Andrew Bolt: Libs were not too right wing, they were just too scared

Peter Dutton’s Liberals were not “too right wing”, they were instead too timid, too uncertain, too incoherent, too “Me Too” and too late.

Liberals of the left are telling you not to believe your lying eyes.

They brazenly claim the Liberals were smashed because they were too right wing.

What’s this madness?

Where in this campaign were the Liberals “too right wing”?

To believe this fantasy, you must forget history and everything you just saw of the worst political campaign this country has ever seen.

Let’s fact-check these critics, now swarming to make Sussan Ley the Liberals’ new leader.

“Parties too far to the right or the left do not form government,” complained former minister Christopher Pyne, a long-time don of the Liberal Left.

What? Chris, have you already forgotten John Howard winning again and again after insisting “we decide who comes into our country”?

Have you forgotten Tony Abbott, later winning in a landslide by promising to “stop the boats” and “axe the carbon tax”?

You certainly have forgotten how your mate Malcolm Turnbull, a Labor man in Liberal drag, then lost 14 seats by babbling about climate change.

Tony Abbott won by a landslide by promising to “stop the boats”. Picture: Tertius Pickard

But Opposition Leader Peter Dutton at this election was nothing like a conservative – let alone “too right wing”.

I know one of the Liberals’ biggest donors, mining billionaire Gina Rinehart, was furious that he wasn’t and told the party so.

But to the people still parroting that claim, tell me what was remotely “right wing” about Dutton’s Liberals promising bigger deficits and higher taxes than Labor?

What was “right wing” about Dutton burying his defence policy until the campaign’s dying days?

What was “right-wing” about going on a spendathon and rejecting tax reform, including a bold plan from Treasury spokesman Angus Taylor to index tax rates to save taxpayers from bracket creep?

Dutton was even promising to be more Left than Labor, threatening to force investment funds to sell parts of their business.

So where was Dutton “too right-wing”?

Gina Rinehart was furious that Dutton was nothing like a conservative. Picture: Supplied

I heard Allegra Spender, the Teal, on Wednesday say the Liberals should stop fighting the “culture wars”.

But when she was asked on Sky News which culture wars she meant, she struggled to name any.

The best she could suggest were that the Liberals gave preferences to One Nation – a total non-issue in the campaign – and had been “going after women” by promising, before unpromising, to ban Canberra public servants working from home.

Excuse me, but that idiotic ban wasn’t conservative.

If working from home works and helps people manage their lives, why would anyone but a big-government type be against it?

As for the “culture wars”, all started by the Left, Dutton ran from them, too.

He even sidelined talented Coalition politicians who might say something conservative – defence spokesman Andrew Hastie, former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, and Indigenous Australians spokesman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who just 18 months ago was critical in the Coalition’s great victory – stopping Labor’s plan to divide Australians by race with an Aboriginal-only Voice to Parliament.

When the Liberals fought that culture war, they won – and then led Labor in the polls.

But this year they quit fighting, and got hammered.

So tell me: where was that Dutton who was “too right wing”?

Not even his promise to build seven nuclear reactors was “right wing”, because he justified it by saying they were critical to fighting global warming – to meeting our target of net-zero emissions.

And he was right that we can’t meet that target and keep on the lights without nuclear.

Wait and watch. Last week’s blackout in Spain was a warning.

Dutton was far from ‘too right-wing’. Picture: Adam Head

No, what really hurt the Liberals in promising to go nuclear is that Dutton seemed frightened by his own policy.

He tried to play it down, hid his energy spokesman, failed to visit proposed sites, and failed even to nail the Labor lie that his reactors would cost $600bn until it was too late.

This was part of a pattern.

Dutton seemed too scared to say where he’d cut spending, too scared to release his defence policy until too late, and – critically – so scared of his ban on working from home that he scrapped it within days.

Bottom line: if Dutton seemed too scared of his own policies, why would voters not be scared, too?

So no, Dutton’s Liberals were not “too right wing”.

They were instead too timid, too uncertain, too incoherent, too me-too and too late.

Their problem wasn’t ideology but the other deadly i-word – incompetence.

Liberals now claiming “Right-wing” policies killed their party have that incompetence in spades, and are digging the Liberals’ grave.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Libs were not too right wing, they were just too scared