Australia’s mainstream conservatism is taking a radical turn

One wonders if, at any point during the writing of his piece, titled “Hungary, and Florida, offer tips for conservative revival”, The Australian‘s Greg Sheridan was given pause by a caveat he kept adding into his rundown of parties across Europe that he argued showed the way forward for conservative values. See if you can spot the pattern:

Traditional European conservative parties, having lost all sense of purpose and fight, have been substantially replaced by parties that were once labelled far right. Thus Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, leads the Brothers of Italy. It had its origins decades ago in fascism but is not remotely fascist today. The Sweden Democrats, now the biggest party in Sweden’s ruling coali­tion, had more recent roots in extremism but are nothing remotely like that today. France’s National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, has completely repudiated its anti-Semitic past and now routinely comes second in national elections with an ever-increasing vote.

The piece is glowing in its view of Meloni and Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán among others. Orbán openly believes in “ethnic homogeneity” on the basis that “life has proven that too much mixing causes trouble” — repeating in 2022 that “[Hungarians] do not want to become a mixed race” — and has peddled anti-Semitic tropes. Meloni (and her party) believe in the “great replacement” theory of immigration as an active attempt at “ethnic substitution” of white Europeans “desired by big capital”. These facts don’t appear to have affected Sheridan’s notions of these leaders as conservative exemplars.

Compare this, as University of Sydney researcher Dr Kurt Sengul did, with Sheridan’s horror at the electoral success of One Nation in 1998. He described it as “the first time since the end of the White Australia policy that a party basing its appeal on racial hostility won significant parliamentary representation”, a development that made Australia “a poorer nation, an uglier nation, and certainly a much more divided nation”. Today, Sheridan regards Hungary’s strict immigration control in far more laid-back mode: “I am personally strongly in favour of a very big and racially non-discriminatory immigration program for Australia. But it’s not necessary that every country must be the same”.

Sheridan’s piece is only the latest example of the embrace of far-right figures within the mainstream media in Australia.

Sengul, who is a researcher on the communications techniques of far-right populism, told Crikey there was an ongoing “radicalisation of mainstream conservatives”.

“The far right has not moderated in the 21st century — if anything the opposite is true,” he said. “Which means that conservatives like Greg Sheridan who praise figures such as Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, Jair Bolsonaro and Ron DeSantis have shifted considerably to the right, not the other way around.”

In recent years far-right figures like Lauren Southern, Stefan Molyneux and Blair Cottrell have been given a platform on Sky News, while Cottrell has also featured on Seven and the ABC. Seven News Sydney’s Facebook account posted a poll calling for opinions on whether “anti-white racism” was “on the rise”, while the network, along with the Herald Sun and The Australian, spent months hyping an apparent crime wave committed by “African gangs”. We’ve seen conservative commentator Andrew Bolt worry in the Herald Sun about Jewish people who “keep their culture” and who form “colonies” as part of a “foreign invasion”. Far-right figures have been revealed by Crikey to write for Australia’s versions of The Spectator and the Daily Mail.

“The commercial pressures of media have aligned well with the communication style of the far right who provide them with conflict-driven, controversial and scandalous content,” Sengul said. “The media knows that the far right sells.”

He believes the process had been incremental but has accelerated in recent years.

“I don’t think there was one single watermark moment but rather a series of events and crises that elevated the far right: 9/11 and the War on Terror was a big one in the first two decades of the 21st century,” he said.

“Although they seem to have shifted to other issues at the moment, Islamophobia was the core issue of the contemporary far right, particularly after 9/11, and this aligned with the broader Islamophobic rhetoric that we were seeing from mainstream political parties.”

This Islamophobia, in turn, propelled a number of far-right parties in Europe into the mainstream, he said, adding there was every reason to believe this process will continue.

“The far right is incredibly effective at exploiting crises to their political advantage. We saw this around the global financial crisis, the 2015 refugee crisis, COVID-19 and now the alignment between so-called progressives and moderates and the far right around trans rights.”