How does the political right in Australia need to change?
Our media tend to over fixate on Donald Trump but in some ways, he is a distraction. What is missing is a proper understanding of the intellectual transformation that has occurred in the conservative movement in the United States the last few years.
A little over 3 years ago Kevin Roberts, the newly appointed head of the Heritage Foundation, the largest centre-right think tank in Washington DC, addressed a new fledging gathering of “national conservatives” in Miami, Florida and surprisingly declared:
“I come not to invite national conservatives to join our conservative movement, but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours.”
Why is this significant?
The Heritage Foundation is not only the largest centre-right think tank in Washington DC, but it has been at the heart of conservative thinking since the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s. In the 1990s it enthusiastically championed free trade agreements with China and others. In the 2000s it was a staunch proponent of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the “war on terror”.
It had nothing much to say on immigration during that time. Indeed, after Trump’s first surprise victory in 2016, the editor of the influential “First Things” magazine, R. R. Reno noted:
“It’s really quite telling that places like AEI [another US think tank] and Heritage don’t have full-time staff working on immigration questions when in fact it turns out to be the single most salient political issue in the West in the 21st century.”
Heritage was initially very hostile to Donald Trump’s bid for the White House labelling him “a clown” who “needs to be out of the race”.
Since that time it has undergone an intellectual “national conservative” revolution.
It now argues for a fundamental restructuring of the trade agreements it once strongly advocated for.
It is very sceptical of the foreign entanglements, including the conflict in Ukraine and other “forever wars”.
Heritage has also come to recognize the central importance of immigration. Not just stopping illegals crossing the border or even reducing the number of legal immigrants, but a fundamental reassessment about whether immigration continues to benefit Western nations at all.
At a deeper level it has also questioned philosophical “liberalism” which is so often held up as the lodestar that should guide the centre-right. JD Vance, who is very close to Kevin Roberts and many in the national conservative movement, now openly refers to himself as “post-liberal”.
Yet no such change has occurred among the existing think tanks in Australia.
The equivalent would be Melbourne’s Institute of Public Affairs saying they no longer believed in “free trade” and though the idea harmful and utopian.
Or Sydney’s Centre for Independent Studies saying that mass immigration had clearly failed Australia and issuing a mea culpa.
It would be like Tony Abbott admitting on reflection he was a bit embarrassed by how overly emotionally invested he had become over who controls Donetsk.
Or Georgia Downer’s Robert Menzies Institute being openly critical of “liberalism”.
Now, I know and like many of the people and organizations mentioned above and there is still a great deal of agreement on many issues.
But it is also true that the majority of Australia’s centre-right intelligentsia, Howard-era ministers, and conservative commentators have still not really moved on from the 1990s or earlier.
There has been a lack of engagement with the “new right” generally.
Fortunately, some in Australia’s Parliament do appear to understand the change required.
“Conservatives need to accept that it’s not 1996 anymore,” Senator Alex Antic urged in his recent CPAC speech in Brisbane. “We need to cast off the shackles of globalism and start putting Australia first.”
Andrew Hastie has also tried to get some of his colleagues to appreciate that simply rehashing “dog-eared copied of Hayek” will not suffice.
But it should not be for these individuals to stride out alone on to the battlefield without proper cover. They need support which to date has been lacking from the legacy right infrastructure here.
“Decades of frustration and failure have shown us that the old Washington red team of free marketers, neoconservatives and evangelicals alone is simply not enough” stated Kevin Roberts at the 50th anniversary of the organization he heads.
“The conservative promise must be more than simply free markets and free trade, cheap credit, cheap imports or cheap foreign labour. We’ve been there and it didn’t work.”
We will only know when the necessary change in Australia has occurred when the centre-right here start speaking the same way.
First published in The Daily Telegraph Australia 24 November 2025 as “Time Keep Changing But The Right Just Won’t” © Dan Ryan 2025. All Rights Reserved.
