What is the point of politics, if you’re not willing to fight for something?

These are the words of shadow minister for home affairs Andrew Hastie in a recent facebook post about immigration.

It’s perhaps the most important question facing the Liberal party today, and it’s why Hastie is copping a lot of media attention, both positive and negative, in recent weeks.

But Hastie is spot on to say that politics is about ideas and vision.

His recent video on manufacturing is a case in point.

The mistake critics are making is thinking this video is about reopening car manufacturing factories. It’s not. It’s about deciding what the Australia of the future looks like.

Will we build things? Or will we import and consume things?

It’s an important threshold question that the Liberal party must answer before they bother locking in a single policy for the next election.

Yet at the very suggestion of directing government priorities towards the working class and manufacturing was met with howls of objections by faceless nameless Liberals.

CEO of the Page Research Centre, Gerard Holland, made a particularly astute observation about Hastie’s video:

“Elites are fine with spending $20 billion annually on universities, $80 billion on non-essential public servants and $50 billion on the renewable transition but the second you mention investing in domestic manufacturing for our working class and industry for the regions they lose their minds as if we live in some free market libertarian paradise instead of a rigged economy that only works for them.”

Exactly.

Labor is deluded and dangerous when it comes to Net Zero, but the one thing you can say for them is they have decided this is what they’re doing, and they’re giving it everything no matter the cost.

When was the last time you saw the Liberal party do that?

When was the last time you saw the Liberal party take an issue by the neck and forcefully make the case for it rather than try to timidly avoid bad headlines and uncomfortable Question Time?

The sooner the Liberals understand we are not in the late 1990s anymore, the better.

Because the fact is the nameless, faceless critics of Hastie from the Liberal party seem to have this idea in their head that the Australian people rejected them in May this year because they didn’t do enough technocratic policy making.

They thought they could Bradbury their way back into office because Albo is a moron and they had some policies no one had ever heard of to announce three weeks before polling day.

And it’s clear since May, there are many who want to keep the policy debates behind closed doors. They think good policy is what gets nice headlines in the Guardian and a regular spot on ABC’s afternoon news shows.

They’re looking at polling spreadsheets trying to figure out precisely what policy dial they can turn a little bit to win back just enough of the vote to get some Teal seats back.

But politics doesn’t work like that.

The Liberals aren’t facing a policy problem.

It’s not about moving to the centre, or the right, or the left.

They’re facing an identity problem.

And they won’t resolve it by making off-the-record comments to journos criticising the one guy willing to go and put some ideas out there that might help build a Liberal party identity.

This is something Andrew Hastie understands, and so does Jacinta Nampijinpa Price with her comments about how our values should inform immigration policy.

At ADVANCE, we don’t care who leads the Liberal party or who has what ministry or whatever.

But we do care about the electoral consequences Australia faces when we have an impotent, scared Liberal party that retreats from every tough political question, loses every debate, while congratulating themselves on being sensible.

Well, you can be sensible in opposition, or visionary in government.

Hastie and Nampijinpa Price have shown one way. Faceless others are showing the other.

Make your choice.