I first got to know Andrew Hastie when he was still in the SAS, through mutual friends during my regular trips to Perth lecturing at the university. 

Even then, he was plainly interested in politics.

I tried, at first, to talk him out of it. Not because he lacked the ability. I figured either he would be dragooned into a marginal seat, where his military service might help on the stump but leave him hostage to the electoral tide, or he would have to spend years inside the party machine trying to stitch up something safer - a process I suspected would drive him bonkers. 

Neither option sounded appealing to me, and I tried to convince him of the same.

Then Don Randall, the member for Canning, suddenly and unexpectedly died, forcing a by-election in his seat the Liberals needed to win. I got hold of Hastie's mobile number and called him. 

This, I told him, was his chance, if he really wanted it. A safe seat for which the Liberals needed a quality marginal-seat-style candidate to offset the inevitable anti-government by-election swing.

He didn't live in the electorate. Frankly, he didn't seem especially sure where it even was, much less who Don Randall was. To be fair, Hastie had a newborn baby and life would have been a blur at that time. Plus, he was based on the other side of town at the SAS barracks at Swanbourne, having grown up in Sydney.

I had no ties to either side of politics, but I was in a position to put Hastie in touch with some of the WA Liberal powerbrokers who might be able to make things happen, so I left them to work it all out, or not.

He was eventually preselected with support from a broad range of people in the party, at a difficult moment for then PM Tony Abbott, who couldn't afford to lose the by-election with the polls where they were and Malcolm Turnbull supporters agitating for change. 

Hastie campaigned for most of the high-profile by-election alongside Abbott, as you would expect. By polling day, however, Turnbull was Prime Minister, the leadership coup preceding the by-election by a matter of days. So Hastie entered Parliament in one of those neat political ironies: a conservative warrior-style candidate, elevated in an Abbott-era contest, being congratulated in victory by a new Liberal leader who sat almost entirely on the other side of the party's ideological divide.

That was more than a decade ago. Today, Hastie is one of the senior figures in the Opposition with open ambitions to one day lead the Liberals. He looks, at first glance, like the Liberal right's laboratory-built future leader: a former SAS captain who served in Afghanistan, and speaks the language of faith, family and national service. 

Hastie is socially conservative without sounding like a shock jock. He is hawkish on defence, China and national security; sceptical of net zero; suspicious of technocratic progressivism; and increasingly willing to talk about manufacturing, sovereignty and national resilience in ways that appeal to the modern right's post-free-market mood.

He is not a libertarian, not a wet, and not a managerial moderate in search of the least offensive sentence when fronting the media or pitching to colleagues. Hastie is, in many respects, exactly the sort of figure the Liberal right has long said that it wants: values-driven, martial, articulate, serious and young enough to be talked about as part of the future rather than a relic of the past.

And yet the Hastie story is nowhere near that simple.

The contradiction is that the man who should be a pin-up boy for the conservative establishment has managed to find himself on the wrong side of some of its most powerful emotional, institutional and media networks in recent times.

The most obvious example is Ben Roberts-Smith.

For many on the right, BRS remains a culture war symbol: the decorated soldier, the Victoria Cross recipient, the man they believe was hounded by the media and betrayed by elites. 

For others, including the courts in the defamation proceedings, the story looks very different. Roberts-Smith lost his defamation case against Nine, and then lost his appeal, with findings against him made on the civil standard. He denies wrongdoing and, in the criminal process, is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Hastie's place in that saga is politically awkward.

He gave evidence in the defamation proceedings, and has never been part of the chorus defending BRS. More recently, BRS's partner, Sarah Matulin, called Hastie a 'traitor' in a since-deleted social media comment on an Anzac Day post, before apologising and saying it was a mistake.

Traitor is strong language, to say the least, especially about someone like Hastie. That is the first Hastie paradox: his military past gives him a certain authority, but it also drags him into one of the most divisive military controversies in modern Australian public life - one that is set to last for years.

The second Hastie paradox is Western Australia.

He represents Canning, but he is not originally a creature of WA's old political, media and business networks. He came to the state, and made himself a national figure from nothing. 

Yet in WA, the nexus between politics, mining wealth and media power is unusually tight. Gina Rinehart has publicly criticised what she regards as the relentless attacks on BRS. Kerry Stokes, through his long association with Seven West Media and BRS, has been central to the wider public architecture around the VC recipient's story.

In a state where Seven and The West Australian remain dominant, where mining power matters, and where BRS hails from and still has passionate defenders, Hastie's position is complicated.

That complication has not only been external. It has also extended into Hastie's relationship with Peter Dutton, the former Opposition leader and for years the unofficial leader of the Liberal right.

On paper, the two men should have been natural allies: national security conservatives, socially cautious, and suspicious of progressive orthodoxies. 

Yet party insiders have long speculated about the origins of their simmering feud, and about the reality that they never particularly got along or had much time for one another.

Instead of a mentor-protégé relationship forming between the established conservative strongman and the rising conservative warrior, the tension between them became another Hastie paradox.

The same is true online. Hastie cops a surprising amount of trolling and abuse from sections of the right, despite the fact that this is meant to be his natural constituency.

For a politician who looks, on paper, like the sort of conservative many of them claim to want, he is often treated less like a future leader than an apostate who has somehow betrayed the tribe. The Roberts-Smith situation has only added to the online attacks Hastie receives.

The next Hastie paradox is ideological.

His conservatism isn't the old economic dry argument reheated for today. Hastie talks about manufacturing, strategic industry, energy security and national resilience in ways that the dries would have argued against. That places him closer to the new hard right than the old market liberalism of yesteryear. Hastie sounds less like a Thatcherite (John Howard's political hero) and more like a conservative nationalist: pro-business, sure, but not always pro-market, and suspicious of globalisation.

That might help him with parts of the base that think the Liberal Party has forgotten workers, families and industrial capability. But it also unsettles the few remaining economic liberals who still think the party's pathway back to relevance is smaller government, lower taxes and market discipline.

So Hastie splits the right even as he seeks to become its political messiah.

The same applies socially. His Christian conservatism makes him authentic to supporters tired of poll-tested emptiness; however, it also makes him easy to caricature in some constituencies the Liberals need to win back. The party can't rebuild only in outer suburban churches and within anti-net-Zero Facebook threads. It also needs women, younger voters, professionals and the metropolitan seats it has been bleeding to Labor and the teals.

Hastie's problem is not that he lacks a constituency. It is that his constituency risks being too intense before it becomes broad enough.

Which is why the Roberts-Smith issue is more than just a strange footnote. It exposes the tension at the heart of Hastie's appeal. He is a conservative who can be attacked by conservatives. A military man who can be denounced by defenders of a military hero. A Western Australian MP who doesn't fit neatly within WA's conservative establishment. And he is a right-winger whose economics isn't based on principles many Liberals grew up with.

None of which means Hastie won't still lead the Liberal Party one day.

In fact, the very existence of these contradictions is part of what makes him an interesting character who gets attention. He's not another interchangeable frontbencher waiting for a vacancy who is easily forgotten.

He has a story, but he also has enemies.