09/06/2026
ANDREW HASTIE
The Nolan Principles and one MP who lives some of them and wears the rest as a brand.
You may have already made your mind up about Andrew Hastie, the soldier, the China hawk, the leadership-in-waiting. But the only question this series asks is how he conducts himself in office.
In 1995 the United Kingdom drew up the Seven Principles of Public Life, the Nolan Principles, after a run of scandals. They’re now the benchmark for how public officials should behave. They are: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership.
Australia has no binding national version of this code. Most of the political class falls short of it. So the fair test isn’t perfection, it’s how a figure measures against what’s actually achievable.
Start with what holds up, because plenty does. Hastie is no lightweight: former SAS troop commander, MP for Canning since 2015, now Deputy Liberal Leader in the House and in 2025 the only Perth Liberal to swing toward his own party while the rest of the city ran the other way.
On honesty: he gave sworn evidence about a fellow soldier in the Ben Roberts-Smith matter, and may testify again in the war-crimes trial, at real cost, with One Nation now hunting his seat over it.
On accountability: as the commander on the ground in Afghanistan in 2013, when soldiers in his troop severed the hands of dead fighters, he ordered it stopped and reported it up the chain.
On objectivity and leadership: he drove the foreign-interference laws to unanimous cross-party committee support, working with Labor on a threat now widely accepted.
On openness: clean disclosures, one mortgaged home, no shares, no trusts, no expenses scandal while others were caught out. Credit where it’s due.
But measure the brand against the conduct.
On accountability: in 2018 he used parliamentary privilege, where he can’t be sued, to name a private citizen, donor Chau Chak Wing, over an allegation that man could never answer in court. Then-PM Turnbull said members “have to explain” doing that. Naming someone where they can’t fight back is the opposite of submitting to scrutiny yourself.
On objectivity: in 2019 he lent his senior intelligence-committee weight to a self-described Chinese defector, calling him a “friend of democracy” while Australia’s own agencies were quietly sceptical and working to rule out a double agent. The man’s asylum was later refused after a fraud finding. Conviction ran ahead of the evidence.
On openness, the other way: “strangers in our own home.” An independent MP said it echoed Enoch Powell. Hastie says it’s about housing and numbers, not race and he’s separately called multiculturalism “a strength.” Real data, contested framing and you can weigh that yourself.
None of it is proven corruption. That matters, and it’s stated plainly. What it adds up to is a pattern: a real factual base every time, then a contested call laid on top name the man who can’t answer, back the source before the facts are in, reach for the sharpest words available.
You can disagree with every policy Andrew Hastie holds. That’s politics. But the Nolan Principles aren’t about whether you like someone’s views, they’re about how they conduct themselves in office. Honestly. Transparently. Accountably.
And it doesn’t have to be this way. Australian politics has working examples, people who chase documents through formal channels until they’re released, who submit to scrutiny without obstruction, whose critics still find nothing improper. Those examples are real. Hastie had them available. On some principles he meets them squarely; on others he chose differently. The gap between what he lives and what he brands, that’s the finding.
The reader decides if that’s acceptable.
Cold hard facts. Sourced. Corrected when wrong.
What’s your thoughts…?
Peter Lyndon-James 🇦🇺
