TRANSCRIPT:
(This transcript is derived from an automated process. The video recording is authoritative.)
Dan Ryan:
It's my second time here I think, isn't it Jewel? Yeah. The first time, I'm not sure I was defending the liberal party on that occasion. I think I was just, in fact, I'm not probably under a text. Yeah, I attack in a different way. So look, I'm delighted to be here. It's always a great crowd. No sugar coating it. The last federal election was a disaster for the centre right in Australia. I was saying to a friend that it's almost sorry. It's almost as though the liberal party, well the political map in Australia almost looks like the National Party of Queensland still exists and it has some seats in regional and rural parts of the rest of Australia. But the liberal party, which used to dominate Metropolitan Australia and used to be represent middle class Australia, no longer does many of the seats that it held in the inner city since the beginning of the second World War.
It no longer holds and many people hate it, but it can't be avoided. There needs to be a large centre right party in Australia if the centre right are going to win government here again. So it matters what it looks like, how it operates, and what its future should be. So what are the answers to these questions? One possible alternative, which has been muted by many people is to say, we need to turn the liberal party into a new progressive tealish type of party. We need to not become the nasty party, which famously was a line that Theresa May used back in 2002 at a conservative party conference speech. And that may seem an obscure reference, but it's amazing how many people, senior people in the party still refer to that speech of Theresa Mays and point to it as the turning point for how the conservative party over there reformed and supposedly rejuvenated itself.
Not to name names, and I'm not criticising them personally, but it is amazing how much this comes up. George Grandis, Simon Birmingham, James McGraw, Latika Burke, who's a columnist, Dave Sharma, the former head of the Young Libs, all point to this speech and they say, we need to become more diverse and all the rest of it and modernise precisely what those terms mean when put into practise. It is always a bit vague. They want to avoid any culture wars. I guess they want to. Well, if you look at what David Cameron did to the UK conservative Party, he got across the line in coalition with the liberal Democrats beating the Labour Party of Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown. And then he ramped up carbon neutral stuff, ramped up renewables spare, no expense, avoided the plague, any cultural war issues, appointed an A-list through an A-list sort of selection committee, a whole diverse bunch of people.
And I had an article in the Australian last Monday where I said, this guys who are promoting this line, have they picked up a British newspaper lately? Because quite clearly no one in Westminster thinks that is the future at the moment for British conservatism. So why on earth would we in Australia be wanting to go back 25 years to something which I didn't even think was appropriate at that time? I mean, they only just got across the line David Cameron coalition and why wouldn't we look to other examples that are out there which approved actually much more successful. I mean it wasn't avoiding being a controversial figure and avoiding cultural war issues, which saw the conservatives in the UK ultimately win deep wall red seats in industrial heartland of the uk. It wasn't being Notting Hill Torries or getting involved in sort of being a tealish type of party that ultimately won them government.
And also these guys that point to Theresa May who was actually not a bad premier despite the troublesome Brexit stuff, her key advisors, they realised that whole David Cameron project was completely out of date as well. Nick Timothy was her key advisor and he is very much a kind of red Tory or a national conservative or a Trumpian conservative in the US and those guys going forward after their decimation at the recent UK election where basically the conservative party was wiped out because they completely lost control of immigration. They've had to reassess, they've had to adjust because they've got a new competitor on the block in reform and other parties. And they also experienced the same type of devastation in their election that we had here. Now all countries are different. We have to mirror the palms, but there are sort of lessons and trends amongst the Anglos sphere that we need to be aware of because some of the lessons can be translated here.
But the bottom line is the idea that the liberal party in Australia, the future for them is to David Cameron. I honestly think it's like it's idea from Deep Space nine. I mean these guys just need to pick up a UK paper look around the world as what's successful. The only people that are talking about doing that to the centre right party are some provincial libs here in Australia. They may think they're kind of like Ford seeing an orchestra, but they are out of touch and out of date. So that's option one where I stand on that, but I'll tell you that is being promoted heavily within certain circles in the liberal party. So it's not an idea that is been dismissed by people who matter within the party, even though I am violently opposed to it. The other option though is that some people promote is to, I call it the bring back tones party, bring back Tony Abbott.
