Like the United States, Australian conservatism is dealing with multiple factions such as nativists, economic rationalists and social conservatives. However, like US conservatism the basis is Schmittian;

The charge against liberalism is that liberalism promotes a civicly divisive pluralism and that the public sphere is little more than the chattering classes indulging their narcissism to unending discussion or ever lasting conversation. Decisive decisions on tough issues are what is needed--not endless chatter.

This leads to the existential unavoidability of exceptional emergency situations (the state of emergency) and the necessity of an unaccountable sovereign defending/guarding the Australian people from external threat in unusual and threatening times.

This is deeply embedded in western culture form Roman times. Cincinnattus was a Roman farmer who was plucked from his fields to defend Rome from the Gauls. To do so he took the temporary constitutional position of dictator and after defeating the Gauls, retired back to his fields.

Caesar used this path as well - just without the retiring bit. He claimed himself as dictator for life. Augustus' innovation was to use the constitutional position of Tribune to ensure permanent imperium and freedom from political persecution by the Senate via the Tribune's ability to veto.

The problem with a Schmittian reading of the failure of Liberalism is that its solution breaks constitutional liberalism and ultimately the capability for good governance. As such it is a temporal solution. The chaos that the US Republican Party finds itself in currently is a result of this.

Carl Schmitt argued that without a friend-enemy distinction there was no 'political'. Increasingly that division is rotating around the distinction between reason and irrationalism. Reason is often construed as a political outlet for liberalism. (more)

One of the results of an exception being created is that the politics become unitary. Essentially the politics around the exception or emergency become the executive and executive's alone. The health of liberal democracy is dependent upon political competition, discussion and deliberation. Removed of its liberal component democracy is reduced to the mechanical action of voting. (more)

John C. Halez has a thought provoking article on Gary's site where he writes: "no legal system is autonomously self-subsistent and self-regulating, but rather all legal systems will contain areas of indeterminacy, unpredictable and depending on historical circumstances and conditions, which must be 'supplemented' by political decisions." (more)

One of the hard parts of Carl Schmitt's writing is determining what he calls the 'political'. Tracy Strong writes in the introduction to The Concept of the Political that to Schmitt it is "the arena of authority rather then general law and requires decisions which are singular, absolute and final". Since that is his definition of the political it is easy to see how Schmitt made the leap to believing that the only determinant of true sovereignty is a governor who operates under a state of exception. (more)