How does a divided centre right avoid the horror of handing Labor a third term to continue wrecking everything?

That was the conundrum CPAC founder Andrew Cooper and his Chairman Warren Mundine valiantly tried to solve as conservatives gathered for their annual sanity certification therapy session in Brisbane at the weekend.

Spoiler alert. They failed.

Nonetheless, platforming Angus Taylor, Pauline Hanson, and Matt Canavan as ‘CPAC-endorsed’ was a good start.

This was the first time a Liberal Leader had attended.

It’s now cool to be conservative.

But it was lost on no one that the only reason Angus Taylor was there was because of the orange surge.

In the minds of the CPAC crowd, TLD – Total Liberal Death – is looming. It’s a prospect that also worries many of the Libs who have remained.

The orange wave could even kick the biggest of own goals by washing arguably the most talented of the three leaders, Canavan, from the Parliament.

Conservatives are justifiably incandescent with rage at the political class, but they should be careful what they wish for.

Burning the house down is not the answer.

Speaking to his former base, Taylor began well with mea culpas aplenty.

‘We made the mistake as a government of signing up to Net Zero – which I detested from the get-go.’

Detested is not how Taylor looked in 2021 as he and Barnaby Joyce waved Scott Morrison off on the plane to Glasgow to sign our economic death warrant.

But Taylor is different now, he says.

‘Your frustrations about where we let you down in the recent past are understandable and reasonable.’

No kidding.

Then there was this.

‘Together with Matt Canavan’s leadership of the Nationals, the Coalition is once again conviction-led and unashamedly on the right.’

You could almost read the collective mind of the CPAC crowd – we’ll believe it when we see it.

‘And we’ve got a bold agenda to save our country – no more small target,’ Taylor said, with a straight face.

Again, we all want to believe this.

Despite the Liberals squibbing the ‘what is a woman’ debate during their nine years in government, Taylor now says the Liberals know what a woman is and will fight with the likes of Sall Grover to restore sanity to the Sex Discrimination Act.

Nonetheless Taylor gave a solid speech with a measure of gravitas.

He’s not charismatic but neither was John Howard. Taylor looked Prime Ministerial.

And he came with policy prescriptions, not just popularism.

‘We will pay down Labor’s trillion-dollars-of-debt by banking resource revenue windfalls into a Future Generations Fund.’

A permanent $50,000 instant asset write-off for businesses with a turnover of under $10 million is proposed to increase productivity and a Coalition government will dig and drill for coal and gas.

With due respect to Pauline for her courage and for the necessary disruption she has brought, it is hard to disagree with Taylor’s proposition that he and Matt would provide ‘the most credible alternative government to deliver the change our country desperately needs’.

But this would only work unless there was a big cohort of orange on the floor of the House of Representatives to vanquish the Liberals’ so-called ‘moderates’.

It’s hard to imagine a Prime Minister Pauline Hanson leading a functional One Nation government. Barnaby Joyce is the only one in her party with experience in high office.

Many will say that One Nation can’t do any worse than what we have had for the past 19 years. That is a powerful argument which speaks to the disaster this period has been.

But going into an election, which could be as early as this time next year, with two potential Prime Ministers from the centre right is untenable.

This must be sorted or risk baking in another Labor-Greens government.

The best CPAC could come up with was a strategy to put Labor last, thereby ensuring that voters didn’t allow their votes to exhaust by failing to number every box.

That message is critical to ensuring that whatever happens, preference flows mean the three centre right parties exchange them and thereby maximise their votes.

And it was the one point of agreement between the three leaders.

Taylor was respectful to Hanson but lost the room when he wouldn’t appear on stage with her.

His sit down with podcaster Karl Stefanovic was conducted separately and when Taylor repeatedly wouldn’t answer how he would work with Hanson someone yelled ‘answer the question’.

It was a disastrous moment. You can’t come to CPAC and do pollie waffle.

But Hanson didn’t help by labelling Taylor ‘some smarmy management consultant’.

In a room where she was the rock star, she can say what she likes.

Despite the jibe, she said: ‘One Nation will work with the Liberals and Nationals to remove this Labor government.’

Let’s hope so because conservative voters need to know what that looks like. They need to know who the leader is that they are getting behind.

If the right is not united, it won’t be just the Libs that face total death.

In the meantime, there is a lot of water to go under the bridge.

How One Nation fares in Victoria and NSW will bring sharper focus to the questions CPAC was trying to answer.

In the mix in these state elections is Family First with Moira Deeming and myself seeking seats in the Victorian and NSW Upper Houses respectively.

Unlike One Nation, Family First does not seek to govern, simply to influence.

Lyle Shelton is National Director of Family First and the party’s lead candidate for the NSW Legislative Council.

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