Get Aboard the Teal Train to Revival

Hooray for Australia’s victorious women of teal!

Zali Steggall, the original teal

In attempting to destroy the Liberal Party, they have unwittingly begun a process that could rebuild the party into a dynamic and irresistible conservative force.

The teal “independents” have done what the Liberals themselves did not have the bravery or vision to accomplish.

They have purged the Liberal movement of Malcolm Turnbull’s useless climate-obsessed squishy leftists.

Dave Sharma has been cast aside in Wentworth after just a solitary term by voters who preferred super-wealthy tealian Allegra Spender.

Teal independent Sophie Scamps accounted for Jason Falinski in the Sydney seat of Mackellar.

Assistant Minister for Emissions Reduction Tim Wilson lost to teal representative and former ABC US correspondent Zoe Daniel, whose previous lifetime highlight was interviewing her own children about Donald Trump’s election.

Treasurer and ex-Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg is all but gone, swept aside in Kooyong by teal gal Monique Ryan.

Brisbane Liberal Trevor Evans got swamped by Greens candidate Stephen Bates. A similar fate befell Julian Simmonds, whose Queensland seat of Ryan has been held by the Coalition since 1972.

And Trent Zimmerman will likely be taken down by Kylea Tink in North Sydney.

As you’d expect, NSW Treasurer and fellow climate obsessive Matt Kean was at Zimmerman’s post-election misery party, where he continued the long “modern” Liberal tradition of completely not getting it.

“Clearly the community are concerned after the bushfires, the floods and the droughts about the issue of climate change,” Kean said.

Yet Zimmerman pushed for all he was worth for action on climate change – and a community allegedly concerned about climate change threw him out. Do please continue, Mr Kean:

“The key thing is the Liberal party is at its strongest when it represents the diversity of the community – we need to talk to inner city voters and rural regional voters as well and there’ll be lessons to be learned out of tonight’s result.”

Matt Kean won’t learn any of them. He’s overdue for removal, too.

Is that a teal space costume?

“We felt that the government wasn’t listening to us, and so we have changed the government,” Monique Ryan, demolisher of Josh Frydenberg’s Prime Ministerial dreams, said following her win.

 “We have come together as a community and expressed what we want, and I think that this is going to be a permanent sort of a change, not just a protest against one thing.”

Oh, please. Ryan was so intensely focused on one thing – climate – throughout the campaign that she barely spoke of anything else.

The minor issue of taxation, for example, is a task for others. “It’s not my job as an independent,” Ryan said during a campaign debate, “to come up with a fully-fledged idea for tax reform for this country.”

If you’re not fussed about taxation, then you either don’t pay any or you’re sufficiently wealthy that it just isn’t a concern.

Guess into which camp the majority of teal candidates – backed, of course, by millionaire heir Simon Holmes a Court – obviously fall.

As pollsters noted in a chat last week with the ABC’s Fran Kelly, cost of living just wasn’t on the radar in seats that voted teal.

Zali Steggall, the original teal, indicated this with a perfectly teal Twitter post extolling the virtues of her electric car, purchased late last year.

“My family car is a Kona electric. Imagine, no nasty shocks at the bowser!” Steggall wrote, urging Australians to follow her example and save $1000 per year in petrol costs.

There’s just one small problem with that. The base model of Steggall’s electric Hyundai Kona mini-SUV costs about $60,000. The fanciest petrol version, on the other hand, costs just $47,000.

This is awesome. Don’t fill up with nasty fossil fuels, fill up with coal-fired electricity! https://t.co/0c4vU9IxNm

— Damien Tomlinson (@DamTom79) May 17, 2022

A petrol buyer would be in front financially for 13 years.

All of this presents the Liberals, hopefully led by Peter Dutton, with an enormous opportunity.

If voters in urban seats are now so rich that they can afford to discard meaningful parliamentary representation, it clears the field for the Liberals to reinvent themselves as a party primarily concerned with the cost of living.

It’s an issue the teals can’t comprehend, much less deal with. And without the burden of their own climate munchkins, it should be easy for the Liberals to shift their policy base away from pointless Guardian-level political posturing and towards matters of suburban and regional affordability.

Policies that reduce the cost of living are by necessity conservative policies. Cutting costs means cutting regulations, cutting administrative overload and cutting down the size of government.

Reducing the cost of living also requires an end to Australia’s multi-party infatuation with energy sources that cost more money to produce less reliable electricity.

Meanwhile, Scott Morrison now joins the miserable ranks of Australian Prime Ministers who were cut down by climate change madness.

He’s in the same sad club as net zeroes Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull. And all because of Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions, which every year amount to just a couple of weeks of emissions from China.

Liberals should relentlessly make the point that erasing every single Australian business, house, vehicle, factory and road wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to the world’s temperature.

Instead, Liberals bought into the climate scam – and erased themselves.

UPDATE:

Liberal Bass MP Bridget Archer says she is interested in running for the party’s deputy position, saying she wants to “fight” for the party’s values and hopes the Coalition puts the “culture wars and the divisive language to bed”.

No.

UPDATE II. A guide to the teal mindset in the US, via Dave the Gardener: