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The best guide to what Anthony Albanese’s budget has done for a Liberal Party that was floundering and increasingly irrelevant can be found in the changing mood of one of conservatism’s most influential voices.
Within four days, News Corp commentator Andrew Bolt went from declaring Angus Taylor “a dead man walking” after the Liberals’ humiliation in the Farrer byelection to celebrating his “brave” budget reply as the emergence of a serious political alternative.
That reversal says less about Bolt than it does about the volatile and uncertain first 100 days of Taylor’s leadership.
When Taylor toppled Sussan Ley in February, his argument was that the Liberal Party was headed off a cliff amid a surging One Nation. His line – “change or die” – was not only a diagnosis but a rallying cry.
But for much of his first three months, critics argued that Taylor’s problem was an overreliance on naff slogans. No critic was more brutal than Bolt.
“Is Taylor listening to himself?” he wrote in Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids, including Melbourne’s Herald Sun and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, in response to Taylor’s Farrer concession speech, which included a warning to voters that “if the vote sprays, Labor stays”.
“Political slogans so contrived just make Taylor sound scripted, without the heartfelt convictions he claims to have.”
The criticism echoed lingering anxieties inside sections of the Liberal Party itself. In Canberra, questions were raised as to why Taylor – cynically labelled “The Special One” by some of his doubters – wasn’t cutting through.
The loss to One Nation in Farrer on May 9 was damaging because of what the seat represented. Ley had held the electorate since 2001. The primary vote of just 12.4 per cent – a swing of more than 31 percentage points – was interpreted in some Liberal circles as a referendum not only on the party but Taylor’s lack of progress in wooing back Pauline Hanson’s supporters.
And if the Coalition couldn’t hold Farrer, how many other seats were now at risk?
Ley, travelling overseas and unsighted during the campaign, ensured nobody dismissed the result.
“On the day the leadership spilled in February, the new leader said the Liberal Party needed to ‘change or die’,” she said in a statement. “Three months later, the result in Farrer demonstrates that statement to be far truer today than it ever was then.”
Taylor’s strategy in the immediate aftermath of the leadership change has been not revolution but stabilisation. The patient was on life-support, the bleeding needed to be stemmed, as one MP close to Taylor puts it. And recovery, he stressed, would be slow.
The wounds triggered from February’s spill and various Coalition splits still fester but are slowly healing. Such is the existential crisis facing the Liberals, they now take comfort that things have at least not worsened.
Back then, some within the party had wanted Taylor to use his ascendancy as leader to purge so-called “moderates” aligned with Ley. Instead, he largely resisted. Several MPs who backed Ley survived untouched; some were elevated.
Privately, even his early critics acknowledge that Taylor has surprised colleagues one-on-one. Previously sceptical MPs describe him as consultative, prepared to listen and more open to disagreement than first thought.
Criticism has been organisational rather than personal. Even allies have complained that Taylor took too long to establish his office and decision-making structures. Several MPs, speaking anonymously to detail internal matters, argued that too much authority remained concentrated among a small and ideologically narrow inner circle.
The budget reply itself was also tightly controlled. Some senior figures were not fully aware of proposals until the night of the speech.
But the speech marked Taylor’s first serious attempt to convert slogans into substance.
Its centrepiece – attacking bracket creep through indexed tax thresholds – has handed the Coalition the type of political fight it has lacked for years. Combined with sharper language on spending restraint, migration and energy, it represented the clearest indication yet of where Taylor intends to take his party.
Among the most enthusiastic voices was former prime minister Tony Abbott, one of Taylor’s strongest backers and an influential voice among the Liberal right. Abbott is Taylor’s choice to become the next federal president later this month and will also oversee a planned overhaul of the party’s campaigning wing.
“I think that the budget reply has well and truly established Angus Taylor as an extremely credible alternative prime minister … I think it’s going to change the political dynamic very considerably,” Abbott said on his podcast, Australia’s Future.
He argued that the contrast with Labor had finally become visible.
“What we saw last week in the budget was a government more interested in wealth redistribution and what we saw with the budget reply was an alternative government more interested in wealth creation.”
That observation may explain why Albanese’s budget suddenly changed the mood.
This masthead’s Resolve Political Monitor last week found Taylor moving ahead as preferred prime minister, leading Albanese 33-30, even while the Coalition’s primary support remained historically weak at 23 per cent.
The focus groups underneath the numbers were more revealing than the headline.
Taylor’s supporters described him as someone who “knows what he’s doing”, praised his focus on cost-of-living pressures, and viewed him as willing to stand by unpopular positions. But his critics said they barely knew who he was and argued that he still had not explained what he would actually do differently.
A detailed new poll published by The Australian Financial Review on Saturday highlights how precarious it still all is for Taylor and the Liberals.
The large-scale analysis of voter intentions conducted by RedBridge Group and Accent Research forecasts the Coalition, if a federal election had been held this weekend, would have won between seven and 21 seats, with a median prediction of just 12 seats. It handed a median prediction of 53 seats to One Nation (a low of 43 and a high of 59) and 76 seats – just enough for a majority – to Labor (low of 70, high of 82).
Insiders are quick to caution against reading too much into seat modelling that cannot fully account for incumbency, local campaigns and regional factors. But few dispute that there is a broader message.
Both the Liberal and Nationals parties remain in survive-or-die territory, but a fierce divide remains between those who believe the fight is fundamentally with Albanese and those who think the more urgent threat is Hanson.
Taylor’s inner circle sided with the second view. Their diagnosis was that migration levels, tied to housing pressure and climate policy, sit underneath much of the voter frustration driving support to One Nation.
But fighting Hanson head-on has proved more difficult than many expected. Coalition strategists learnt from Farrer that direct attacks on Hanson backfire because she retains unusually durable loyalty among parts of the electorate. It’s described by some as a “St Pauline factor”, where she can weaponise attacks on her as victimhood.
Internally, there is an increasing belief that the better strategy is to prosecute credibility questions around One Nation policies, candidates, MPs and controversies.
Taylor himself is expected to remain above that fight, with other senior figures on the right – including James Paterson, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Andrew Hastie – increasingly carrying those arguments. The promotion of Queensland senator Matt Canavan, another attack dog, as Nationals leader is widely viewed as a major boost to their hopes.
But efforts to ape One Nation on the policy front has unsettled many urban Liberals, many of whom would rather be fighting Labor on economic reform.
The tensions surfaced publicly when Liberal senator Andrew McLachlan criticised the Coalition’s proposal to restrict welfare access for permanent residents and raised concerns with Taylor’s use of the phrase “mass immigration”. Others, such as shadow treasurer Tim Wilson, have also refused to use the term.
McLachlan, a South Australian senator aligned with the party’s moderate faction, warned that the proposal risked creating “two types of community members”.
Taylor’s supporters insist this discomfort is unavoidable. A senior figure close to Taylor puts it bluntly.
“The fight with One Nation isn’t going to be overnight. But clearly we need to win back trust and credibility on other issues first,” they said, speaking anonymously to detail internal matters.
“It’s not a job for them [moderates] to sell. We know we have different people to talk to different audiences.”
Figures such as deputy leader Jane Hume, Wilson and housing spokesman Andrew Bragg are focused on the economic side of the debate, which has been energised in the past week by Labor’s budget plan to overhaul capital gains tax and trusts.
“If the One Nation term the uni-party is true, it’s been between us and Labor on the economy for too long,” another MP says, adding that they should take the fight to Labor on tax, industrial relations and superannuation.
Labor strategists are betting the panicked Liberals eventually move on from Taylor if the polls don’t improve and are researching lines of attack for various potential opponents come the next election, due by May 2028.
But one Liberal insists there’s no appetite for another change, and puts the task asked rather more simply: “Get better or die. It’s the only option.”
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