The Liberal Party needs better moderates than Jason Falinski

Jason Falinski sure has been busy.

The former member for Mackellar, one of the six Liberals who lost to independents in 2022’s “teal” wave, is perhaps the most media hungry of the former “moderates”, appearing on Sky News at least weekly — clips he diligently rips and posts to his social media and website.

While fellow teal losers Dave Sharma and Tim Wilson have found their way back into parliament, and Josh Frydenberg bides his time, Falinski shouts from the sidelines, having concluded a stint as NSW Liberal Party president over a year ago.

Since this month’s federal election, Falinski has made at least a dozen media appearances, mostly calling for the Libs to undergo a “reset” — a term he used repeatedly in interviews during the short-lived Coalition split. He’s become Wilson’s biggest hype man, repeatedly suggesting the returned Goldstein MP should be the new leader after showing what it takes to win a seat off a teal (just). In this week’s Sky chat, Falinski became tetchy when corrected on the Goldstein recount — a clip he bafflingly still posted to YouTube.

In this week’s Four Corners on the Liberal Party’s future (a clip the former MP also ripped and posted to YouTube), Falinski was positioned as one of the key moderate voices, arguing the party needs to move away from culture wars to focus on economics. Like others in the party, Falinski has been talking about it reconnecting with “aspiration” — or as he puts it “economic enablement and empowering individuals to live their best lives”.

But is Falinski  — who, like most former MPs, never crossed the floor to prove his moderate credentials when he had the chance — really the best the party can do? Should the party really be taking advice from the man who last year suggested Amelia Hamer step aside and let Josh Frydenberg have another go when the boundaries looked slightly more favourable?

Falinski does genuinely seem to want the party to move to a more electable position — though he was seemingly unable to bring himself to criticise arch-conservative Peter Dutton on Monday’s Four Cornersor to disavow nuclear power.

And yet it’s hard to see him — or his like-minded “moderates” — showing interest in the party returning to the centre-right on economics, with a single-minded obsession with opposing attempts to rein in tax concessions. For all the talk of the need to return to “aspiration”, high-profile moderates like Falinski, Wilson and Sharma seem far more interested in protecting the wealth of the rich, at the expense of those for whom aspiration is now a furphy.

On top of that, Falinski spent the election helping lead coal-funded “Australians for Prosperity”, a vehicle mostly set up to attack the teals over Labor’s modest changes to super tax concessions for the top 0.5%. As Peter Fitzsimmons pointed out on the weekend, there’s some irony to claiming to be a climate-friendly moderate while taking money from the coal lobby.

While many small l-liberals fed up with this conservatism have embraced the more centrist teals, Falinski refuses to accept that the women who defeated him and his colleagues are small-l liberals, insisting they are secret Greens.

So who else is there to seize the moderate mantle? As far as I can see, new-ish NSW senator Maria Kovacic is the lone moderate voice willing to question Liberal economic orthodoxy — an orthodoxy that is hurting the party in the cities and the suburbs, where regular Australians can no longer “aspire” to the lives their parents lived, for all that talk of prosperity. Kovacic was by far the firmest voice on Monday’s Four Cornersand she was also out in front in calling for nuclear to be taken off the table following the election — something Falinski and Wilson seem unwilling to do.

Ultimately, some of the biggest obstacles to true Liberal renewal may be figures like Falinski, “moderate” men who failed to stand up on climate or integrity when they had the chance, and are now insisting on doubling down on the class warfare, believing all the party needs is a “rebadge”, and a new coat of greenwash paint.

It’s time for a new generation of moderate Liberals to come through, people who are willing to actually fight for a party of liberalism. Falinski and co are standing in the way.