Tony Abbott is back in Budapest telling the West that "the best migrants are our own children"

The pronatalists, immigration fearmongers and Christian coercives are having another gabfest in Hungary. Australians should be paying attention.

Bernard Keane, Crikey’s politics editor, got excited this week about the imperative to replace Angus “more Australian babies” Taylor at the helm of Australia’s main* conservative political party with the much smarter “MAGA right” Andrew Hastie. We don’t know quite how “coercive Christian” Hastie’s ideology is, but we know he is on the Christian Nationalist Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Advisory Board. The fact that Hastie is in the national conservative faction of Australian rightwing politics and mentored by Tony Abbott means that what Tony Abbott does matters.

Tony Abbott is back in Budapest at the Atlas Network-linked Danube Institute, providing the first keynote speech at the Family Formation and the Future Conference.

Abbott moved from the lectern to a panel with Claremont Institute and Heritage Foundation’s Scott Yenor. That man’s extreme bigotries and allegiances need to be heard to recognise the significance of Abbott appearing alongside him.

The days’ program contains a grim spattering of American actors, including the US Deputy Secretary of State providing opening remarks in a video message: this suggests where the event is ranked within the Trump posse’s priorities during the war with Iran. Another American is Ammon Blair from the Atlas Network partner the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where his specialty is “border security”. He works for a private sector beneficiary of related state contracts. A fourth is Delano Squires, Director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing at the Heritage Foundation. (The DeVos family is one of the Christofascist Council for National Policy’s main mega-donors.)

The Heritage Foundation (ex? Atlas) has just released its report advising the US to steer women away from higher education and careers, promoting early marriage and breeding to address the “population crisis”. One of the recommendations is a “marriage bootcamp” to pressure unmarried families into marital orthodoxy. There is no scope for family models outside divinely sanctioned marriage.

John O’Sullivan gave the conference’s welcoming remarks as founder and president of the Institute. He is one of the original of this era’s Mont Pelerin Society and Atlas Network think tank promoters, with a particular emphasis on fearmongering about immigration and family formation.

Most of the conference’s speakers come from an assortment of European radicalising Right political factions and front groups. One example is Laoise de Brún BL, Irish terf and anti-abortion activist. She was interviewed on the Australian Atlas Network affiliate Dan Ryan’s interesting podcast last July.

Also to be screened at the conference is the Danube Institute’s first “documentary” which appears to be a classic piece of dystopian propaganda about the “threat” posed by immigration.

It should be noted that Abbott was probably not the most extreme person speaking at the conference, given that he was able to acknowledge migration’s ability to bring (as summarised by the Hungarian Conservative) “economic and cultural benefits”.

He blamed migration and multiculturalism for creating a “nation of tribes”. Note the connotations of primitivism associated with immigrant communities in his choice of noun.

The gist of the days’ activity was that immigration poses an existential threat across the West. The concurrent emphasis on the failure of Western nations’ women to marry early and have big families made this event part of the “race suicide” and “Great Replacement” narratives of the far right. More of these actors will be inspired and networked to harm any of the “woke” people who dare to live outside the narrowest mandate of “traditional” married and procreative (White) lives.

Andrew Hastie’s decision last September to move beyond dogwhistles to declare that immigation is making Australians feel like “strangers” in our own country ought to have made any thoughtful member of the commentariat cautious.

It might be easy for Bernard Keane, however, to be excited about Tony Abbott’s apprentice as leader of the Liberal Party: Keane belongs to the cohort with which the rest of us have long worked to gain equality. Middle class White male citizens will be one of the last cohorts to lose safety and rights if the national conservative minority gains power in Australia.

*The Liberal Party is no longer anywhere near conservative, having driven out all its electable talent and the actual conservatives. The party looks to be on the brink of crumbling at federal and most state levels at the moment, perhaps to be replaced by the nativist populist One Nation. Whether it can rebuild is a gargantuan challenge, particularly since it seems to have been abandoned by key big donors. For overseas readers, the Party was named for economic liberalism and has moved to occupy ever further Right positions, much of that under the influence of Atlas Network partner activity.