Andrew Hastie delivered the Tom Hughes Oration in Sydney at the beginning of last week. It was ostensibly a speech about artificial intelligence, sovereignty and the future of Australia. 

Whether Hastie admits it or not, it was also his first public pitch to replace Angus Taylor as Liberal leader.

Hastie, the shadow minister for industry and sovereign capability, used the prism of artificial intelligence to construct a large, sweeping argument about national independence, energy abundance, Australia's strategic vulnerability, and the collapse of educational standards. 

He painted a picture of a country that must stop behaving like a passive middle power waiting for others to shape its destiny.

It was ambitious, had scale, and was unmistakably a new leadership manifesto. And it landed at a moment when the Liberal Party is desperate for someone to look like they know where the country is going and how to manage it.

Taylor took over the leadership from Sussan Ley promising a change in party fortunes. So far, any change has mostly been for the worse. 

The Coalition's primary vote has turned to complete custard, while One Nation continues its unprecedented surge.

Pauline Hanson is now doing things in the polls that would once have been dismissed as outright impossible, given the durability of the two-party system, including overtaking Anthony Albanese as preferred prime minister in one major survey just last week. 

Taylor's personal numbers are so bad as to render him irrelevant.

This is the terminal danger for Taylor, and unless something changes the Liberal Party. 

Opposition leaders can survive being unpopular, and they can even survive internal grumbling if the party room believes the underlying strategy is working. What they can't survive is utter irrelevance, yet that's precisely where Taylor is now.

He should have gained significant traction after a budget as unpopular as the one Labor just delivered. Regardless of your view on Jim Chalmers' tax agenda, spending choices, and cost-of-living patch-ups, the budget handed the opposition a free kick. 

Instead, Hanson has taken advantage of Labor's broken promises, barnstorming the country with her 'fire the liar' slogan - one she reportedly pinched from Peta Credlin's TV show. 

Which is exactly why Hastie's speech matters so much. A senior MP who has never hidden his leadership ambitions actively demonstrated that he has a coherent argument for the future, right when Taylor is struggling.

Hastie argued that Australia missed its chance to become a nuclear power in the last century, leaving us permanently dependent on the American nuclear umbrella. This century, he warns that we risk making the same mistake with artificial intelligence. 

Hastie says we either become an AI sovereign power, or we become an AI supplicant.

What does that mean? 

In plain English, he's saying Australia either builds enough of its own AI capability to shape its future, or we become dependent on foreign tech giants and other governments for the tools that will increasingly run our economy, defence systems and public life. 

It's an important warning, and more importantly it's vastly bigger picture than anything Taylor, Albo or Hanson are currently offering.

Hastie wasn't speaking in the tired, old Liberal language of marginal tax rates and small business aspiration. He was talking about national power. 

He also spoke about the Western canon and the dignity of work in an age of machine intelligence. 

Whether you agree with all of what he said or not, it had a seriousness to it that the Liberal Party has been sorely missing for years.

For too long the Liberals have looked like a party arguing with yesterday's ghosts. They just appointed one of them, Tony Abbott, their federal President. Labor is no better, having appointed Wayne Swan as their national President years ago.

Hastie, unashamedly conservative, is declaring that the next Liberal leader must grapple with the world that is coming, and give voters a reason to believe the Liberal Party is capable of governing within it.

Meanwhile Taylor and Albo continue to play in the sandpit of daily politics.

Of course, Hastie carries significant baggage now. He is viewed by many moderates as too hard-edged, too conservative, and too culturally loaded. 

His call to abandon net zero will only complicate his path to the prime ministership, handing Labor and the teals an easy way to drag him back onto historical ground. And he's been immersed in the Ben Roberts-Smith saga too.

But Hastie possesses something Taylor fundamentally lacks: political presence. He sounds like he actually believes in things.

The Liberal Party's core problem is not simply that voters have parked their support elsewhere, it's that those same voters no longer know what the Liberal Party is even around for.

One Nation has a story, crude and incomplete though it may be. Labor has incumbency, spending power, and the machinery of government, alongside the resourcing of the unions.

The Greens have their radical ideology. The teals have affluent moral certainty on issues like climate change. The modern Liberals have nothing at the moment.

Hastie's speech was a deliberate attempt to forge a post-Taylor Liberal argument on issues Hastie is passionate about. 

It's not classical liberalism in the old sense, because it abandons the strict language of small government and open markets. 

In terms of philosophy, it leans more towards De Gaulle than Hayek, prioritising national capability over market purity. But the old Liberal settlement is broken. 

Liberals can't keep pretending that if they talk about lower taxes and Labor waste the voters will eventually come home to them.

That certainty has passed.

Hastie's use of AI is a clever political vehicle, allowing him to talk about energy without sounding obsessed with coal, or education without sounding like a culture warrior. 

He can show care about rising inequality too, without sounding like a Labor redistributionist.

It's remarkable how little we hear about AI from our political leaders, actually. Hastie is clearly looking to change that.

The ultimate question is whether he can secure the numbers to topple Taylor, a fellow traveller on the factional right. Hastie can't do it with conservatives alone. This is where Tim Wilson becomes the crucial variable. 

As shadow treasurer, Wilson gives moderates an alternative future if a Hastie experiment fails. 

Wilson's proximity to the leadership also gets closer with Taylor out of the way, which might be reason enough for some moderates to give Hastie his chance. 

If he succeeds, so does Wilson as shadow treasurer. If Hastie fails, Wilson becomes the obvious alternative next in line.

Moderates don't have to love Hastie, they only have to decide that Taylor is finished, and the WA conservative deserves a shot as the generational change candidate while Wilson waits in the wings.

Leadership challenges rarely begin with a formal declaration. They usually start with speeches just like the one Hastie delivered on Monday night.