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His Liberal Party colleagues describe Angus Taylor as a gifted strategist with strong economic qualifications and driving ambition, but some fear he lacks cut-through in the political match-up with Jim Chalmers. By Karen Barlow.
Can Angus Taylor be treasurer?
Now that inflation is heading down and not up, Angus Taylor is “desperately unhappy” the numbers are not assisting his politics, according to Treasurer Jim Chalmers.
In the pantomime of parliamentary Question Time, the treasurer has the airtime and the slick, dismissive throwdowns. He also has the coveted back-to-back surpluses under his belt. Taylor mostly sidesteps the treasurer’s head-to-head battles, however, seeing more value in trying to destabilise the bigger target of the prime minister.
It was Taylor’s constant interjections that recently rattled Anthony Albanese enough to make an ill-considered quip about Tourette syndrome.
Question Time tactics are often ugly but illustrative, and Liberal strategists see Taylor’s focus paying off.
“Albanese taught us that elections these days are intensely presidential, and he made the last election very presidential, and he focused on Morrison, and it worked, didn’t it?” a senior Liberal tactician tells The Saturday Paper.
“The prime minister is very good in Question Time, but yeah, I think he’s got a little bit of a glass jaw,” opposition frontbencher Dan Tehan tells The Saturday Paper.
“He’s shown that he’s not across detail. He’s almost shown a disinterest in all things economic.”
As Australia enters a cost-of-living election campaign, Taylor is the economic front for a Coalition emboldened by Donald Trump’s win in the United States. The four-term member for the semirural seat of Hume has a serious economics background, vaulting ambition and is tight with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. He’s also seen as one of the Coalition’s best and brightest strategists.
Yet some colleagues say his economic pitch is yet to cut through – he’s just not good with political “bullshit”.
This is despite many recognising his political ambition. The 58-year-old conservative stalwart is also considered internally as an empire builder in the ranks of the New South Wales hard right, which became clear in June when he backed a challenger over fellow frontbencher Hollie Hughes for a winnable position on the state’s Senate ticket.
While Hughes accused Taylor of being more focused on his own ambitions rather than the “betterment of the team”, Tehan says all he sees is a “really united” front that is “right back in the game” after two-and-a-half years.
Another Liberal colleague notes Taylor clearly has eyes for the top job: “given the opportunity” he would “take Dutton anytime”.
However, they did not regard the shadow treasurer as demonstrating a “clear, defined direction” for the Coalition. “Angus should be one of the best. He is on paper. It just has not translated,” they said. “He is just throwing rocks at Chalmers.”
Former Coalition frontbencher Karen Andrews, who is no factional ally, affirms Taylor’s potential. “Given an opportunity Angus would be an excellent treasurer. He is competent. You can rely on him to get it right,” she tells The Saturday Paper.
But she has no doubts about who should be in his current role. She laments the electoral loss in 2022 of the former Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg after the Kooyong clash with Monique Ryan.
“We need him back. We should have done everything we could to keep him.”
Andrews is among those who say Taylor needs a “coherent message”.
“He and others need help in the selling … People are out there asking, ‘What is the solution? How are you going to put more money in people’s pockets?’
“You need someone who can say, ‘Here is what you need to do.’ ”
Taylor’s allies believe he is sharpening his messaging. A big part of his current approach is that he won’t give details when pressed on Coalition plans for government austerity. He’s making it all about the government.
“Well, you won’t see reckless spending from us. And I’ve made that point for two years,” the shadow treasurer told reporters last week. “You grow the economy faster than you spend, that’s what you do. It’s pretty simple. It’s pretty simple stuff, but it works. It is not happening under Labor. We see it in all of the data.
“This is a government that sees that the answer to every problem is more government spending. It has the wrong toolkit for the times we live in.”
It’s a retail approach that served Chalmers well in opposition. On Taylor’s side of politics, it also worked well for Joe Hockey before he became treasurer under Tony Abbott in 2013, particularly as he joked and sparred with then former prime minister Kevin Rudd on morning television. That ease deserted Hockey in government.
The Coalition has made a point of opposing Labor’s cost-of-living measures, such as the energy rebates and the rejigged stage three tax cuts, and pressure is growing to roll out their own proposals.
Taylor is in no doubt that this is the defining issue. He has been counselling colleagues that inflation changes politics – there is “nothing even close” – and that getting interest rates down is the top priority. They are buoyed by recent polling showing the Coalition’s numbers improving amid angst over the economy.
“It’s always contested. It’s never a free kick. But I think, in the end, Angus has been focused on getting the big calls right,” fellow frontbencher and right faction ally Michael Sukkar tells The Saturday Paper.
“The polling seems to indicate that when you look at the equity of the economy.”
The challenge is to get the attention of voters, however, and there’s worry among the opposition benches that the shadow treasurer, a Rhodes scholar in economics with a master’s thesis on competition policy and a long-time management consultant before politics, is underperforming against his opposite number. Chalmers earnt a PhD in political science from the Australian National University – with his thesis on “brawler statesman” Paul Keating.
“Angus should be smashing the shit out of Chalmers, but he is not getting through,” says one Coalition backbencher. “Angus is not good at bullshit; Jim is.”
Another MP described Taylor as performing as if he has “vacated the field”.
“He could be doing it better. Jim is more repetitious. He is an expert at it,” the backbencher says. “My base locked into Sky News knows who he is, the rest of Australia does not.”
Sukkar says Taylor has the advantage in the match-up against Chalmers. “I don’t want to be a prick about it, but yeah, he’s got a PhD in basically interviewing former Labor leaders. Whereas Angus is a Rhodes scholar and economist.”
