Taylor’s 'values' are purely rhetorical

 

Peter Strempel, 21 February 2026 

When Angus Taylor talks values, and his gang repeat him, it’s all about rhetoric, with zero substance.

Like most management consultants, Taylor probably doesn’t actually believe in anything, except making money and keeping clients on the hook. So what was that values statement all about?

The context is that Angus Taylor was freshly elected Liberal leader when he felt compelled to make a statement about migration, on which One Nation had outbid the Coalition for extremism on the already extreme political right.

It should have been uncontroversial for Taylor to argue that ‘immigrants’ should ‘adhere to core beliefs in democracy, the rule of law and basic freedoms’. It is a paraphrase of an ‘Australian values statement, signed by temporary and permanent visa applicants’ referring to ‘freedom of speech and religion, commitment to the rule of law, equality of opportunity and the idea of a “fair go”’. See the Home Affairs site for that value statement.

And it wouldn’t have been controversial if Taylor had not been addressing the entire electorate instead of clarifying this was a rebuke solely for Muslim immigrants on behalf of Israel, which is exerting alarmingly successful pressure on Australian politicians to do its bidding, under the pretext of acting on antisemitism.

What does Angus Taylor mean by values?

It would be easy to assume Taylor has no idea what values are. Or at least only a consultant’s ideas. You get together a management team, brainstorm management word salad, and come up with a values statement that sounds meaningful, but becomes just some words printed on marketing materials and in annual reports. Everyone knows the statement is meaningless, and that the actual values are only ever expressed in what the management team actually does, and how that translates into organizational culture.

‘Values’ are probably merely a branding exercise as far as Taylor is concerned. They cannot be enforced, and they will forever be ambiguous enough to fit any specific circumstance, or to offend against any specific circumstance.

What does Angus Taylor mean by democracy?

We can assume he means the Australian system of Westminster-style representative parliamentary democracy, but also the oligopoly system in Australia by which new entrants into politics face steep hurdles, and in which, for the past 80 or so years, the ALP and the Coalition have enjoyed a virtual duopoly of political power.

So, Taylor’s democracy is a condition in which the Coalition is guaranteed a place at the table, no matter it suffered its worst election defeat since 1944 at last May’s federal poll. No matter the electorate has decisively rejected the Coalition’s right wing extremism. And no matter that One Nation is apparently more popular than the current Coalition parties.

It could be said that Angus Taylor conceives of democracy as his own political privilege, fixed as a static condition impervious to change, or the need to reinvent his party and its policies. There is no need to listen to the electorate, because that electorate will always turn back to the Coalition again. And that is indeed the experience of the past. Whether it will hold for the future is yet to be seen. We might get a foretaste of things to come at the South Australian election next month.

What does Angus Taylor mean by rule of law?

Here’s where things get tricky for Taylor. His intent might well have been to preach obedience, but the rule of law is a concept that is unforgiving in requiring that everyone is subject to law, which is clearly not the case in Australia.

Continuous, highly visible, and completely unpunished corruption in the private and public sectors is probably the most embarrassing failure of democracy and the rule of law in Australia. Whether it’s watergate (Taylor’s own weak spot), sports rorts, car park rorts, Robodebt, banking frauds against customers, natural gas and groceries price-gouging, wage theft, or a seemingly endless list of white collar crimes, there seems to be zero accountability under law for the rich and powerful.

And everyone knows that accessing the law is deliberately priced on such astronomical scales that most citizens cannot possibly afford legal proceedings, making it quite plain that the law is designed to serve only the wealthy, and usually only in order for the wealthy to subvert or frustrate the intention of the laws they go to court to dispute.

In that context, mentioning the rule of law seems to be no more than Angus Taylor saying ‘obey’. Unquestioningly. Blindly. Whatever the demand by whatever bureaucrat, cop, or media commentator. Not a remote reflection on how corrupt such authority figures can be. And an obedience now anchored in the most authoritarian restrictions on assembly and speech since federation. Laws that might have been enacted by a Labor government, but only after a hyperventilating, neurotic campaign by the Coalition and News Corp media assets demanding exactly that. And even then only after Israeli counter-intelligence efforts were put into overdrive to prevent criticism of its Gaza genocide, justified as an illogical and contradictory effort to fight antisemitism. As if antisemitism were remotely related to any critique of Israeli fascism and its Gaza genocide.

What does Taylor mean by ‘basic freedoms’?

