Piers Akerman: Liberal party is unrecognisable from Robert Menzies’ day

Legendary Liberal PM Robert Menzies would not recognise the party today, and claims to his legacy from its modern leaders are nonsense, writes Piers Akerman.

The Morrison government lacks a distinct and compelling conservative flavour and Liberal Party members are getting restless.

The spin from both Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg that last month’s federal budget was Menzian in character is a complete nonsense.

Sir Robert Menzies didn’t believe in massive government debt and wasn’t a supporter of limitless welfare handouts. He believed that governments should create opportunity, not provide a system which made work a permanently unattractive alternate to the dole.

The Howard and the Abbott governments were Menzian and the result was a reduction of the national debt and real surpluses after Labor had created what were record deficits — at least until the Covid spending spree.

Sir Robert Menzies would be out of place in the Liberal party today.

Defence Minister Peter Dutton is the only one carrying on Menzies’ legacy. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Conservative members of the Morrison government say the only member of Cabinet representing Menzian Liberal philosophy is Defence Minister Peter Dutton.

Two weeks ago, Dutton upset a handful of senior members of his department when he ordered his department and serving military personnel to stop pursuing a “woke agenda” after Defence held morning teas where staff wore rainbow clothing to mark the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT).

Vowing to shake up his department and get it to refocus on its core mission, he told Nine Media he had ordered Defence Force Chief Angus Campbell and Secretary Greg Moriarty to issue a note ending events with “particular clothes in celebration”.

“I’ve been very clear to the chiefs that I will not tolerate discrimination. But we are not pursuing a woke agenda,” he said.

“Our task is to build up the morale in the Australian Defence Force and these woke agendas don’t help.”

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is leading a government with no conservative agenda. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s budget goes against Menzian values. Picture: Getty Images

Earlier in the year a note was sent out from Defence to staff urging them to mark IDAHOBIT (who’s a Hobbit?) by wearing rainbow clothing and ally pins to morning tea events.

Until Dutton stepped up the heads of defence had been indistinguishable from the organising committee of the Mardi Gras.

Now he is tackling the almost unthinkable, the ludicrous job creation program that is the French Navy Group’s apparently open-ended submarine contract.

That contract was agreed by former (non-) Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the wily South Australian former MP Christopher Pyne in a herculean effort which demonstrated that history (unlearnt) will be repeated.

In giving the dopey, wokey defence chiefs their head and permitting them to seek to reinvent the wheel, sorry the submarine, by handing the French an expected $100-billion contract to retro-design a nuclear-class sub into a diesel-propelled vessel it was as if former Labor Defence minister Kim Beazley’s disastrous approval of the Collins-class submarines had been swept under a monstrous carpet or sunk to the depths of Lake Burley Griffin.

Former PM Malcolm Turnbull sparked the drift of the Liberal party towards Labor.

Not only that, the Russell Hill genii apparently didn’t see any regional threats that might require a submarine capacity before 2040 or 2050 which gives some notion of the short-term thinking of these strategists and, further, they were so woke that they weren’t awake to the reality that the Americans, who were to supply the weapons control systems, don’t trust the leaky French defence industry with their software systems.

Now, when we have a genuine need to rapidly build-up our naval strength, surface and submarine, we are as unprepared as we were when the disastrous Labor Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government was in office.

This government is not in the mould of John Howard either. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Joel Carrett

The Morrison government, with the exception of Dutton, is nothing short of Labor-lite.

The defence department still hasn’t provided its report into the eighty per cent Chinese ownership of the port of Darwin (which it approved in 2015) as it no doubt struggles with wording along the lines of “it seemed a good idea at the time but times have changed”.

Another indication of its incapacity to conduct meaningful strategic analysis.

Since his victory, Morrison has edged the party further toward Labor and the electorate is reasonably asking what is the difference between Labor and Liberal?

He is governing under the Liberal flag but his government could not be called Liberal in the Menzies, Howard or Abbott mould.

Conservatives are reviled by the woke folk but when the Liberal Party ignores them, the party suffers.