Telling us to ‘move on’ is pure arrogance

AFTER one of the worst weeks in our nation’s political history it’s a bit rich for those involved in Malcolm Turnbull’s demise to stay tight-lipped on what really happened, writes Dennis Atkins.

HOW do you just move on from last week?

That’s what we’re being asked to do by the prime minister, by his Coalition colleagues and by the Liberals and Nationals.

We’ve had this thing that’s paraded as a “generational change” in which a 64-year-old male Liberal leader and his 61-year-old female deputy have been replaced by two suburban guys who are 50 and 47 respectively.

Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop are progressive in the Menzian sense of the word — the first of three legs which supported the Liberal Party stool.

The other legs are belief in the free market and a commitment to social equity.

The new leader and deputy, Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg, fall into line with these fundamental tenets of Australian liberalism. However, there’s real evidence that almost half of the Liberal parliamentary party have abandoned these Menzian tenets.

Out of the 85 MPs who voted in last week leadership ballot, in the final choice between Peter Dutton and Morrison, 40 gave their support to the Queensland challenger.

This was the right-wing insurgency that was formed by and around former leader Tony Abbott — a group that Turnbull called terrorists on his way out of office.

The idea that the Australian public will forget what happened last week any time soon is laughable. (Pic: AAP/Lukas Coch)

Left’s tick off how they measure up to the Menzies formula of liberalism.

They are not progressive, as seen in their religious refusal to even listen to science-based arguments about climate change.

They reject the free market, preferring to advocate some of the greatest market interventions since Ben Chifley wanted to nationalise the banks in the late 1940s.

They want to build coal-fired power stations using taxpayer money and they want to use federal levers to force energy companies to divest assets and possibly impose price controls.

Finally, this group have a careless attitude to the social safety net, backing savage cuts to welfare spending, especially for the most vulnerable such as the unemployed and the homeless.

This is a Liberal Party that’s almost unrecognisable from what we saw over the decades from the early 1940s until John Howard left office in 2007.

It may be we just have to get used to this new style Liberal Party with its enhanced conservative tendency. Anyone who watches global politics understands there has been a drift rightwards in mainstream electoral affairs around the world.

An poll published today had some harsh findings for the Liberals. (Pic: Kym Smith)

But an Essential poll published on today had some harsh findings for the Liberals.

The top four attributes ascribed to the Liberals — all rating over 60 per cent — were divided (79), out of touch with ordinary people (69), will promise anything to win votes (68), and too close to big corporate and financial interests (67).

Just 31 per cent of respondents nominated good leadership, while three in 10 listed trustworthiness and 28 per cent the party kept its promises.

These strong negative responses were given in the shadows of last week’s shambolic leadership crisis and attitudes might return to something closer to balance.

Meanwhile, we are still being asked to move on. Giving a brief news conference to talk about her exit from ministerial politics, Bishop rejected a request to reflect on what had just happened.

Move on, she said.

This is more than a little insulting to the Australian public, not to mention the tens of thousands of Liberal Party branch members who turn up at election time, letterboxing, handing out how-to-vote cards and undertaking other polling place tasks.

The “move on” line is more than a little insulting to the Australian public. (Pic: AAP/Joel Carrett)

If the people who’ve approached me on the street and emailed or called in the last four days are any guide, there’s a genuine hunger to have these events explained beyond the talking points responses we’ve had from the new leadership and other senior figures.

Here’s a tip top to the 85 Liberals who voted last Friday. Most Australians still don’t understand why these events happened, other than the fact this is what happens in Australia with depressing regularity.

Was there some deep policy schism? Was there someone in the Turnbull Government that colleagues couldn’t serve with? Is there something we weren’t being told?

If Turnbull had, as everyone said, lost the confidence of a majority of his colleagues, why was this so?

If, as became clear once the votes were counted on Friday, there in fact wasn’t a time when Turnbull had lost the confidence of an outright majority of colleagues, why did this happen?

None of these five questions were addressed properly and most likely they will not be addressed. It seems our political leaders do not have enough respect for the voters to do that.

No, our political leaders prefer to have one of the most consequential internal battles in modern history and ask the voters and their supporters to move on. What utterly unacceptable arrogance.

Dennis Atkins is The Courier-Mail’s national affairs editor.