Alan Jones: It is not the Nationals who began last week’s Macquarie St mess
By putting koalas over constituents, the Berejiklian government has again dudded voters who are hurting in the bush — and if they don’t make it right, they’ll be gone, writes Alan Jones.
Opinion
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The Liberal Party of Australia is looking over a political cliff.
You can write endless treatises about Liberal philosophy, but the two outstanding components of true liberalism are freedom and enterprise.
In Canberra, a Liberal government has eroded both.
The response to the virus was articulated perfectly well by Scott Morrison on March 15, when he said: “For the vast majority, around eight in 10 is our advice, it will be a mild illness and it will pass. However, for older Australians and those who are more vulnerable … it is a far more serious virus and that is our concern. Our aim in all of this is to protect the most vulnerable.”
There was never any obligation to follow the advice to shut down businesses everywhere, mostly small and medium sized, the life blood of the Liberal Party, the engine of a nation’s wealth, the living, breathing metaphor of enterprise.
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It’s instructive to note that when the global financial crisis struck, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard went on a spending spree.
Liberal leader, Malcolm Turnbull, didn’t miss: “This waste of borrowed money is made worse by the fact that Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan are leading Australia into record debt.”
And this was over $42 billion.
We are now talking almost $400 billion for shutting down businesses and workers with no epidemiological evidence to support such a nationwide damaging response.
The Liberal heartland has been destroyed. Fear has replaced enterprise. It’s problematic how many of these businesses will recover. But, on current assessments, there are deferred payments of $240 billion, the bulk of them housing loans and small business.
How the hell do small business and battling homeowners repay $240 billion and resume normal payments; while the education of millions of young Australians has been vandalised.
Freedom and enterprise have been stolen by the very political party that would have you believe these are the two defining qualities which justify the voter supporting them.
Then you go to NSW. Headlines everywhere in the last several days sprouting the hairy-chested view that Premier Berejiklian has stared down John Barilaro, which makes her a latter day Margaret Thatcher. Never before has such rubbish been uttered.
What was Barilaro up to? Well, koalas were the thin edge of the wedge.
A Liberal government can never be in government without the National Party. Empty-headed Liberals might want to demonise Barilaro and the Nationals but without them, there is no Berejiklian Government.
The last Coalition government, under Baird and Berejiklian, ignored the bush with forced council amalgamations, and the bush hated it. They ignored the bush with the attempt to abolish the greyhound industry, the bush hated it. They ignored the bush and took water from farmers, with no compensation for “environmental flow”. The bush hated it.
And the same lefties in the Liberal Party in Macquarie Street, Berejiklian among them, refused to remove the fuel from the floor of National Parks, refused to open the National Parks to allow starving cattle to eat down the undergrowth, the bushfires came with the resultant massive destruction of koala colonies.
It was only several days ago that Gladys Berejiklian said it would be a “dream” if NSW could have zero carbon dioxide emissions.
The National Party seats in the Hunter Valley, suddenly saw the leader of government in NSW give the green light to the abolition of the coal mining industry. They went apoplectic.
Then the iconic Tamworth Country Music Festival, internationally acclaimed, quintessentially the bush in music, small business and patronage, abandoned because of the ridiculous Berejiklian coronavirus restrictions in regional areas where they have never heard of it.
And now, the koalas.
Lest anyone think this is a bush issue, think again. You may now be in a koala habitat, even though you have never seen one. Do you live in Campbelltown, Green Valley or the centre of Newcastle? You are on the maps.
The National Party have tried for six months to get these maps fixed, but as one MP said to me, “hopeless Gladys did nothing.”
Another said: “She is devoid of any worthwhile policy-making culture.”
Barilaro took a sensible and courageous stand to save the National Party.
He knows why the Shooters and Fishers added “Farmers” to their party title. The swings in some seats, against the Nationals, at the last election were alarming, but the leftie Liberals can’t see or read.
In Murray, in the State’s southwest, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers gained 27.8 per cent; Barwon, a swing to the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers of 21.5 per cent.
And Gladys, you were the deputy leader of the Liberal Party, as stubborn as they come. There was no consultation with the bush on forced council amalgamations and in the by-election for the seat of Orange, in 2016, the National Party suffered a swing of 34 per cent because a Coalition government, told the bush it knew best, which is what it is telling them now about koalas.
The bush answered with a lethal electoral response.
Berejiklian, who apparently was ready to sack a stash of Nationals for doing nothing more than trying to represent their constituency, might modestly admit that without the 13 National party seats, she would be on Jodi McKay’s side of the parliament or on a pension.
Barilaro and people like Bronwyn Taylor, Adam Marshall, Melinda Pavey and Sarah Mitchell — they were the ones fighting to preserve the government, because if there are further swings at the next election because the bush has been abandoned, it’s goodbye Gladys.
Barilaro, known by the electorate to speak for his constituency, won every booth in his seat of Monaro at the last election. If Barilaro can’t act in a way that brings National Party supporters to vote for the National Party, Morrison and Berejiklian are gone.
It’s not Barilaro who’s blowing up the government, but the lefties in the Berejiklian Liberal Party. The koala issue is a metaphor of a bigger problem.
So far from Barilaro being put in his place and slapped down by the Liberal lefties, they must surely know that if this koala regulation isn’t changed, the National Party are gone, and with them, government. The votes in the bush are bleeding away.
Forget the headlines in the scuffle of last week. Barilaro emerged as the leader of his troops, a leader the bush desperately needs. As Yoni Bashan, the NSW political correspondent for The Australian newspaper wrote with clarity: “A true victory for the Premier would have been to de-escalate this crisis weeks ago. That we had to watch this train wreck in slow motion is an indictment of her leadership.”
The Liberal Party is not out of trouble. It has forgotten what it is meant to stand for; and if McCormack continues to lead the Nationals in Canberra, there will be more National Party losses and Morrison can’t win government. Someone in the Liberal Party has to understand NSW has to stand for more than “Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong”.