Matt Canavan has done in an hour what Angus Taylor failed to do in a month

March 14, 2026 — 5:00am

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When the world is falling apart, must Australia fall apart, too? Pauline Hanson hopes so. After 30 years of efforts to drive racial and religious division, she is closer than ever to establishing hate politics at the centre of Australian affairs.

Now that she’s consistently polling more strongly than the Coalition, Liberal leader Angus Taylor cravenly courts her support instead of confronting her agenda. Asked whether he’d ever use Hanson’s language that there are no “good” Muslims, Taylor replied “absolutely not” before going on to say that he has “many good Muslims” in his electorate, a version of “some of my best friends are Muslims”. He then turned attention to the ISIS brides. Bad Muslims, get it?

Notably, Taylor did not disown Hanson or the race politics she plays. Notably, the Coalition he leads did not support the other parties in the Senate censuring Hanson for “seeking to vilify Muslim Australians”. Notably, he has kept open the option of directing voter preferences to One Nation.

But, this week, the country’s newest political leader gave Taylor a lesson in leadership. Matt Canavan was elected to lead the National Party on Wednesday morning. In his first hour in the job, he managed to do something that Taylor has failed to accomplish in his first month.

He recognised Pauline Hanson as the enemy, not the friend, of the established parties of the right. And the enemy of Australian cohesion. “I’m very concerned – concerned that the identity politics of division that we’ve seen on the left is creeping into the right now,” Canavan said in his first remarks as Nationals leader. “I was very critical of Pauline’s comments dividing Australians and different groups, suggesting there are no good people in certain groups of Australians. I totally reject that.” For emphasis, Canavan repeated: “I totally reject that.”

Hanson had told us recently that there are “no good Muslims”.

Canavan: “We’re all Australians. What unites us as a country is more than what divides us, even when we have robust debates. We are a wonderful country with wonderful people of different backgrounds.”

That was blow No. 1. Followed immediately by a second: “Pauline has been in politics for more than double the time I have been, and I struggle to point to a single dam, a single road, a single hospital that Pauline has delivered in Australia,” Canavan said. “I can point to swathes of those things from the work I’ve done with Michelle Landry, Colin Boyce” – Nationals members of federal parliament – “and others in central Queensland.”

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Canavan’s immediate goal was political. The Nationals, like the other parties, are contesting a byelection in the federal seat of Farrer in southern NSW on May 9. At the moment, One Nation is leading, according to the only poll published to date. Canavan wants to stop its momentum and win some votes back.

He knows he can’t do that by pandering to Hanson. Why would anyone vote for a party that’s trying to be a Hanson lite? Surely, you’d vote for the real deal, instead, and cast your ballot for One Nation itself.

You might think this is entirely obvious. But it wasn’t obvious to Canavan’s predecessor, David Littleproud, the disastrous Nats leader who twice broke the Coalition apart before resigning this week rather than deal with the consequences of the byelection.

And, evidently, it’s not obvious to Taylor. The surest way to differentiate yourself in politics is to pick a fight. The Coalition is always ready to pick a fight with Labor and the Greens on its left flank. But now that the Coalition is under siege from One Nation on its right, it needs to pick a fight there, too. Otherwise, it’s undifferentiated. And if you’re undifferentiated, what’s the point of voting for you?

Taylor has yet to vindicate his party’s faith in electing him leader. He is, so far, an identikit politician, nice hair and an empty suit, casting about for a purpose. What does he believe in? So far, all we know is that he believes in fiscal rules, and that he does not believe in ISIS brides or expensive petrol.

By picking a fight with Hanson on race politics and hate-mongering, Canavan achieves the greater aim of defending Australian society and security.

Australia is the most multi-ethnic, multicultural country in the developed world. Half of us were born overseas or have at least one parent born overseas. That’s double the proportion of the US. To promote hate between groups is to rip the place apart.

Is this about trying to preserve some semblance of social harmony? Yes, but it’s also about national security. We know that Iran was covertly organising arson and violence against Jewish targets in Australia. That’s why the Albanese government expelled the Iranian ambassador last year.

Iran’s immediate aim was to harm Australian Jews, of course. But the bigger purpose was the destabilisation of Australia. It’s exactly the same reason that Russia spends a fortune on bot farms and influence operations in a strategic campaign to reach through the internet into the minds of credulous voters in Western democracies. If we are preoccupied with fighting each other, we are not confronting our enemies.

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It’s plain that we need a reliable supply of petrol to remain a functioning economy. A reliable supply of social trust and goodwill is just as vital to a functioning society and to effective security. To abet racial or religious conflict is to damage national security.

This is not to defend the level of immigration in the post-COVID years. Immigration is a question of management and always open to debate; hate-mongering is a question of principle and never a ground for legitimate politics.

Hanson’s reply to Canavan’s criticism: “Canavan joins the likes of the ABC, The Guardian and left-wing fact-checkers who have started a war against One Nation to try and tear us down.” A bit precious? Canavan thought so: “Maybe Pauline can give it, but she can’t take it. Welcome to politics, Pauline.”

Social unity – South Australia’s Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas this week was bold enough to call it patriotism – is a form of national resilience. As the Ukrainians show us, day in and day out. Resilience is very much in vogue.

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Virginia HausseggerCanberra writer and an academic advocate for gender equity.

Canberra writer and an academic advocate for gender equity.

Canada’s Mark Carney described “a rupture in the world order”. In this world, Australia needs to invest more energy and attention in its resilience. We learnt a lot about our vulnerability to supply chain interruptions during the pandemic, but we seem to have remembered very little.

Peter Dean says we live in a “TikTok world”. We are focused on the contemporary crisis for fully 30 seconds before our attention is diverted to the next reel, only to be shocked when the crisis returns in a more savage form, posits the Australian defence strategist and historian.

Australia’s prophet on a resilience agenda was the late Liberal senator Jim Molan. He spent years campaigning within the Coalition and he badgered Scott Morrison endlessly to create a national resilience strategy. It was in vain. Even after COVID, Australia has no resilience strategy. In 2023, Molan said: “The things that worry me most are liquid fuels, of which we have very little in the country because we depend on open supply chains. We have fragility in our energy supplies to our factories and our people (and) we import an awful lot of our fertiliser, therefore our food production will drop and the impact of no diesel on our food production is terrifying.”

Morrison’s one concession to Molan was to create a national oil reserve. Alas, the oil was to be held in the US. It was a measure of Australian complacency. The Albanese government abandoned that idea and instead applied a minimum fuel stockholding obligation. Importers and refiners are required by law to keep a national total of 3 billion litres of diesel and 1.5 billion of petrol. This has the virtue of being held on our continent rather than another. But it’s still only about a month’s supply.

Unfortunately, it’s now exposed as being inadequate. Molan, three years ago, said: “We are woefully unprepared for a regional war in relation to the resilience of our nation.”

It turns out that it doesn’t take a regional war. Australian resilience, apart from its test at the hands of One Nation populism, is being stressed by a medium-sized war far from our region. Angus Taylor is in a poor position to criticise the government. He was the Morrison government minister who proudly assigned Australian reserves to the safekeeping of the US.

The Iran war revives the priority of a national resilience strategy. So that the country has the fuel, fertiliser, pharmaceuticals and other commodities to survive sudden interruptions. But there is no more precious commodity than social resilience. The rupture is in its very early days. Australia needs to work actively to avoid rupturing itself.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.

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© The Sydney Morning Herald