If you ask him to tell you who killed Australian Conservatives – Cory Bernardi’s attempt to pitch a new tent on the right flank of Australian politics – the technical answer is Bernardi. He’s folded his own political political party. But the substantive answer, he says candidly, is Scott Morrison.

Morrison’s ascension in August last year knocked his insurgency stone dead. “He reclaimed a lot of the ground we’d tilled the soil for,” Bernardi says. Once Malcolm Turnbull was deposed “there was a very clear move back to them”.

But the story of the demise of Australian Conservatives is more interesting and multidimensional than Morrison being a Liberal leader Bernardi’s rightwing supporters could vote for without holding their noses. After a parliamentary term spent trying to carve out territory on the hard right fringe of Australian politics, trying to create a conservative party that declined to be overtly nationalist or racist, Bernardi has concluded the voters just aren’t interested.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cory Bernardi says there was some resistance from natural supporters of Australian Conservatives out of concern it was a religious party. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

The experiment might not have foundered, Bernardi tells Guardian Australia’s politics podcast this week, if the Liberals had lost the May election, gone rancorously into opposition, and the conservative and liberal wings had split, although he insists he’s “grateful” that didn’t happen. Given how things landed, he’s taken stock of the journey, and reached some conclusions.

'No one listened': Cory Bernardi on the demise of his party – Australian politics live podcast Read more

The view progressive Australians have of Bernardi is he’s an outlier – inflammatory on same sex marriage, which he once predicted could presage bestiality, provocative on Islam, which he once categorised as a “totalitarian, political and religious ideology”. But in the febrile and highly competitive world of the micro-party right, the South Australian was a mainstream conservative; an economic rationalist and free marketeer who was avowedly socially conservative but not interested in being a shopfront for evangelical Christianity.

Bernardi has concluded rusted-off rightwing voters aren’t interested in a micro party alternative that espouses comparatively mainstream conservative values, and prioritises policy consistency over flip-flop populism. His experiment also suggests to him that Liberals alienated by brutal factionalism, or by comparatively progressive leaders like Malcolm Turnbull, will flirt with a breakaway movement but return to the mothership if they get a sufficiently red meat conservative.

To put it bluntly, he’s discovered consciously declining to be reactionary isn’t a winning formula on the right in 2019. “We were too sensible for a lot of people who want the system detonated,” he says.

If this sounds like sour grapes, or revisionism, it isn’t. Bernardi doesn’t blame anybody else, or cast himself as a victim. He’s clinical in his own debrief, acknowledging that he, and the party he put together, wasn’t equipped to deal with the complexities that presented themselves over the past couple of years. His self-appraisal is, in fact, brutal. “We spent millions of dollars getting a message out that no one listened to,” he says.

I’m not one of those evangelical Christians ... I’m not having prayer circles before political meetings. Cory Bernardi

When he embarked on the Australian Conservatives experiment, Bernardi made some assumptions. Principal among them was One Nation would implode, creating room for a new entrant to the rightwing petrie dish in Australian politics. He was correct about the implosion but Bernardi did not grasp how loyal Pauline Hanson’s base was.

One Nation supporters are “sticky”, he says. He discovered just how sticky when he attempted to critique Hanson’s obvious contradictions and inconsistencies. The blowback, he says, was intense. People would be abusive, telling him Hanson “went to jail for us”. Bernardi says he discovered there was no prospect of a logical conversation with the Hanson cohort – a cohort he calls “the angry voter”.

He says extreme nationalists, politicians with a “race-based orientation”, have a perennial appeal for a proportion of Australian voters. “These people are not healthy for us on the right side of politics,” he says.

Bernardi says the racism, the antisemitism, the aggressively exclusionary rhetoric about Islam, is dangerous, but he’s always held the view that these attitudes exist in Australia, and political movements have to address fears in the community by speaking to these issues, otherwise nativism will escalate. “I think you’ve got to stop that rising,” he says. In his mind this was the point of Australian Conservatives – to speak to that constituency with an affect of reasonableness to avoid a permanent splinter in the right that keeps centre-right forces out of government.

Bernardi fashioned a caucus in the Senate with the right rump, David Leyonhjelm and Fraser Anning, but the experience wasn’t that comfortable. He says he saw a “marked change” in Anning as Anning attempted his own product differentiation during the last parliament. He says Anning’s politics became more toxic as he chased publicity: the “attention drug”.

“I saw that change happen in Fraser, unless you temper that, you end up in a very dark place,” he says. I challenge Bernardi in our conversation about why he didn’t disavow Anning’s extreme views when he had the opportunity. He says he didn’t disavow Anning because people are entitled to their views, “but we couldn’t support a lot of things he put forward”.

“It hurts me deeply that Fraser Anning got more votes than us in a number of electorates simply for espousing stuff that I think is not valid in contemporary Australia – but the voters make their decisions, don’t they?” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cory Bernardi discovered there wasn’t much appetite for a conservative but not reactionary party. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

As well as discovering there wasn’t much appetite for a conservative but not a reactionary micro party, Bernardi also recounts the complexity associated with absorbing Family First, a religious party.

Combining forces seemed a sensible economy of scale for a new political entrant but the tie-up wasn’t in the end that helpful. Bernardi says there was some resistance from natural supporters of Australian Conservatives out of concern it was a religious party, which was never Bernardi’s intention.

“I went to great lengths to say it wasn’t [a religious party],” he says. “I am a person of faith. I make no bones about it, and I am the most flawed individual that my wife knows anyway, but … I’m not one of those evangelical Christians.

“I don’t argue my position from a Biblical perspective. I’m not having prayer circles before political meetings or something.

Maybe, just maybe, it did shepherd the Liberal party in a different direction. Cory Bernardi

“I’ll give you one example. We had someone handing out how-to-vote cards … and they wrote to me saying how good it was to hand out how-to-vote cards because then I could talk to people about the Bible.

“That’s not what people go to a voting booth to do. That overt religious intonation is counterproductive in politics to be honest … You are not meant to be out there proselytising in the public square.”

Despite the experiment being a bust, Bernardi remains upbeat. “I do think it was the right thing to do, “ he says. “As difficult as it was there had to be an alternative. The Liberal party was heading off a cliff and their supporters were deserting them”.

While he’s unlikely to see out the coming term, he intends to remain in politics until the middle of next year. There are still things he wants to achieve.

Bernardi also takes comfort in thinking his parting of the ways with the Liberal party played some small part in triggering the events that led to Morrison taking the leadership, which he hopes will end the destruction of the Abbott/Turnbull era.

“Maybe, just maybe, it did shepherd the Liberal party in a different direction.”