One Nation’s Pauline Hanson has revealed her pick to head right-wing counterparts the Liberals after dismissing its current leader as a ‘smarmy management consultant’.
Angus Taylor became the first sitting opposition leader to address the Australian Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Brisbane on Saturday as the coalition and One Nation vied for the fractured right-wing vote.
But Senator Hanson emerged the crowd favourite as she made jibes about her conservative rivals while also offering to ‘put personal history aside’ and team up with the Coalition to remove Labor from government.
Opposition frontbenchers headlined on Sunday as their leaders swapped the conference stage for the morning media rounds.
Senator Hanson said she did not ‘want to be around the table’ with the Liberals, but they should still work together to get rid of Labor as it would be extremely hard for either One Nation or the Coalition to govern alone.
A day after suggesting Taylor – a former partner at global consulting firm McKinsey & Company – was a ‘smarmy management consultant’, she also dismissed shadow treasurer and Liberal leadership hopeful Tim Wilson as ‘full of himself’ and ‘woke‘.
‘He put us last in the last election, called us a racist party,’ she told News24.
‘If they’re thinking about Tim Wilson, I think you better think again because I’ve got no time for that man.’
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has revealed her pick to head the Liberal Party
It comes after Hanson slammed current Coalition leader Angus Taylor as a ‘smarmy management consultant’
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Senator Hanson said she got on ‘reasonably well’ with former Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who is reportedly mulling a return to politics after losing his seat at the 2022 election.
But she said former prime minister and current party president Tony Abbott was the person with the best chance of leading the Liberals.
The Coalition has consistently trailed One Nation in the polls since the start of the year, while some surveys have put the anti-immigration party ahead of Labor on primary support.
Taylor said he would welcome Mr Frydenberg ‘playing whatever role he’s able to play’ as he needed ‘every good Liberal with shoulder to the wheel’ in the lead-up to the next election.
But he poured cold water on an idea floated by the former treasurer to raise the GST while lowering income taxes.
‘We will not be raising the GST in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis … we’ll put Australia and Australians first, but we won’t be raising taxes,’ he told ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday.
In an extract from his soon-to-be-published memoir, Frydenberg called on the coalition to ignore calls to appeal to the extremes and instead target the electoral centre.
But during his speech to the conservative conference, Taylor described the coalition under his leadership alongside the Nationals’ Matt Canavan as ‘unashamedly on the right’.
Hanson named former prime minister and current Liberals president Tony Abbott (pictured) as the person with the best chance of leading the party
Opposition energy spokesman Dan Tehan took the stage on Sunday, telling the audience the coalition would axe Labor’s policies to achieve net-zero emissions.
Earlier, Mr Tehan told AAP he was using ‘every forum available’ to inform Australians of the coalition’s energy agenda.
His Labor counterpart, Chris Bowen, said Liberals were competing with One Nation on ‘crazy’.
‘We’re going to see a whole bunch of crazy over the next few days as the Liberal Party and the One Nation party try to outdo each other on the race to the right and the race to the bottom,’ the energy and climate change minister said.
Mainstream journalists – given ‘fake news’ media passes – were not allowed to put questions to leaders at the conference, while some were refused entry outright.
CPAC was imported to Australia from the US in 2019.
