years ago.

Fixed. Imperfect. Unchangeable.

People are selfish, make mistakes, and have limitations.

That’s why we prefer limited government.

That’s why we like to distribute power and knowledge through institutions and markets.

That’s why we believe in trade-offs rather than solutions.

That’s why we are sceptical of intellectuals and policy elites governing us from an ivory tower.

We like democratic accountability, because we know that people make mistakes—including ourselves!

On the centre-left, they’ve traditionally taken an unconstrained view of the world.

They assume that human nature is changeable and open to improvement.

That social conditions matter more than distinct flaws in human nature.

That the right sort of leadership and institutional power can bring moral progress.

That social order can be redesigned with reason and power.

That problems can be solved – once and for all – rather than managed through trade-offs.

That government should play a more central role in our lives, and that we should place greater faith in intellectuals and policymakers.

You can see the differences between the two political visions.

The Constrained political vision is realistic, cautious, limited and believes in distributed power through institutions and networks.

The Unconstrained political vision is utopian, bold, expansive and centralising of power into the hands of experts.

You can see the battlelines forming.

So here’s my big idea for the night:

The reason that the centre-right is at war with itself at the moment is because we have adopted elements of the Unconstrained political vision.

We’ve adopted the thinking of the centre-left in key areas.

Specifically, we’ve allowed political and economic power to be centralised in the hands of a governing elite that is increasingly out of touch with regular Australians.

I mentioned the Reserve Bank’s expansive monetary policy over the last seventeen years, and the impact that has had on housing prices.

It is true that a significant amount of economic and financial power is vested into the hands of a few Australians at the Reserve Bank, and many regular Australians feel powerless against the massive decisions made by those policy experts.

That is a source of great frustration to many people—particularly for those who’ve had their hopes of home ownership extinguished.

We need to acknowledge their frustration and anger, and hear them when they say that it feels like the economic system is rigged against the average person trying to get ahead and build a better life.

A more recent and politically charged example of where we have adopted the political vision of the centre-left was during the Pandemic.

Where governments across the country – both Liberal and Labor – vested great power into the hands of unelected health officials who advocated for social distancing, lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

These decisions of state—taken and enforced from comfortable government buildings in our capital cities—had far greater impact on blue-collar Australians who work in the Bunnings economy rather than white-collar workers who work in the Zoom economy.

The decisions taken during the Pandemic damaged the covenant between our governments and the Australian people they serve. It accelerated the retreat of people into online communities, and dealt a blow to our local, living institutions.

No wonder we see so much anxiety, stress and loneliness.

No wonder we see so much suspicion, residual anger and resentment of politicians and policy experts.

Regular Australians lived the consequences of these decisions during the Pandemic. Jobs were taken from people. Families were separated. Medical care was denied to people because of state boundaries.

Decisions of state have consequences: but not all are bad.

I wouldn’t have my four-year-old daughter, Jemimah, if Premier Mark McGowan had not cancelled my vasectomy in 2020.

But for many Australians, the consequences were damaging, and they are right to feel aggrieved—as many still do.

Another area where we’ve failed on the centre-right is in energy policy by adopting Net Zero.

That was a mistake, and we should have never caved to international pressure on that.

The Australian national interest should always be our number one priority, not the applause of jet-setting billionaires in Davos, Switzerland.

That’s why we’re out of Net Zero—we made that call as a Liberal Party room last year, and Australian energy security is now our number one priority.

That’s the battle we can and must win, as energy security supports the whole economy—as we are now rediscovering as we stare down a massive oil supply shock in the Middle East.

Thirty odd days of petrol, diesel and aviation fuel is not enough. President Trump’s war with Iran has revealed our energy frailty, we now start to hear whispers of fuel rationing.

Meanwhile, Labor plunges recklessly ahead with Net Zero, spending tens of billions of dollars to build an expensive new grid powered by 82% renewables by 2030.

This has massive consequences for our country. Families, small businesses and heavy industry are crushed by rising energy costs. What’s left of our advanced manufacturing is at risk of being lost.

Yet today our government is dishing out our taxpayer dollars to support foreign-dominated industries.

The vast fields of solar panels and wind turbines are not manufactured by us, but by our competitors.

Let’s talk about car manufacturing for a moment—a favourite subject of mine. In the current financial year, Treasury estimates that $1.35 billion dollars will be spent to subsidise the purchase of electric vehicles.

This is achieved through a Fringe Benefits Tax Exemption allowing companies to give high-earning employees electric cars, and exclude the value of the car from their assessed taxable income.^[1]

That’s $1.35 billion dollars. In a single year.

By contrast, in 2010-11 financial year, total budgetary assistance for the Australian car industry was $519 million^[2], or $770 million in today’s dollars.

Just over half as much as EV subsidies cost us today!

Even when we add the effective off-budget support from tariffs, the Productivity Commission estimates that total industry assistance to the Aussie car industry from 1997 to 2012 was $30 billion in 2011-12 dollars.

In today’s dollars, that could be $2.6 billion per year.  Under current policies, the cost of current subsidies for EVs will exceed this level in three years, hitting $2.8 billion in 2028-29, and rising nearly 30% year on year.^[3]

According to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, China accounts for 77.5% of all new Battery Electric Vehicles sales in Australia last year.^[4]

Here we can see the great irony of current Labor party policies on full display.

Rather than supporting a real ‘Future Made in Australia’, the Albanese government plans on spending even more taxpayer money than we invested in the Australian car industry, subsidising electric vehicles that are made in China instead.

So, friends, to bring this to a close.

A few final points:

We – the Liberal Party – must respond to this massive rupture we’re seeing play across Western democracies.

For much too long, we adopted the thinking of the centre-left, and the Australian people are sending us a clear signal that they’ve had enough of the uni-party.

They deserve something other than Labor.

A strong, principled centre-right movement must meet the political market with a reform agenda that puts the Australian people first.

I’m confident the Leader of the Opposition, Angus Taylor, is doing just that.

I’m confident he hears your voice.

Gus has often said to me: ‘the left has taken over most of our institutions, but there’s one they can’t control and that’s the Australian people.’

We saw that during the Voice referendum.

Your voice matters, and we are hearing it, once again.

We also need to make sure we don’t imitate the left in the way we do business as a centre-right movement.

I’ve noticed that the more we lean into the online environment, the more we mirror the left with outrage, cyber lynchings and cancel culture.

It’s ugly. It lacks virtue. And it divides us.

And a divided centre-right movement doesn’t win elections.

The Constrained political vision reminds us that people are imperfect, and that we make mistakes.

That there is no such thing as a perfect solution—only trade-offs—and that compromise is often the way to get the best outcome.

We shouldn’t hope for a political king to fix the world.

Nor should we spend all our time tearing down others. But we must throw away the vision that has prevented us from seeing the world as it is.

We are builders, and we can afford to be gracious to our opponents—and friends. Accepting your vision is wrong is hard, and painful.

It began for me in Afghanistan in 2009 and a lot of my friends in the party have been going through it this summer in Australia.

When we see the world as it is, we can then become a dynamic election winning movement that is ruthlessly mission-focussed on building a stronger and more prosperous Australia.

Thank you.

 

[ENDS]

 

[1] https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-12/p2025-721342.pdf page 155

[2] https://assets.pc.gov.au/ongoing/trade-assistance/2011-12/trade-assistance-review-2011-12.pdf page 121

[3] https://budget.gov.au/content/myefo/download/myefo-2025-26.pdf page 312

[4] https://www.fcai.com.au/new-vehicle-sales-remain-strong-in-september/