‘Basic’ is the key word here. Freedom to practice religion, so long as ‘we’ (being the born-to-rule set) approve of the way it is practised. Freedom to live the consumer, wage slavery life we prescribe for the lesser classes. Freedom to vote once in a while for a variant on the same economic policy of wealth concentration and inequality supported by all major, established parties.

Freedom to regard oneself either as part of the master race of white Christian nationalists, or the naturally lesser class of middle class people that have to be suffered to guarantee there is an upper class at all. But the corollary is that most people are invited to frind their freedom in being worker drones, ‘bludgers’, ‘abos’, ‘wogs’, and ‘refos’, with all of them expected to acknowledge a born-to-rule aristocracy of predominantly (but not only) Sydney-based spivs, distinguished by nothing more than the moneyed families they were born into, and the privilege that comes with money and the old boy network of private school chums looking out for each other all their lives. In that regard Australia is hardly different to Britain or the USA, where such class distinctions are also played out, and played upon, but we’ve never yet confronted this reality openly.

So, Angus Taylor wasn’t really talking about values at all. He was talking about Patrician expectations of an obedient mass of Plebeians.

Note: if some of the derogatory terms used here seem alien or abhorrent, keep in mind that most politicians are older than 50, and grew up in the 1980s or 1990s, when such words were quite commonplace even in public debates.

What are actual values?

Values aren’t rules to be obeyed or enforced. They are, as the word says, qualities actually valued by a majority of people, and reflected in how they behave, not how police, jurists, politicians, or any other authority figure would like them to behave. Moreover, they vary greatly by locality, or community. There is no common ground across localities or states. But we might guess that values are driven by economic pressures, particularly among those who are scraping by, or just subsisting.

This absence of common Australian values possibly caused a belated recognition in the political class, reflected in the sudden decision by state and federal education ministers that ‘values’ would be taught in school. As a desperate effort to be seen to be addressing antisemitism, but maybe also to create some sort of common ground in the formerly free-for-all, market-driven social consciousness of children and their parents. Whether school indoctrination can reverse the ideological capture of class consciousness, and its radicalization, is another question altogether. No one whose experiences don’t match the ‘values’ talked up like cheap marketing patter by politicians will adopt those empty phrases just because they’re told to.

The ‘values’ to be ideologized in schools include all of Taylor’s euphemisms, plus the ‘fair go’, whatever that is supposed to mean, given it seems to have been abolished during John Howard’s long ascendancy. Howard’s signal achievement was to commended to us all the market virtues of mean-spirited selfishness, spite, and culture war contempt for people we’ve never met: all the demographics already mentioned with pejoratives above, and today conveniently classified as ‘woke’, or ‘radicalized’, to avoid the odium of the people using such terms being unambiguously identified as the bigoted, prejudiced xenophobes they are.

It seems like Angus Taylor jinxed himself by talking values at all, since the outcome has been to draw attention to the fact that the only widely shared values at the top of the town are about engaging in and profiting from corruption. And the values lower down the class hierarchy are anyone’s guess. They range from compassion, cooperation, and the old fair go, meaning giving everyone a chance, to hatred and spite for everyone and everything not immediately beneficial to a local clan, congregation, or community. The first set of values probably leads its adherents to vote against the right wing extremists of the Coalition, and beyond. The second set probably has its adherents switching to right wing extremism even more extreme than the Coalition. Leaving Angus Taylor’s Coalition appealing solely to the fantasy world proposed by News Corp propagandists, and a narrow group of patrons and cronies.

Lest this be seen as too one-sided a viewpoint, let’s reflect for a few seconds on the ALP’s profligate surrender to Israeli propaganda demands. This is how federal education minister Jason Clare represented that surrender to The Australian:

‘“We are the best country in the world, and part of the reason for that is the value we place on things like democracy, the rule of law, basic freedoms and just a fair go,’’ Mr Clare told The Australian after the meeting.

‘“It’s what helps hold us together, and make us who we are. It’s something we pass from one generation to the next – that’s why this work is so important.’’’

Hold us together, as in ‘social cohesion’. So cohesive our children are to be indoctrinated with ideological lies that don’t bear scrutiny. It means that Labor’s idea of social cohesion is something that has to be coerced and compelled. And that means these are not Australian values at all.

Taylor’s path back to the future

 

Peter Strempel, 16 February 2026 

To consolidate their new roles as leader and deputy of the battered and bruised Liberal Party, Angus Taylor has talked core values and Jane Hume has talked about lowering taxes.

What do they mean?

Taylor’s core values are apparently the rule of law, democracy, and ‘basic’ freedoms. Fine rhetoric. But it doesn’t really reflect the realities most Australians deal with.

