Taylor was billed as CPAC’s keynote speaker. He looked more like Hanson’s support act

Sometimes the first person to the podium is the keynote speaker. Sometimes they are a warm-up act. In the cavernous main chamber of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Brisbane this weekend, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor learnt that lesson.

Despite the wash of Liberal blue light painting the conference centre, and the watchful eyes of party founder Sir Robert Menzies looking down upon him from an enormous banner, Taylor couldn’t help but be overshadowed by the woman who has pillaged his party’s primary vote and set the political agenda for almost a year now.

In the course of a careening speech that somehow always found its way back to a knife twist in the side of the Liberal Party, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson whipped the crowd into a frenzy with a clear-eyed offering to set aside past grievances with the Coalition and form government after the next election.

Even as her lieutenant Barnaby Joyce delivered a rambling and, at points, flatly bizarre economics lecture that somehow touched on hyperinflation under Roman emperor Caracalla, the Kazakh government’s investment in gold, and sabre-toothed tigers, the crowd could not get enough.

Almost the entire audience rose to their feet at the end of both speeches, before large numbers promptly filed out of the room as Nationals leader Matt Canavan followed Hanson, and deputy leader Bridget McKenzie followed Joyce.

As the first sitting Liberal leader to address the once counter-cultural conference, Taylor, and Nationals leader Matt Canavan offered nothing new beyond a refreshed mea culpa to straying Coalition voters and a marked reticence to comment on any deal-making with One Nation. The crowd was not quick to rise after either speech.

Their comments were almost the polar opposites of the two clear points Hanson offered: conservative voters should not forget the Coalition’s policy failures in the last government; and she would happily form government with Taylor and Canavan to give Prime Minister Anthony Albanese the boot.

Despite repeated heckling for Taylor to offer a full-throated plan to team up with One Nation, the opposition leader stuck to well-worn territory: the Albanese government was socialist, power-hungry and hates aspiration, and the only thing Labor loves more than destroying industry was keeping their voters on government handouts.

Both Taylor and Canavan had high points. Their dismissal of net zero and plans to back Australian industry were clearly appreciated, and the party’s praetorian guard made their best effort.

Frontbencher Phil Thompson offered an emotional off-the-cuff retelling of his experiences fighting in Afghanistan, after Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price waved an enormous Australian flag while singing the national anthem. Both were well received but that’s hardly the problem.

In a room full of conservatives, some literally in tears as they reached out with their phones for a selfie with Hanson, the leader of what until recently was Australia’s most successful political party felt like an afterthought.

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