What we need to do is just rehash the John Howard formula, but we need to be more courageous and more articulate and good old tones. He's the man to do it. And I just think that is also a recipe for failure because the policy framework that has been successful in the United States and elsewhere on what I call the new right, is different to what was existing during John Howard's time and different in three main ways. I mean, there's a lot of commonality, but the reason why Donald Trump beat Jeb Mark Bush was because they differed on policy and they differed in three key areas. The first one is foreign policy. Donald Trump was not looked back over the last 30 years and thought all these interventions that we've had in Iraq, in Libya and Afghanistan and the rest of it had been a disaster. And that's a 70% pop opinion.
I mean, he went down famously in a primary to South Carolina, the most sort of military loving state, and he said the Iraq war was a complete and utter disaster. And all the Fox new commentators were like, oh, he's going to just crash out here. They realise this is the Citadel in South Carolina and they love their military and he smashed it. He got 70% of the vote because the military guys were sick of all these utopian interventions around the world. They loved the military, but they did not like the United States foreign policy that had been occurring over the last 70 years. I don't think the liberal party in Australia have recognised that they still want to get involved in every last poses. Winston Churchill, I like to say. So that's the first thing I think needs to readjust. The second one. And the second reason why Donald Trump be exclamation Mark book Bush is because they focused on a reassessment of trade policy.
Supposedly free trade has always been a, it was promoted. John Howard said he disagreed with Donald Trump because Donald Trump's not a real conservative, he doesn't believe in free trade. Free trade if you go back to the time of Israeli. And Menzies was never a conservative value. We need to be realistic about trade at the moment. We have a trade agreement with China where a hundred percent of manufactured goods come to Australia duty free. That is lunacy in due course corporate Australia and the political establishment will be embarrassed that they ever signed that thing. That's what's happening in the States, despite all the hoo-ha and despite all the theatrics of Trump, there are some very serious people, Robert Leis Hauser, who used to be the United States trade representative, his successor Robert Knick, and the rest of them, they are very serious about renegotiating the terms of America's commercial engagement with the world. And we need to think about that as well. I mean, we have completely de-industrialized over the last 30 years. We can't produce a coat hanger.
We can't produce glass for our thing, and we have enormous amount of debt. Kids can't afford houses. There are no manufacturing jobs in Australia, and it does actually matter whether you produce things or not. You lose your sovereign capacity for doing things. So foreign policy trade needs a reassessment. And obviously the last one, the massive one is immigration. I mean, America had a completely out of control southern border. And Jeb exclamation Mark Bush said, oh, illegal immigration is an act of love. We didn't have the same level of illegal immigration, at least in people crossing up crossing to try and get into Australia by boat. Although illegal immigration happens in different ways, but we have a massive mass immigration problem. And John Howard after tamper and the rest of it said, well, because we cracked down on illegal immigration, therefore the Australian community has accepted large numbers.
Well, if that was indeed true then, and I've seen very little sketchy polling to actually confirm that it is not true now. I mean, cracking down a mass immigration, reducing it dramatically, that's a 70% issue. In Australia, you had 70% labourer liberal across the board. Marco Rubio, the Foreign United States Secretary of State, in his confirmation hearings, he famously said, the age of mass immigration is over, not illegal immigration, not people crossing boats on the southern borders, mass immigration, because it's destroying our country's social cohesion, it's destroying the ability of our young people to buy houses, own start families, and the rest of it all. And it's not politically successful either for the liberal party because it takes a long time for someone, even though they might have some conservative ish values, it takes a generation or two like my Irish forebears before they start voting for the conservative, the Senate right party in Australia.
So you sometimes hear these liberal party guys talk and say, oh, we just to reach out to different communities. Well, look, it's like saying you'll lose 70% of that vote and you might gain 30. It's like saying you're losing money on every product, but you make it up on volume. Obviously don't. It's a suicidal political strategy, which is why places like Victoria and parts of Sydney have changed so dramatically. So we need to stop that, bring it back, reform our nation, focusing on binding us together as a people in the kind of Israeli nationalist tradition in the mens tradition. And that in my view is where the future of the liberal party lies that's I'm going to be arguing for internally. And if people want the outside want to join or throw stones or push in that direction, they're more than welcome to as well.
It's not going to be an easy task. The only options on the table are to either start a new party that's really hard. It's hard to jumpstart from scratch or to try and rebuild an existing one. That's also quite hard to, so neither are, we're not in a great sort of situation as the old Irish Pro said, if you want to get to a particular destination, it wouldn't be starting from here. But here is where we are. So thanks very much everyone. That's a quick little sort of taster. Welcome. Happy to answer any questions and take any criticism you might have. Thanks.
