Liberal leadership : The rise of Taylor and Hume is improbable . It also farcical

watoday.com.au · Feb 18, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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OpinionFebruary 19, 2026 — 2:00amNow that Angus Taylor and Jane Hume hold the Liberal Party’s top two positions, how are we to assess their elevation? Is it a tale of redemption and forgiveness? Sure, as the opposition’s chief economic policymakers and advocates in the lead-up to the election just nine months ago, they contributed mightily to the Coalition’s landslide defeat. But let’s face it: who hasn’t made a mistake or two at work?The process of life is learning from one’s mistakes, surely. Or is the placement of the duo at the top of the Liberal tree a sign of the depths of a talent and policy deficit within the Liberal party room and potentially the wider organisation? Photo: Illustration: Joe BenkeIt is definitely a reminder of how much the world of politics is an irony-free zone. This came home strongly when Taylor and Hume held their first joint media conference in their new roles last Friday. Here was a first. They had both won their ballots by resounding margins. But out of the gate, they both had to begin by admitting they had screwed up separately when they last worked together, entrusted as they were with the task of maintaining the most important and enduring element of the Coalition’s “brand”: its primacy on economic management.The Australian Election Study, which has been surveying voter attitudes for 14 elections going back to 1987, found that at last year’s election, for the first time, Labor came out ahead as the party most trusted to manage the economy and taxation. It’s not fair to sheet all the blame for this on Taylor and Hume. They were assisted by Peter Dutton, who the Election Study found was the least popular leader in its history. Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, in her role as shadow minister for government efficiency, a portfolio designed to ape Elon Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration, also did her bit, blurting out “Let’s make Australia great again” during a campaign appearance with a grinning Dutton.Compared with Hume, Taylor was able to get through his admission of error more speedily. As shadow treasurer, he had advocated repudiating and reversing Labor’s revised stage 3 tax cuts. He’s relying on confusion about how much Dutton used his authority to influence the tax policy to avoid carrying the can. Maybe there’s something to that, but the degree of confusion about who was ultimately accountable tells us a lot about the poor order in which the Liberals have placed themselves.Hume had the more complicated job as she had multiple mea culpas to deliver. She has a loquacious public style that is disarming when it works and catastrophic when it doesn’t. In the weeks before the election, Hume offended people who work from home, especially women, and federal public servants, implying they were loafers. The policy to get people back into their offices and away from the laptop at home got so bad, the policy had to be junked during the campaign – a genuine calamity. Then she backed up with an unintended swipe at Chinese Australians with a loose reference to “Chinese spies” assisting Labor’s campaign.It’s not unreasonable to canvass these matters and how they’ve affected the new leadership team’s earliest moments. They’re not from the dim recesses of history: they’re recent and are material to the Liberals’ current, dire plight. Essentially, Taylor and Hume have started off with an apology tour, playing tunes made famous by One Nation and the Howard government. Their performance as a One Nation tribute band has meant a heavy emphasis on cutting immigration and restoring “Australian values”. It makes some sense to lean in on national security, the Liberals’ last remaining strength with voters.But will trying to steal Pauline Hanson’s lunch be a path to restoration? Taylor will need to be a communications maestro to carry that off. Once you start going on about having too many of the wrong sort of migrants – “the numbers are too high and the standards are too low” in Taylor’s words – moving among us, it can easily get out of control.There are almost 1 million Indian-born residents in Australia and about 700,000 residents born in China. The 2021 census recorded that 51.5 per cent of Australian residents were either born overseas or had at least one parent born overseas. A few months ago, Nampijinpa Price asserted that Indians are allowed here in large numbers because they vote Labor. Taylor has restored her to the frontbench, offering that “Jacinta has made her comments, and I think it’s time to move on ...” Indian Australians, already under threat from the March for Australia crowd, might find it hard to do that.The other plank of Taylor’s plan is to restart an economic approach that harks back to the glory days of the Howard government, with ever-lower low taxes and liberal deregulation at its core. That would inevitably mean stripping out supports for different cohorts of society, which won’t be easy to sell. Coming up with those policies will take a good deal of time, so judgment in this space needs to be reserved.The big challenge remains. Can the Liberals under their new leadership drop the reflexive habit of looking for old solutions to new problems? History can be a dead weight. Paradoxically, the party’s past, sustained electoral success means that it has more than a few prime ministerial ghosts inhabiting the walls. John Howard is a regular contributor, as is Tony Abbott, who is a big promoter of Taylor and is highly nostalgic for an Australia of decades ago. Malcolm Turnbull is a one-man Greek chorus. Scott Morrison is characteristically strange but still likes to be heard.The future contains substantial risks for the new leadership team. To the extent that voters are unhappy with the status quo, we’ve never before seen an opposition rather than a government appearing to lose support in existentially large numbers. Have Taylor and Hume been rewarded or punished? If the change doesn’t work, history is likely to ask “what were they thinking?”Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.From our partners