Highly visible, continuous, and unpunished corruption at the senior levels of private and public sectors, including especially by CEOs, corporate boards, and politicians, teach people that corruption is the way to get ahead. And that the law doesn’t really apply to the rich. An observation strengthened by the astronomical cost of accessing a legal system shutting out ordinary Australians because it is clearly designed to serve only the rich, mostly to evade accountability under law itself.

If by democracy Taylor meant the perpetuation of an oligopoly party political system, he seems to have ignored the backlash his own party has faced as a consequence for taking voters for granted in such an arrangement. The rise of independents and the peculiar boost in One Nation popularity should give him pause to reconsider.

And if he conceives of ‘basic’ rights as the surrender by millions of Australians to be treated merely as economic factors of ever greater wealth concentration in a rigidly class-based society in which everyone knows their place, Taylor has failed to understand that most Australians want to be more than subjects of an economy rather than citizens and partners in a society and culture.

So, Taylor appears to assume most Australians cannot see the reality of Australian self-serving rich and powerful robbing lesser Australians blind while feeding them platitudes about the rule of law, democracy, and basic freedoms.

Jane Hume speaks glibly of Liberals having always understood that lower taxes mean greater freedoms for self-determination, as if the Liberal Party had not actually done the complete opposite since the Howard years: given tax breaks mainly to the rich, and increased taxes and other costs for everyone else.

Hume also carefully avoided the consequence of lower taxes: cuts in services.  Meaning reducing the services needed predominantly by Australians not already wealthy.  Is this a continuation of Tony Abbott's and Scott Morrison's war on the poor?  

Hume’s strategy here seems to be to talk like voters had not recognized empty rhetoric untethered from a longitudinal record of hypocrisy and outright lies in making their decisions at the last two federal elections.  Almost as if those last two elections hadn't thrown a born-to-rule party into chaos.

Her rhetoric also seems to completely ignore the appeal of One Nation to a broad swathe of Australians who feel they have been betrayed by politicians who promised to look after their interests and then actually undermined those.  Lower income Australians make up a substantial percentage of that demographic.

It is true One Nation is mostly just talk and grievances with zero credible policies, or even the intellect to understand the economic and social impacts of the simple-minded prescriptions preached about by Pauline Hanson. But the discontents she addresses are real.

To capitalize on these discontents, Taylor and Hume would first have to recognize them as real, and then they would need to refactor their focus on actually addressing the concerns of those ‘forgotten people’, not as rhetorical platitudes, but in hard-nosed policy departures from their dated and discredited ideological comfort zones.

Limiting immigration as a means to do that seems to be worse than useless, and potentially harmful to economic growth overall. No one is saying we should invite terrorists into our midst, nor that there shouldn’t be a well crafted immigration policy. But to suggest that limiting immigration will resolve cost or living pressures, or housing affordability, or employment pressure, is just deliberately chosen stupidity.

The real solutions to the mentioned problems are about addressing wealth inequality. And wealth inequality is addressed with wealth redistribution, not business as usual or tax cuts for the already wealthy.

Based on current performance, it doesn’t look like the Liberals are willing to even entertain such realities, much less address them. Does Angus Taylor’s background in management consultancy so hamstring him to old MBA models and methods he cannot conceive of new ones? Is Jane Hume so wedded to an imaginary past she cannot comprehend how today’s voters want much more than yesterday’s slogans?

We’ll find out. But in the meantime they both betray Australian voters by failing one fundamental test of anyone calling themselves an opposition: holding to account a government that has moved to the right to capture all the territory once claimed for Liberal ‘moderates’. Why would that government not be contemptuous of a Coalition so self-obsessed and backward looking it fails to act like an opposition?

One Nation: Nietzsche's Abyss

 

Peter Strempel, 3 February 2026 

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is like the vast array of underground machinery in Forbidden Planet that gives gestalt to the monstrously predatory id of a post industrial society, killed off by its own proclivities. Stripping away all pretense at rational, civilized conduct, and anything recognizable as human decency from normally repressed psychosexual urges, leaving only a nihilistic, murderous phantom. In the film, the solution is a 1950s version of ‘Alright. We take off. Nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure’. We don’t have that option.

The ‘surge’ in opinion polling popularity of the id party seems inexplicable to the lumpen-scribblers calling themselves ‘journalists’. Maybe because so many of them are bourgeois drudges, too cowardly or too self-censorious to ever tell the truth about anything, let alone something that confronts them with their own personal failings. Perhaps they are, after all, a part of the uncomfortably large numbers of people who are in fact treacherous, sociopathic scum, barely constrained from enacting their own variations of Lord of the Flies savageries.

