Piers Akerman: Liberal Party isn’t too left or too right – it’s gutless – and voters could smell it

Instead of more marketing and focus groups, Australians need leaders who can talk about work, contribution, fairness, the rule of law – and mean it, writes Piers Akerman.

If the polls have it right and the Australian electorate has awarded Anthony Albanese’s Labor government a second term, mark this election as a grim milestone.

It was a victory for illogical, untruthful, economically disastrous politics and a resounding defeat for sound, rational and affordable policy.

The quote misattributed to Albert Einstein applies – the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

If Labor wins in its own right, or with the support of the odious Greens or nauseating Teals, the nation has just voted for self-harm, suicide even.

The facts are inescapable.

If Anthony Albanese’s Labor wins, the nation has just voted for self-harm, suicide even. Picture: Jason Edwards/NewsWire

Over the past three years of Labor’s reckless mismanagement, Australia slid into the longest per-capita recession on record. We’ve suffered the sharpest fall in living standards in the developed world and the cost of living soared beyond breaking point.

Ordinary families were strangled by electricity bills, supermarket prices and mortgage repayments dwarfing anything we saw even in the darkest days of the 1990s recession.

National security, the first and most sacred duty of any government, has been trashed.

Our defence forces are weaker than they’ve been since Curtin scrambled for US help in 1942. Recruitment numbers are falling so fast they now barely cover natural attrition. At a time when China and Russia openly test our resolve, we have a defence policy drawn up by craven appeasers who support anti-Semitic UN bureaucrats and wouldn’t know a battlefield if it flattened their Canberra townhouses.

Energy policy, the engine of every economy, is run by climate catastrophists and scientifically ignorant zealots. Just days ago Sir Tony Blair, no friend of the conservative cause, declared Net Zero policies “doomed to fail” and “totally irrational”. Spain and Portugal were plunged into darkness this week because of over-reliance on unreliable wind and solar. Norway urged European nations to back off green energy.

Peter Dutton has run a bigger dog of a campaign than even Andrew Peacock, who led the Coalition to a bloodbath against Bob Hawke in 1980. Picture: Brian Birzer

But Labor, lashed to the Greens and the Teal socialites bankrolled by Simon Holmes a Court, is committed to the same suicidal path.

Both major parties, in a fit of bipartisan idiocy, are signed up to Net Zero nonsense, even as the US, China, Russia and half of Europe ease out of their climate pledges. Australia is now infected by Fifth Columnists – a cabal of professional grievance merchants, cultural vandals and cowardly technocrats working against the national interest from within.

Penny Wong expressed her view that the Voice to Parliament – soundly rejected at the ballot box – remains inevitable. Treaties, reparations, division and chaos loom.

The Coalition ran the most inept campaign since Andrew Peacock’s doomed 1990 tilt against Bob Hawke.

Peter Dutton failed to present a coherent message to voters.. Picture: Adam Head/NewsWire

An incoherent message.

No clarity. Just a shopping list of policies, some backtracking and plenty of asinine distractions.

There should have been one theme, the cost of living. Rents and home prices are skyrocketing. Grocery bills are gutting household budgets. A trillion-dollar debt mountain is soaring by the minute.

Precious days were wasted yapping about woke education and work-from-home flexibility for public servants.

They didn’t need a consultant’s focus group to know what mattered – they needed a backbone.

You, your kids and your grandkids will pay for this folly.

Peter Dutton did well to hold the Opposition together but that’s not enough. The Liberal Party isn’t too left or too right – it’s gutless.

Voters can smell it.

We don’t need more marketing and focus groups, we need leaders who can talk about work, contribution, fairness, the rule of law – and mean it.

Originally published as Piers Akerman: Liberal Party isn’t too left or too right – it’s gutless – and voters could smell it