Taylor backs reform path to prosperity

Before Christmas, we secured Opposition shadow defence minister Angus Taylor to help kick off the Centre for Independent Studies’ 50th year on Monday of this week. We made it the first of our Next50 series to focus on policy options for the next 50 years of CIS.

As we all know now, just one business day before Taylor’s scheduled appearance, he emerged from the Liberal leadership spill as the new leader of the Opposition. The CIS team quickly pivoted to an event that attracted a flood of late interest. It became Taylor’s first speech as Liberal leader outside the Canberra political bubble.

Taylor brought along new Liberal deputy Jane Hume and fellow senator James Paterson, who the next day was given the new leader’s former job of Opposition shadow defence minister. Taylor opened by expressing gratitude for the work of CIS over the past half century, recalling that he started following our research in his days studying economics at Sydney University in the 1980s.

And he praised former prime minister John Howard, sitting in the front row, as an extraordinary role model. His speech positioned the Taylor Liberals as taking up the inheritance of the Howard-Costello government, which in turn represented a continuum from the preceding Hawke-Keating government.

Amid the disruption on the political right, Taylor laid out the sort of orthodox economic reform agenda required to shore up Australia’s modern prosperity, as championed by CIS. Living standards were now going backwards, he said, because government had become too big, taxes too high and regulation too intrusive.

Taylor backed the CIS focus on opening up housing supply to restore the Australian home ownership dream. He reiterated that school education needs to focus more on core knowledge. And he flagged a key political battle over Anthony Albanese’s promise of universal childcare by pledging the Liberals to offer more parental choice and flexibility over Labor’s ‘standardised childcare model’.

I pressed Taylor on Liberal leadership aspirant Andrew Hastie’s romanticised lament over the loss of Australia’s sub-scale and high-cost car manufacturing industry following the removal of import protection. He backed Hastie as a member of his team, quickly adding that “I intensely dislike impeding trade because it is good for us”.

Amid talk of economic ‘sovereignty’, he insisted Australia needed to “maintain a very strong predisposition to open markets”. But he backed keeping more manufacturing onshore by reducing the tax, regulatory and energy cost burden on secondary industry.

With the Libs and Nats being outpolled by One Nation on their right flank, Taylor committed to reducing immigration from the post-pandemic catch-up levels. In the wake of the fatal Bondi terror attack on a Jewish celebration, he said a Liberal-led government would “shut the door” on immigrants who “do not believe in our basic freedoms”. While nominating “Islamist extremists” in this category, his “values-based” policy ruled out discriminating on the basis of race or religion.

With the Coalition becoming such a rabble, Taylor faces a daunting challenge. While highly capable, he has previously lacked political cut-though. But, at the CIS on Monday, Taylor was sharper and more consistently on message. It helps that his policy prescription is mostly what’s needed to relieve the ongoing cost-of-living squeeze and secure Australian prosperity. And, if the Coalition follows through on actual policy, it would provide a sharp contrast with Labor in the contest of ideas.