Please note that I’m travelling over the long weekend and won’t have access to a computer, so this will likely be the last post until the middle of next week.
Plastered prominently at the top of the “Our Beliefs” section on the Liberal Party of Australia’s website is the following sentence:
“We Believe… In the inalienable rights and freedoms of all peoples; and we work towards a lean government that minimises interference in our daily lives; and maximises individual and private sector initiative.”
Certainly nothing there about loving central planning and socialism. Yet here was Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie on social media earlier this week:
“I don’t know about you but I have to remind myself that we used to make cars in this country. Check this car out. It’s a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Its horsepower, its heritage, its grit. And it’s an Aussie car made by Aussie workers, for the Australian people. We used to make complex things in this country. In fact, with cars, we used to say race them on a Sunday, sell them on a Monday. And it wasn’t just a slogan; it was a way of life.
Cool story. We also used to have a large textile industry employing more than 120,000 people. Agriculture once employed close to half a million people. Both have declined significantly ever since, not because of a lack of ‘grit’, but due to the same global economic shifts and changes in comparative advantage that affected the car industry.
Will Hastie make a video longing for those sectors next, perhaps featuring him knitting a nice wool jacket after sheering a sheep? Somehow I doubt it. Anyway, Hastie continues:
“Competition drove innovation in our car industry. But that’s all gone.”
That’s simply not true; Australia’s car industry was protected from foreign competition for most of its existence, and eventually died off despite tens of billions of dollars worth of direct budgetary support and layers of protection.
But back to Hastie, who waffles on a while longer about the lost past, “that we’re now just helpless consumers”, and the “silent soulless” Chinese cars that Australians enjoy (because they’re actually really good), before getting stuck into his policy agenda:
“We’re a nation of flat white makers, when we could be making beautiful cars like this again. And in order to do that, we need cheap energy. We have this abundance of coal and gas, which Anthony Albanese and Labor are willing to sell to countries like Japan, China, and India. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. They’ll sell that stuff to countries that burn it and they’ll deny it to the Australian people. They’ll deny us an industrial base like this.
So yeah, I’m for Australians, I’m for putting Australians first. I wanna see us making complex things because I’m ambitious for my country. And I know many of you are ambitious for your country, too. It’s time that we made a decision. What sort of country do we want to be? Do we want to be a country that is deindustrialised and is just effectively a nation of helpless consumers? Or do we want to unlock our energy potential? Make the most of our coal. Make the most of our gas. And produce things again. Build stuff with our hands. If you want that, let’s go.”
I don’t know about you, but connect the dots and it sure sounds a lot like Hastie wants the government to override consumer preferences and market forces, seize control over the means of production, and… you know, dabble in socialism.
Look, you can make anything in Australia if you’re willing, like some kind of vampire squid, to suck the productive resources out of the rest of the economy to get it done. But that doesn’t mean you should. The principle of comparative advantage is real; you can’t wish away the fact that Australia’s small, isolated, high-cost domestic market makes large-scale, globally competitive car manufacturing uneconomic.
A senior member of the Liberal Party should understand that.
Yes, Hastie is right that cheaper energy would help manufacturing at the margin. But he is overstating his case; other inputs matter a lot more than energy (e.g. scale, labour, and supply chains) and the sector was in decline as a share of the economy well before energy prices started to meaningfully rise in the 2000s:
I’m also not sure if Hastie has ever seen a modern car factory. Let me tell you, it doesn’t involve building much “with our hands” anymore. It’s all robotic arms and automated assembly lines, with very few human hands directly involved. In fact, the barista he so derides probably gets their hands dirtier than a worker at a BYD factory:
Hastie’s nostalgia is a recipe for bad policy. If he’s truly someone who believes in “a lean government that minimises interference in our daily lives [and] maximises individual and private sector initiative”, then he should understand the futility of trying to bring back car manufacturing to Australia.
On a deeper level, Hastie’s comments are a sign that the Liberal Party may have been captured by something resembling the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, faction of the US Republican Party. First it was Jacinta Price—who defended Hastie’s nonsense, adding that “he’d make a remarkable leader one day”—and now Andrew Hastie. These are relatively young, senior members of the Liberal Party, so their embrace of an Australian MAGA-style agenda does not bode well for the future of the party.
I know it might be too late—the rot certainly appears to cut deep—but what I would like to see is a Liberal Party that doesn’t try to out-do Labor in its fetishisation of manufacturing, but that pushes back against it!
I would like to see the Liberal Party of Australia rediscover its core values and critique Labor’s attempts to centrally plan everything from its energy transition and healthcare to social media. To harpoon Labor’s pots of gold, such as the National Reconstruction Fund, that incentivise rent seeking over productivity. To come up with a credible plan to reverse the structural fiscal deficits that Labor intends to roll forward indefinitely. To put an end to the bailout economy. To build more housing and infrastructure by defending property rights over land-use zoning. To do an actual cost benefit analysis, rather than spout xenophobic rhetoric, to try and determine what’s the right amount of migration for Australia.
If the Liberal Party doesn’t fill that void, my concern is disillusioned voters will increasingly shift towards fringe parties such as One Nation and the Greens, gifting them the political leverage to create a much worse future for Australia.