One Nation is like a magnet for such people, with its toadying to the nihilistic, sadistic corruption of MAGA America. It holds out to the libidinally-challenged barbarians a revenge porn fantasy of being ICE thugs and shooting civilians—recast as real or imagined culture wars enemies the way they are shown in A Super Progressive Movie. Shooting them in the back if they are men, and in the face if they are not. Such fantasies for One Nation supporters probably include even worse thoughts, steeped in self-destructive primal fear and depraved, self-loathing psychosexual neuroses that ultimately lead to elaborately fetishized hatreds.

It is tough to stomach, but with the exception of a small number of protest voters giving the finger to all established parties, One Nation supporters are the sort of people who pulled the wings off flies when they were five, bullied weaker kids at school from about the same age, possibly practised bestiality the way the Anita Cobby killers did in their teenage years, graduating to abusing children who should have been able to count on their protection, committing domestic violence, and turning into bitter but cowardly bullies in the workplace.

They have no empathy for even their own kin. They are ignorant by choice and inclination, and petulantly stupid, the way MAGA supporters in the USA have shown themselves to be, repeating absurdly cretinous conspiracy theories as if it were sacred liturgy. They are the people who make it possible at all for a civilized society to descend into a corrupt and cruel tyranny with their mass support, just as they were the backbone of the Nazi party in another time and place. Willing to abandon all ethics and humanity just to hurt others, as an onanistic satisfaction of their own pathetic shortcomings and degenerate impulses.

One Nation supporters cannot—or stubbornly will not—understand that their support of the foreign and poisonous MAGA corruption is treasonous, rather than the Chinese-made flag waving, hooligan, migrant bashing patriotism they claim for themselves. They have no concept that the party they strengthen regards them as merely useful idiots, and will betray them as soon as they have served their purpose, treating them like so much manure in the fantasy killing fields of the id party’s culture war against all but a narrow elite of moneyed oligarchs.

What does the One Nation utopia look like, assuming there are enough festering closet fascists to vote them into power? Without a clue about running anything more complex than a raffle, all One Nation can promise is turning the witch hunting of culture wars enemies into a permanent feature, probably underwritten by Nine Entertainment, News Corp, and Seven West Media, who have already turned the Orwellian two minutes of hate into a permanent, continuous diet of bile-spewing invective. We could look forward to that diet of hatred to be made mandatory in all public spaces, delivered through television by AI generated talking heads, in print, for slightly less ill-educated people as editorials credited to long dead or retired polemicists. People will be encouraged to denounce their colleagues and neighbours, feeding a televised stream of public executions carried out by fat middle aged men wearing camouflage gear and flack jackets, playing at being soldiers.  These executions can be real or artificially generated, presented as spectacle, like a spectator sport.

Pauline Hanson will be kept alive well past her demise, like the Thatcheresque robot in Silverchair’s ‘Anthem for the Year 2000’, as a fake figurehead. The real government will be a cartel of corporations strip mining the country’s natural environment and its people entirely for profit, and offering few perks even to the bureaucrat minions keeping things ticking over on their behalf.

Compared to One Nation, the Coalition rabble is comprised of disciplined and honourable people, even if no such qualities can be discerned when looking at individual Liberal and National party MPs. What is all the more horrifying is that whole sections of our mass media gleefully anticipate and enable this kind of barbarism with the express aim to undermine our democratic and civilized institutions, just so an unprincipled and unaccountable group of billionaires and millionaires can pay even less tax than they already do, rape and pillage the land, and sell off the rubble of our civilization like second hand bricks and copper wire.

If the opinion poll numbers translate into votes, our nation—our society—will have fallen away into a kind of barbarism infinitely worse than the worst periods in Western history. Worse because we know about that barbarism and have the choice not to repeat those nightmare epochs. We are at Nietzsche’s precipice, staring into the abyssal depths of human depravity and ugliness. Most of us might be too frightened to recognize in that hellish nothingness the worst of ourselves, preferring to pretend it’s all going to end in some comfortably benign, bourgeois fantasy in which a technocratic bureaucracy will save us from the worst of the fallout while we sit on our sofas and watch the kind of television that allows us to blank out the pustulent ugliness we have become. But some of us will know even then that bureaucrats themselves have always been the willing executors of terror and chaos.

It’s not yet too late to step back from the brink. But I wonder who has the integrity to call out the beckoning, all-corrupting, sadistic, and depraved nihilism for what it is.