This man wants to lead the Liberal Party. He won’t if he keeps savaging the ‘liberal’ bit

Politics

Federal

Political leadership

Opinion

George Brandis Former high commissioner to the UK and federal attorney-general November 9, 2025 — 1.45pm

Andrew Hastie likes to quote Edmund Burke. In speeches and opinion columns over the years, the former SAS soldier has burnished his credentials as a conservative intellectual with frequent references to the great parliamentary orator of the late 18th century commonly called the father of conservatism. (That reputation largely rests on Burke’s brilliant critique of the French Revolution in his 1790 tract Reflections on the Revolution in France ; it overlooks the fact that he was a leading parliamentary supporter of the American revolutionaries and sat not as a Tory but a Whig.)

The warrior-scholar is an attractive public persona