Karen Andrews likes Taylor, saying he is a “deep thinker” and good strategically, but he has lacked a slogan as clear-cut for the evening news as, say, “stop the boats”.
That may be changing.
In the US election campaign, Trump asked supporters whether their lives were better now than four years ago, a line repurposed from Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign 44 years ago. That had resonance, Sukkar says.
“ ‘Are you better off than you were three years ago?’ That’s the question that will be asked. A statement in the form of a question. Yeah, I’m all for simplifying messages,” the shadow housing minister tells The Saturday Paper. “It’s not a traditional Tony Abbott slogan, but I think it will be the line that’s ultimately run by Angus and others between now and the election.”
It is a long way from Taylor’s pre-politics career in consulting, which favoured the stilted language of the C-suite.
Taylor’s time with his older brother, Charlie, at global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co brought him success, most notably in his contribution to the founding of multinational dairy cooperative Fonterra. But there were significant losses, too, such as the failure of agribusiness dotcom Farmshed. He later became a director at Australian boutique consulting firm Port Jackson Partners.
A former McKinsey partner, who did not work with Taylor, describes the firm’s way of tasking their smartest people with finding quick solutions to tough problems for top clients.
“They do a lot of training around project management, like how to set up a project, how to structure it, in order to get something done rapidly, but to a high level of quality,” the former partner says. “You’re taught how to communicate starting with the answer and then explaining second. It doesn’t teach you to be personable, right?”
Other McKinsey alumni in the current parliament include Labor minister Clare O’Neil, independent MP Allegra Spender, Liberal frontbencher David Coleman, and Scott Morrison’s successor in the Sydney seat of Cook, Simon Kennedy.
A 2019 article about Taylor in The Australian Financial Review described him as being “lured into politics” from the consultancy, when he embarked on his campaign for the seat of Hume that he won in 2013. His initial focus after a term on the back bench was as assistant minister for cities and the digital transformation under Malcolm Turnbull, then as minister for law enforcement and cybersecurity.
A longstanding critic of wind-farm projects – despite his acceptance of climate science – his profile rose when he stepped up to the energy portfolio in 2018, and his support for Dutton at the time of Turnbull’s leadership spill ultimately led to his appointment as minister for energy and emissions reduction in the Morrison government.
His tenure in cabinet was marked by several controversies. Questions were raised over the $80 million in water buybacks in 2017 for a company based in the Cayman Islands and co-founded by Taylor. He said he was not involved in structuring the company.
Two years later, a company connected to Taylor was accused of illegally clearing critically endangered grasslands in the NSW Monaro region. He maintained he acted within parliamentary rules.
Also in 2019, allegations arose that his office had fabricated figures in documents sent to the News Corp tabloid The Daily Telegraph, showing travel expenses for Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore that were greatly overstated. An Australian Federal Police investigation into the incident was dropped, and Taylor apologised “unreservedly” to Moore for the incorrect figures.
Taylor declined to be interviewed for this profile.
Kennedy, a factional ally and a McKinsey partner after Taylor’s time there, says he could have stayed in the private sector. “Angus had a stellar consulting career, which he could have continued until retirement,” he tells The Saturday Paper.
“He’s got a very sharp, analytical mind. That’s where he’s best. Angus is incredibly good at analytics and pulling out insights from data, and whether that’s economic analysis or any other type of analytic analysis. It is exceptionally good.”
Some colleagues see him as not being challenged.
“He has it too easy. He looks good because Chalmers looks bad. The government is losing the economic fight,” one Liberal MP tells The Saturday Paper. “The lesson from 2022 was you can’t say vote for us because we are better than the other guys. Where is the Coalition’s bold reform in economics?
“We need to raise the GST to 15 per cent while reducing the company tax rate and raising the tax-free threshold, pensions and JobSeeker, but it won’t happen.”
The opposition has departed somewhat from its traditional profile as the party of business, signalling that it will favour the needs of small business owners over large corporations. Dutton has attacked companies such as Woolworths and Qantas for pursuing “woke” agendas such as dropping Australia Day merchandise and supporting the “Yes” campaign for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament last year.
Amid Australian Competition and Consumer Commission findings of non-competitive behaviour and price gouging by supermarket giants Coles and Woolworths, the Coalition has run with the National Party’s calls for divestiture laws that would break up “Big Grocery”. Chalmers has positioned this as a test of Taylor’s control: there is umbrage among the Liberals that the party is being led by its junior coalition partner on competition policy and on other economic policies.
Taylor has said that power would be used only if it could drive “a substantial improvement in competition”, and promised to ensure the benefits wouldn’t be eclipsed by losses of jobs or shareholder value.
“This isn’t some kind of insurgency from the National Party,” a senior source tells The Saturday Paper. “This is good Coalition policy.”
In the lead-up to the election that will happen by May next year, there is now a united tactics team of Dutton, Taylor, Sukkar and Tehan. There is a clear opposition focus on immigration and cost of living, echoing the themes that animated the US electorate.
Tehan says a long game is under way.
“[Taylor is] being patient, but he’s being very precise in his analysis and what’s needed to fix this high inflationary environment. And that’s why we’re currently clearly winning the economic narrative.
“People are once again seeing us as the superior economic manager, as the ones who are best placed to deal with cost of living, and that’s been because we’ve been able to demonstrate that the government has had its priorities wrong.”
Public polling suggests the advantage has swung back to the Coalition on the question of which party is the best economic manager, however Taylor is yet to close the deal with the Australian public on who is best placed to serve as treasurer. He has less than six months to do so.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 16, 2024 as "Can Angus Taylor be treasurer?".
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