Many mainstream Australians would feel as if they’d been dropped in a foreign country at the Conservative Political Action Conference, lost amid oblique references to transgender swimmers, blue hair, women’s bathrooms, jokes about falling off stages and Matt Canavan in hi-vis and speed dealer sunnies.

It’s an interesting spectacle. At this year’s conference in Brisbane, rightwing campaigner Monica Smit was deep in conversation with a Donald Trump impersonator, opera singers belted out the national anthem (the first verse, twice, for unknown reasons), senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and her folk singer husband sang the anthem again, and Karl Stefanovic jokingly thanking CPAC for “rudely interrupting my unemployment”.

Stickers depicting Albanese with a Pinocchio nose, holding a brown burlap sack and a large blue sex toy emblazoned with “United Nations global citizen award” were found in the conference hall and in the men’s urinals. They carried no authorisation message, and did not appear to be officially endorsed by CPAC. Journalists were asked to wear a large red media accreditation lanyard emblazoned with “FAKE NEWS” – a gag CPAC has been pulling for years.

There was Barnaby Joyce handing out a few notes as props during his free-wheeling lecture about the value of money and the historical silver content of Roman coins, and seemingly every One Nation figure with a public profile (besides Farrer MP David Farley) wandering the halls.

Alongside boilerplate rightwing chaff like lower taxes, fiscal discipline and welfare, CPAC is a hotbed for hyper-engaged conservatives riled up on the red cordial of Sky After Dark. Last year’s event featured speakers criticising Peter Dutton as “Labor-lite”.

For all the twisting rabbit holes which various speeches followed, there was only really one prevailing theme which most boiled down to, and which this year’s conference revolved around.

Preferences.

To put it more accurately, the conference was about how Australia’s conservative right planned to boot Albanese and Labor out of office at the next election. With 94 Labor seats, and a splintered rightwing vote with Angus Taylor’s diminished Coalition opposition being whacked by Pauline Hanson’s surging One Nation, it’s a tall task.

To attend this year’s CPAC was to see Australia’s right recognising in real-time that they needed to figure out a way to cooperate; that for all the mocking of Albanese Labor as allegedly “the worst government in history”, conservatives face a third successive election defeat.

CPAC, in messages to attenders, identified what it saw as the problem: “If you support One Nation but won’t preference the Coalition, or support the Coalition but won’t preference One Nation, you risk reinstalling Labor.”

But identifying the problem is only half the challenge. By the conference’s end, it wasn’t clear how parties of the right would, or could, cooperate. While Hanson signed a pledge to “to work together”, challenging Taylor and Canavan to follow suit, it came hours after she’d told the conference they shouldn’t trust the Coalition, and appeared to call the Liberal leader a “smarmy management consultant” unfit to replace Albanese.

Hanson at CPAC 2025 said she would “no longer be the bridesmaid” to the Coalition. She seems wedded to that, and said the ball was in Taylor’s court as to how their two parties would coexist.

Taylor had earlier dodged questions from Karl Stefanovic – to boos from the audience – about how the Coalition should cooperate with One Nation. He tried burnishing his conservative credentials by apologising for net zero, pandemic spending and immigration increases under Coalition governments, and later claiming “I know how to get Australia out of the hole Labor has put us in”, but it was clear many here had only come to see the Hanson show.

In previous years, the mood at the conference has been a decent weathervane indicating where the wind of the right is blowing.

In 2022, CPAC’s prevailing theme was urging the opposition to oppose the Indigenous voice referendum; a month later, the Nationals did, later followed by the Liberals. In 2025, alarmed Coalition speakers begged attenders for their loyalty in the face of One Nation’s rise, culture warriors railed against Sussan Ley’s leadership, and Canavan said the Liberals were on “the cusp” of dropping net zero. Within months, the Coalition split again, the Liberals dumped net zero and then Ley, and Hanson’s surge continued.

There’s some way to go before the next election, due by May 2028. The conservative side of politics still lays splintered. We’ll look back on this weekend to see if it was the start of the right’s rebuild, or just another forum to bag the prime minister.