Why the Liberal Party is failing to gain ground despite One Nation’s recent slide

Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie says multiculturalism has become a “loaded political term” but warned against Pauline Hanson’s brand of monoculture, as the Liberals rebuffed another round of dismal opinion polls by pleading for more time.

The future leadership aspirant also said he was unfazed by the Coalition’s continuing decline in opinion polls, as Angus Taylor on Monday insisted repeatedly he needed more time to turn his party’s fortunes around following a series of polling backslides.

Twin polls published on Sunday showed the Coalition had failed to capitalise on backlash to Labor’s budget and a stall in One Nation’s momentum. They were taken in the week that followed Hanson’s sprawling National Press Club speech in which she demanded Australia be a monoculture, and Taylor’s struggle to articulate his own position on multiculturalism.

Hanson gave a significantly watered-down definition of the term “monoculture” late last week, insisting the Socceroos were a prime example.

Hastie leant further into the criticism of Hanson’s position on Monday. “How do you police that? Do we want government more involved in our lives, policing who fits into Pauline Hanson’s definition of Australian culture and who doesn’t?

“Are we going to watch reruns of Neighbours with Toadfish and Harold Bishop?”

However, he tiptoed around endorsing multiculturalism as a policy.

Hastie said it was “now a loaded political term”, despite many of his colleagues last week rushing to confirm that Australia had long been a successful multicultural nation and dispel any doubts created by Taylor’s response.

“Monoculture and multicultural — they’re two extremes in a sense,” Hastie said.

“Most people, when they talk about multicultural, think about different foods, different backgrounds. But in the end, we have one language, which is English. We have one set of values. We have one flag. And I think that it is fair enough that people raise questions about pockets of sharia law, for example, emerging to our country.

“We can’t Balkanise or split into tribes … But you know, nostalgia is not helpful. We’re here now. How do we come together, live peacefully with our neighbours when we disagree and build our prosperity and security into the future? That’s the question.”

He said he had “lived multiculturalism” in one sense, by growing up in Sydney in a congregation with Chinese, Korean and Samoan people of “one faith”, but emphasised the importance of shared laws and values.

Several Liberal MPs were privately concerned by Taylor’s poor communication effort last week, but they are prioritising stability over leadership speculation. Hastie on Monday afternoon said the Coalition was “still in the winter of our troubles” and needed to be patient.

“We have time and we’ve just got to not get rattled and focus on the mission, which is winning government,” he said on the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing program.

“The only way is up. Sometimes you’ve got to go through the valley to get to the peak … A lot of people are saying ‘oh, just give up, join One Nation’. No, I’m a Liberal because I hold to certain values, I hold to a vision for this country. It’s not Pauline Hanson’s monoculture.”

Hanson’s net favorability dropped 10 points in the past month, according to The Australian Financial Review’s Redbridge survey, while Labor retook the primary vote lead, gaining two points to 30 per cent. One Nation dropped two points to 29 per cent, but the Coalition did not benefit from the minor party’s slide, falling to 18 per cent. Taylor’s personal rating slid five points to minus 9.

The Australian’s Newspoll showed similar gains for Labor, from 30 to 33 per cent, while One Nation dipped from 31 to 29 per cent. Again, the Coalition failed to gain any ground, falling to 17 per cent.

On Monday morning, Taylor repeated seven times that it would take time to rebuild the public’s trust in the Coalition.

“The voting public is angry. They’re angry with everything and everyone at the moment, and understandably so,” he told radio station 2GB, after last week claiming he had stemmed the collapse in his party’s vote.

“You can breach trust in an instant, in an absolute instant, but it takes time to rebuild it. You can’t turn around the tanker in a few months. We have to just keep working and plugging away at axing Labor’s toxic taxes, at scrapping net zero, at ending mass migration, at putting Australians first.”

Coalition frontbencher Melissa McIntosh told Sky News the polls showed the Liberal Party needed to rebrand.

“It doesn’t mean that you change your foundations, but [it] certainly might be time for us to relook at how we express ourselves externally, and that takes a lot of work inside the party to go back to our roots and then to look at our messaging and our communications to the Australian public.”

McIntosh said the blame should not be put on the opposition leader.

“We’ve got some decent policies coming out. Angus is working super-hard to get the party on track to be releasing our policies,” she said. “We’ve got to look at what else is going on.”

Environment Minister Murray Watt said on Monday Australians got a “bit of a reality check” after Hanson’s speech, in which she also attacked workers as lazy.