Just the mention of the Paris climate treaty – a condition of a European-Australian trade agreement – almost roused The Spectator's Anglo-Australian conference's mostly elderly audience to its feet.
"Who cares!" they cried. "Shame!"
Andrew Neil, the deep-throated Scottish journalist and publisher, was warming up the 120-strong Sydney audience on Friday for the politician they had come to adulate: Nigel Farage, the man who reversed half a century of European integration.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott and British anti-Europe campaigner Nigel Farage at The Spectator conference in Sydney on Friday. Aaron Patrick
On a rare Australian speaking tour, the former leader of the UK Independence Party opened by explaining he wanted to escape political infighting and leadership intrigue at home. "It was all too much, so I thought I would come to Australia," he said.
It may not have been the first time on the trip Farage had deployed the perfectly timed joke, which got big laughs. It certainly wasn't the first time he had condemned the European project, which is a passionate target of resentment among some Spectator-reading conservatives of the other side of the world.
Selective European history
In a baritone deep enough for a professional voice-over artist, Farage gave a selective history of Europe through the eyes of a proud Englishman.
"I asked a cafe owner in Strasbourg if he got many Germans coming through," Farage said. "He said: 'A few every 25 years'."
Although Farage's political party lost all its Westminister seats and is perceived to be a serious decline, Farage promised to lead a new campaign to confirm Brexit under the slogan "Leave Means Leave".
The existence of the almost-fawning audience helped explain why Malcolm Turnbull was never able to tame the Liberal Party. Both Tony Abbott and John Howard received warm welcomes after Farage at the Pier One hotel on Sydney Harbour.
A David Rowe cartoon from 2015 when Malcolm Turnbull was eyeing replacing Tony Abbott as prime minister. David Rowe
Intellectual sustenance
Edited by AFR Weekend columnist Rowan Dean, The Spectator is the intellectual sustenance of social conservatives dubbed "deplorables" by their detractors.
A large Union Jack was displayed behind the speakers, and Sydney Harbour's busy waters glistened behind it, framed by its famous bridge. Anthony Pratt's foundation helped cover the bill. The front door was kept locked to keep out undesirables.
If Turnbull wasn't holidaying in New York and had turned up, he would have likely been met with frosty indifference.
Sceptical about the pace of global warming, multiculturalism and supra-national institutions, they watch Sky News, feel like they are losing control of their country, and silently cheered Abbott's so-called insurgency against Turnbull.
Nigel Farage in front of an EU referendum campaign poster in London in 2016. PHILIP TOSCANO
They have more in common with Mark Latham and Pauline Hanson than Turnbull or Marise Payne, the new foreign minister, and they love Donald Trump, not least because the left hate him.
Even though he was a much-criticised catalyst of the Liberal leadership change, some political commentators have begun talking about an Abbott-led opposition.
Rule Britannica
The British-born and educated Abbott apologised for urging Britons not to leave the European Union two years ago, a decision that triggered a political crisis that persists today.
"That advice I gave the British people, I was wrong," he told the conference. "I cheered the day the results came through."
A demonstrator for the "Leave" campaign holds a placard outside Houses of Parliament in London in 2016. LUKE MACGREGOR
"Hear, hear," the audience responded.
For a few hours, conservative Britain merged with contemporary Australia, and those present dreamt of the former returning to lead the latter.
God save the Queen, because it seems nothing can save the Liberal Party.
Correction: UKIP was not founded by Nigel Farage, as originally reported, although he did join when the party was founded in 1993 by Alan Sked, an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Topics
