Andrew Bolt: Liberals too scared to fight for their principles

Victorian Liberals have become a spectacular example of why pandering to global warming alarmists and woke causes doesn’t work.

THE Liberals must finally realise that cringing and pandering doesn’t work. Their humiliating loss in Victoria is their third beating this year for being cowards.

Is federal Liberal leader Peter Dutton watching?

Victoria is the most spectacular example of the new Liberal disease of following the polls, not their principles, but also just the latest.

In March, South Australia’s Liberal government was also flogged despite going green.

It banned fracking – a safe form of gas extraction – in the state’s southeast.

It offered rewards to the rich for buying electric cars.

It promised emissions targets even tougher than federal Labor’s.

Yet it still lost. Yes, global warming was just one issue in that election, but it goes to the heart of the Liberal problem.

The Liberals are scared. Scared of criticism, particularly from the media left. Scared of opening their mouths to fight for their principles.

The Liberal party suffered another election loss under Matthew Guy. Picture: David Caird

In May, it was the same pathetic story. The Morrison government also lost, despite going green and signing up to the absurd net zero emissions by 2050 target long touted by Labor.

In the end, it still got smashed. Labor beat it with a lie – to cut power bills by $275 by going even greener – and half a dozen Liberal seats fell to teal independents pushing the climate scare.

Incredibly, in a post-mortem at a Liberal party room meeting in July, party strategists and pollsters told the survivors the lesson was to go even greener.

As if. The Liberals tried exactly that in Victoria and are now destroyed.

Under Matthew Guy, they went so green that they promised to cut emissions by 50 per cent by 2030, although even the Albanese government promises just 43 per cent.

They even preferenced the Greens above Labor, and didn’t stop there in stealing the left’s clothes. They also endorsed a “treaty” with people identifying as Aboriginal, selling out the fundamental Liberal principle of putting individuals above the collective.

But all this me-tooism just made them look weak, second hand and unprincipled, and, of course, it all failed.

Victoria’s Labor government on Saturday lost 6 per cent of its primary vote, but none of it went to the Liberals. The Liberals didn’t pick up a seat, on the count so far, and in Hawthorn a teal independent nearly beat one of the party’s’ most rah-rah warmists, former MP and favourite John Pesutto, who’d promised energy policies so green Victoria would see “probably the most important transition we are going to make in human history”.

Liberal candidate for Hawthorn John Pesutto. Picture: David Crosling

Once again, the pandering failed. Yet I still hear Liberals demanding even more of that futile same, claiming so many voters believe in the climate crisis so religiously it’s suicide to resist.

It suits a certain kind of modern Liberal MP – careerist, lazy, a little stupid, without convictions – to believe that. Who wants the bother of thinking for themselves? Who wants to be booed on an ABC panel?

And let’s be frank, the Liberals no longer attract many people with the smarts to argue well. But what has go-with-flow surrender got the Liberals except failure?

If they cower, and now argue for what the left has said for years, they look like fakes.

If they now agree there’s a “climate crisis” that will cook their children, all they’ve done is tell voters that the Greens and Labor were right all along.

No, the Liberals must realise global warming – like Labor’s racist plans for an Aboriginal-only parliament – is a battle they can’t keep dodging.

They can never be greener than Labor, the Greens and the teals. And unless they tackle the lies of those climate catastrophists, they can never properly tackle their disastrous fake fixes.

We saw that in Victoria.

The Liberals were so scared of looking like “deniers” that they didn’t dare criticise Premier Daniel Andrews’s main election promise – for a new government-owned State Electricity Commission to run the state completely on green power in just over a decade.

Guy didn’t dare say this was bonkers: the technology wasn’t there, prices would explode and the difference to the climate would be zero.

Yet there’s an audience for the truth, even if not where Liberals usually look for validation.

On Saturday, the Liberals won huge swings in safe Labor seats in Melbourne’s north and west, home to strugglers who must pay for the mad climate plans of the rich.

I know, opposing today’s great Labor causes – global warming and racially dividing Australia – will take years. It’s hard and painful work.

But the Liberals will never win an argument they still don’t even dare to put.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Liberals too scared to fight for their principles