We can’t say he sprang it on us without warning. Just over two years ago Cory Bernardi told the National Press Club he wanted to make an announcement. “I want to form a movement, a movement within Australian politics, if you will. A movement to try and regain some of that trust that has been lost.”
At that point in time, the putative movement Bernardi spoke about was an internal objective. He wasn’t leaving the Liberal party. He was talking about something else: something new, a conversation within a movement.
But if you review the speech he made in June 2014, the thinking was more or less fully formed. While many colleagues were soldiering on placidly in the straitjacket of major party politics, Bernardi’s instincts and ideas were already in a different place. They were sitting comfortably in the slipstream of fracturing post global financial crisis politics.
Bernardi was correct in reading the trend. Pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, he noted the fracturing of establishment politics in Europe and the United States – the Danish People’s party, the Finns party and the Tea Party.
Closer to home, he noted support for minor parties and independents was at record levels. In South Australia, Nick Xenophon was on the rise. In Queensland, the Palmer United party was winning support. There was a record crossbench in the Senate.
“The message of distrust in politics as usual could not be clearer to me. I say we can’t keep going on like this,” he said.
Bernardi also believed the great schism in contemporary politics was a cultural fight – it was about identity in a secular, multicultural, globalised world. He sensed the fight was drifting in increments from being a fringe preoccupation to being something that would bleed into mainstream politics.
He framed this fight the way rightwingers do. “Driven by political correctness, Western values have been increasingly defined along procedural or materialist lines, while elements such as our religious traditions and our unique culture have somehow been relegated to second place or even worse.”
This dynamic had created an “existential crisis ... which may be as damaging to the core of our national psyche as any of the struggles that we’ve faced in recent decades.”
As we begin to contemplate what his next phase as a crossbencher will look like, we have certain advantages. Bernardi has been around sufficiently long in Australian politics to be a known known.
He’s an avowed climate sceptic. He’s a Christian values conservative: a vociferous opponent of marriage equality, and inclined to poke the hornets’ nest on Islam. He’s been at the pointy end of internal debates on section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which is the frontline of the contemporary left-right culture war in Australia. On economic issues, he’s a low-tax, small-government man.
Unlike many micro-party players who have to invent a network from scratch and create the means of bankrolling a fledgling political operation, Bernardi has some prospects of garnering firepower and professionalism because of his well-stocked contact book.
As an important institutional player in the Liberal party in South Australia, he’s got some powerful friends, including the mining magnate Gina Rinehart. Eyebrows were raised inside the Coalition last year when Bernardi and Rinehart met members of the Trump transition team in the US. There were also reports Bernardi spent New Year’s Eve with Rinehart as a guest on the luxury cruise liner The World.
A key question of early interest and import will be how Bernardi’s new operation intends to sit in the political firmament with One Nation. Will Bernardi attempt to take back the ground One Nation has claimed over the course of last year, or does he view himself as being complementary to that insurgency?
Bernardi’s home state of South Australia is already heavily contested on the centre right, with the Liberals and the Nick Xenophon Team. But there’s an opening on the hard right because One Nation is not yet a significant force in SA, notching up 0.3% of a quota in the last election. Measured in first preference votes, One Nation picked up 31,621 in South Australia during the 2015 election compared with the NXT’s 230,703 votes.
Bernardi has noted before that Barry Goldwater is one of his heroes. History credits the Arizona senator and one-time US presidential nominee with the resurgence of grassroots American conservatism in the 1960s.
Goldwater’s credo (or one of them, in any case) was offering voters “a choice, not an echo” – which very much exemplifies the Bernardi style. But as the South Australian has acknowledged, Goldwater’s run for the presidency flamed out spectacularly.
In that speech at the press club two years ago, Bernardi acknowledged his movement may go the same way.
At that time, he said his objective was “opening up a conversation within the beltway to reflect the views from outside the beltway; discussing ideas that will help restore our faith in the political system, our parliament, our MPs and our political parties.”
“I may end up being the only member of this movement,” he said. “But I would say all it takes is one person.”
