Cory Bernardi has left the band. The extreme right-wing senator from South Australia proved good on his threat to leave the Liberal Party, by actually leaving the Liberal Party.

Bernardi has started his owned party, Australian Conservatives, which will probably focus on his pet issues: defunding the ABC, denying LGBTI people the right to marry, weakening anti-race hate laws, denying climate change and hating on Muslims.

Bernardi’s defection is not a surprise. He has never been shy in openly berating the Liberal Party over their failure to be as hardline as himself on the above issues. In fact, Bernardi’s decision has been a drawn-out affair, from removing the ‘Liberal Party’ brand from his Twitter profile a year ago, to his constant swipes at his colleagues (especially Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull).

For Bernardi, leaving the Liberal Party, and the government, gives him the freedom that he’s clearly been seeking. Over the years, he has baited the Liberals with threats to leave amid claims that the party has ignored the “silent majority” of voters and “common sense’ (his personal website boasts the tagline “common sense lives here”). Bernardi has made no secret that he perceives any compromise of his pet issues by his now-former party to be a personal betrayal.

What Is Bernardi Trying To Achieve?

The move is not without risks. While holding what many have said was a disproportionate amount of power in the fragile Turnbull government, Bernardi was able to sway significant issues such as marriage equality (which he has in the past likened to beastiality) and helped launch a hostile and useless investigation into anti-bullying program Safe Schools.

Now, without a seat at the government table (or even another party friend in parliament), Bernardi will be forced to truly own his political ideology; he will be solely responsible for its success or failure.

In many ways, Bernardi’s role in politics for the past few years as been as provocateur. He hasn’t needed to be proactive when it comes to policy; he’s simply been reactionary to events and issues that have occurred around him. It’s easy to say “I’d do things differently” from the sideline, but if Bernardi wants to transform what he believes is his considerable support in the community, he needs to create genuine and substantial policies to turn that informal support into actual votes.

Cory Bernardi received 2,043 1st preference votes in 2016, or 0.025% of a quota. Liberal Party received 345,767 votes.

— James Massola (@jamesmassola) February 6, 2017

While we breathlessly await details of who else will join the Australian Conservatives — both extreme right-wing Liberal senator Eric Abetz and MP George Christensen have already ruled out joining — and what their exact policies will be, we can assume that the party will seek to rival aspects of the recently exhumed Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

One Nation, which has a broad but messy political ethos that is populist and open to influence, currently has three senators in the federal upper house and is fielding a string of candidates in the upcoming Western Australian and Queensland elections. The resuscitated party managed to snatch 4.3 percent of the vote during last year’s election, and according to recent polls has doubled its support.

Bernardi, One Nation And The Rise Of The Right

A new player on the right will result in one of two things. The vote will be split, therefore making it less likely that either will win seats in either house of parliament. Alternatively, they will merge — or at least form some sort of understanding — to support one other against their common enemies.

Hanson has already acknowledged that a split vote is possible and has said she would welcome “working with him”, although what this means exactly is unclear. They may share much in common when it comes to social and cultural issues, but Hanson and Bernardi are extremely different on the economy: Bernardi is pro free-trade and Hanson is not.

Both Hanson and Bernardi look up to US President Donald Trump as a roadmap to power and influence. Like him or not, Trump has broken almost all the political rules and we’re now in a new era that is difficult to predict. Bernardi has watched his political brethren rise over the years and he wants a piece of the action.

What Does This Mean For Malcolm And The Liberals?

Bernardi’s defection, which now leaves South Australia with only three Liberal senators, doesn’t quite give Turnbull the ability to shape a new mandate in the government. Abetz and Christensen will continue to snap at Turnbull and place pressure on him to concede more to the right.

What’s interesting in Bernardi’s choice of his party’s new name: Australian Conservatives. It hijacks the word ‘conservatives’, which has been the Liberal Party’s core identity since the Howard era. Previously, the Liberal Party has been an open church of ideas. Turnbull, for all his faults, is an embodiment of the open church.

By calling himself and his party ‘conservative’ — as opposed to other labels that more accurately reflect his brand his ideology such as ‘extreme right’ or ‘alt-right’ — it has the power to make Bernardi’s hateful messages more mainstream and therefore more acceptable. ‘Conservative’, in the Australian context, is not a byword for discrimination and extremist politics. But it could be, now that is the brand of choice for Bernardi.

There were rumours that Bernardi was going to call his new party ‘Australian Majority’, which would have been an interesting choice. The beat that Bernardi has been drumming along to for years now is that he represents the ‘silent majority’. He thinks he reflects the views of most Australians, from taxation to immigration.

The ‘silent majority’ is the popular cry that is used as a reason, sans evidence, to promote an often restrictive ideology. It’s the mantra that’s widely unspecific and argues that those with historically the greatest access to power and influence in our society — caucasian, Christian, financially favoured — have somehow been denied opportunity and freedom.

But now that Bernardi has cut free of the restraints he feels the Liberal Party put on him, he’s now forced to match his ‘talk’ with the ‘walk’. Even in government, Bernardi has always acted as if he is in opposition. Being in his team, a team of one, will suit his self-made ‘lone wolf’ political style, which has always been more interested in headlines than helping people.

If he can carve out a genuine spot in the increasing busy roster of political parties, then it was worth the risk. But if not, then Bernardi will be heading towards a spot in history as a professional dummy-spitter who lacked loyalty and backbone.

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Alana Schetzer is a Melbourne-based journalist, writer and editor.