The question hanging over Andrew Hastie this week isn't about policy. It's whether he's thinking about walking out on the Liberal Party.
Nine columnist Niki Savva wrote that Hastie's recent stances had:
"undoubtedly cost him support internally, to the point where if he feels abandoned by the Liberal Party in this fight to the death, he will abandon the Liberal Party"
The Daily Mail's Peter van Onselen read it the other way, calling his recent Tom Hughes Oration "his first public pitch to replace Angus Taylor as Liberal leader." Nobody who's watched Hastie will fall off their chair. It fits the only narrative he ever seems to serve: the one about Andrew Hastie.
Out the door, or up the ladder out of the giant hole he keeps digging. The ladder is the part his colleagues have clocked. This is a man who resigned and walked out on his own leader, Sussan Ley, when he didnt get what he wanted and then collected a promotion the moment she fell. Now, on the Daily Mail's reading, his recent moves look like a pitch to take the job of the next man above him, Angus Taylor. The knock on Hastie, and it isn't said kindly, is that he'll climb over whoever stands in his way. He's dismissed the speculation. It hasn't gone anywhere.
And it lands at an awkward moment. The party he wants to lead is stuck at 17%, and One Nation is coming for his own seat of Canning. Whatever Hastie is climbing toward, the voters are walking away from underneath him and him trying to challenge for leadership will only make it worse.
The fight that started it
Hastie has told supporters "One Nation has declared war on me, so they shall have war," warned they'll have to "blast me out of Canning," and reached for Sun Tzu to see it through. One Nation says it isn't running any campaign against him at all. When colleagues floated a preference deal with the surging minor party, he called it "weakness," so clearly not a team player and certainly not aligned with conservatives for what's best for Australians. Andrew Hastie is on the side he's always been on. Andrew Hastie. All of it while the Coalition's primary vote sits at 17% in this week's Newspoll and One Nation runs neck and neck with Labor.
Give it up for Toadfish
On the ABC, Pauline Hanson made a point about culture. Hastie heard the wrong one.
Her nods to Norman Gunston and the larrikin characters of The Paul Hogan Show weren't a plea to live in the past. They pointed to a kind of Australia that could still have a laugh, at itself and at everyone else, in good fun. Call it the ''Hey Hey It's Saturday'' era, before every gag was run past a committee for offence, before gender and ethnicity had to be checked at the door of a punchline. Whatever you make of it, it was a point about a culture, not a calendar.
Hastie missed it completely. Hearing only old names, he tried to paint Hanson as a relic stuck in the 80s and asked whether Australians would soon be "watching reruns of Neighbours with Toadfish and Harold Bishop." Sit with that. To mock her as dated, he reached for Toadfish, a soap character so faded most of the country needs him explained, from a show cancelled twice over, killed off in 2022, dragged back by Amazon, and quietly axed again last December. He answered two genuine icons of Australian comedy with a nobody, and when your joke about someone being out of touch needs a Google search, you're the one who's out of touch.
It fits a pattern, because comprehension has never been Hastie's strong suit. It's the same reflex that had him brand Hanson "MAGA first", certain he'd caught her putting America first.
So allow us to explain it to Andrew, slowly. MAGA cuts both ways. It began as Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again." Swap a single word and it's "Make Australia Great Again," the Australia first nationalism Hanson has traded in for decades, which is exactly why she'll happily wear those four letters. Hastie heard only the American ones and swung at a slogan pointed at his own country all along.
Then, in The Guardian, he did it again.
"Our first loyalty must be to the Australian people," he said. "Not to international institutions, not to ideology like MAGA, but to the Australian people, first and foremost."
Read it twice. He rejects MAGA, then demands the one thing MAGA has always meant: your own people, first. The ideology he's swinging at is, almost word for word, the argument he's making. Country first is not complicated. The rest of the world manages it. Hastie still can't see that his enemy and his own position are the same thing.
For decades the left ran it the other way, newcomers ahead of the people already here. Hanson's pitch, and now much of the Coalition's own base, is simply that the people who live here come first. That Hastie can demand exactly that and sneer at the label for it in the same breath is the tell. On this form, you'd forgive anyone for wondering whether Andrew Hastie can tell his left from his right.
The record he carries into it
None of this sits in isolation. Hastie is the man who featured in the documentary against Ben Roberts-Smith and then gave evidence against Ben Roberts-Smith, the Victoria Cross recipient One Nation backs, who denies the war crime charges he faces and is yet to stand trial.
He's the man who was thrown out of Question Time under 94A, who waved a Treasury paper marked TOXIC at a Sky News camera without any context or substance, and who now quotes the Art of War like a fool on the hill in a party polling 17%. For a man whose colleagues are already whispering about the exits, it's a lot of noise to be making.
Whether he jumps or gets pushed, the whispers around Andrew Hastie's future aren't going anywhere. For a party stuck on 17%, what he does next is one more thing it can't seem to control.
There's a kinder way to read Andrew Hastie's week. The whispers that he might walk from the Liberals could be the most useful thing on offer. A right that has to unite to stand any chance against Labor doesn't need one of its own at war with the fastest growing party on its side. His exit would do more to align the right than his war on One Nation ever could.
