Andrew Hastie was doing fine on Insiders. Comfortable, well-prepared, well-practiced. Returning David Speers’ softballs without breaking a sweat. Then he said this:

Multinationals and big business in this country have lost their social licence and they’ve made no effort to recover it.

Social licence. The tell is right there in the words which I suspect he said by going off script, speaking outside the points his staff put to him.

There is one kind of licence to operate - the kind issued by government following an act of parliament. Everything else is busybodies with no skin in the game inserting themselves into decisions that are not theirs to make.

The “social licence” concept is socialism in bespoke tailoring, and anyone who reaches for it instinctively is telling you something about how they think.

He also offered this gem:

The Liberal Party is not the first line of defence for Corporate Australia.

Fair enough, as far as it goes. But the fact that it needed saying at all is the problem.

Government’s job is not to shill for corporations. It is to create the conditions for business to thrive: low tax, low regulation, rule of law.

Pro-markets, not pro-business.

These are not complicated ideas.

What Hastie is revealing is the Canberra brain. The assumption, deeply held and rarely examined, that government is the prime mover of national life. That society and the economy are things to be planned, centrally planned, from a distant city, by a group of overpaid commissars entirely detached from the consequences of their own bad decisions.

Here is the core problem with the modern Liberal Party and why they are struggling electorally.

They are not liberal. Too few of them are actually liberal in any meaningful sense. Which is why they are bleeding votes to the Teals and One Nation. Because they are essentially all the same when it comes to the giant and overbearing role for government.

Others may be impressed. I am certainly not.

If Andrew Hastie is the answer, the wrong question is being asked.