On Thursday night, at the Sydney Institute, Angus Taylor gave a good speech about economics. It was a clear account of a coherent view: that government has grown too large, that this growth has lowered living standards, that the cure is lower taxes, lower migration, lower regulation and lower energy costs. The argument was competent, the diagnosis mostly correct, and the delivery unembarrassing. A person who had never heard of the Liberal Party would have come away thinking it stood for something worth voting for.
That is the problem.
The trouble with the speech is not the argument. It is the record behind it. In October 2021, Angus Taylor stood next to Scott Morrison and released Australia’s plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050. He was the Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction. He did not inherit the target or vote for it under duress; he was one of the people who built it, sold it, and published the modelling. Four years later he leads a party that spent November of last year formally abandoning the same target, and he told the Sydney Institute on Thursday that the Coalition, unlike everyone else, means what it says.
Since when?
Taylor has framed the coming contest as a choice between three economic programs: Labor’s, the Coalition’s, and One Nation’s. But voters are not assessing public finance theory. They have left the Liberal Party, and they are not coming back because a former energy minister has rediscovered Hayek. The contest is not Liberal economics versus One Nation economics. It is a much simpler test: who will actually do what they say. Taylor sets the test himself, and his party fails it.
Consider the record the speech leaves out. The Coalition was in office from 2013 to 2022. In that time it accepted net zero. It never fundamentally broke with Australia’s high-migration model, except when a pandemic closed the border for it. It never returned the Commonwealth to Howard-era budget dimensions. It accepted the NDIS as a bipartisan entitlement and never brought its trajectory under durable control. In 2019 it branded a budget “Back in Black” and sold $35 mugs announcing “the first surplus in more than a decade”; the surplus that budget forecast never arrived. It repealed the carbon price, then spent years finding remarkably little else in the modern administrative state it was prepared to abolish. This is not the record of a party held hostage to circumstance. It is the record of a party that believed in limited government in opposition and forgot the belief in office, repeatedly.
Taylor quoted Reagan on Thursday. He skipped the more useful line: trust, but verify. So when he says “trust us,” the honest reply is a date. In which year, exactly, did a Liberal government govern the way he now promises the next one will?
The most remarkable feature of the speech is that Taylor has, without apparent awareness, written the most precise available account of his own party’s collapse. The sharpest charges he lays against One Nation describe the Liberal Party at least as well.
He called One Nation “a column of smoke,” “long on rhetoric but short on substance,” offering “a random grab bag of poorly defined, contradictory and constantly changing positions that leave no clear sense of who they are or what they stand for.” Read that sentence again with the Coalition’s climate position in mind: adopted under Turnbull, held under Morrison, taken to an election, abandoned under Ley in November, with Taylor himself moving from co-author to opponent inside four years. If consistency of position is the test, One Nation is not the party failing it.
He said One Nation’s “true instincts are toward big government interventionism,” with “even less of a concern than Labor about how to make the numbers add up,” and “no clear or credible plan for how they’d pay” for their commitments. It is a fair description of the platform the Coalition took to the 2025 election, when the party of lower taxes went to the country promising to repeal Labor’s income tax cuts. Taylor’s warning that One Nation would break the Budget is not a contrast with the Liberal record. It is a summary of it, delivered by the man who was shadow treasurer at the time.
He said, of One Nation, that “it’s easy to make promises when you aren’t a party of government.” This is true. The difficulty is that the Liberal Party has been a party of government for most of the last three decades, and the promises it made from that position have not worn well. John Howard, in 1996, divided his commitments into core and non-core to explain why the spending he had pledged to protect was being cut anyway; “non-core promise” has meant a broken election promise ever since. Tony Abbott went to the 2013 election promising to repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which his attorney-general billed as part of a “freedom agenda.” The draft bill appeared in March 2014 and was abandoned that August, a decision Abbott called a “leadership call.” Scott Morrison promised a Religious Discrimination Act in 2018, spent more than three years failing to pass it, shelved it on the eve of the 2022 election, and re-promised it on his way out of office. None of these promises was made to the teals or the inner city. Each was made to the kind of voter the Liberal Party is now losing to One Nation.
Taylor may be entirely right that One Nation’s top four financial commitments would cost the budget a trillion dollars over a decade, and that its costings do not survive contact with a calculator. But being right about One Nation’s arithmetic does not answer the question the speech exists to answer. Voters are not leaving the Liberal Party because they have run the numbers on One Nation and decided they prefer the deficits. They are leaving because they have run the numbers on the Liberal Party — on net zero, on migration, on spending, on the surplus that never came — and concluded that the philosophy Taylor described so well on Thursday is not one his party can be trusted to enact. The problem was never that the voters cannot count. The problem is that they can.
The speech was, on its own terms, a success. It was clear, it was serious, and it made the case for a smaller, freer, more prosperous Australia about as well as the case can be made. What it did not do was give anyone a reason to believe the Liberal Party would deliver it. Angus Taylor has not explained why conservatives should reject One Nation. He has explained why so many of them stopped waiting for the Liberal Party.