Piers Akerman: Scott Morrison channels Robert Menzies’ family values
IN AN off-the-cuff speech, Scott Morrison demonstrated he has the potential to lead the Coalition to victory at the next election highlighting his values and his policy direction which leant on the Menzies legacy, Piers Akerman writes.
Opinion
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SCOTT Morrison demonstrated in Albury he has the potential to lead the Coalition to victory at the next election with his delivery of a couple of cut-through lines on his values and his policy direction.
That they weren’t highlighted and headlined by hacks in Canberra says a lot about the direction the cosseted press corps would like to see Australia take.
Morrison made an off-the-cuff speech which leant on the Menzies legacy. Bob Menzies, founder of the Liberal Party, made a landmark address at Mate’s Lounge in Albury just under 74 years ago in which he talked of what his new party would stand for.
Menzies had been prime minister from 1939 to 1941. In 1944 as the world emerged from the last great war he forged the Liberal Party from 18 different parties united only in what they were against.
As Morrison said in his remarks, Menzies brought them to Albury to unite them behind what they believed in.
Menzies had done his homework and set his agenda before the public in a series of thoughtful radio broadcasts, the most famous of which, his Forgotten People address delivered on May 22, 1942, has lost nothing over the years and I cannot recommend it enough to those who want to know what the Liberals should stand for.
That script, and his others, won him the support of the Australian Women’s National League, a hugely effective lobby group, but they cut a shrewd and tough bargain with the new party before agreeing to join.
The league’s leaders ensured that women were equally represented throughout the structures of the Liberal Party long before the era of affirmative action and it was agreed that the Liberal Party’s would reserve certain positions for women, that there would be a Woman Vice-President of the Party and also a Federal Women’s Committee, whose president would also sit on the Party’s Federal Executive.
No bra-burning was required. Menzies recognised their force and realised their value, particularly as the contribution women had made through the long war years had been of inestimable value.
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Morrison is now appealing to the same strata of society, ordinary Australians, with the same core basic family values that swung the women’s vote — in the face of sneering from the media and social elites who view basic family values as attributes of the “reactionary Right”.
“You’ve got to be about what you’re for,” he said.
“As a country, as a political party, as an individual, as a family. It’s about what you’re for, not just what you’re against.”
Family is key to Morrison’s character. The media wants it to be about his personal religious beliefs, his faith, and is attacking him for being true to himself.
Being for family is not a sin nor a crime. The so-called progressives would like to see the family unit smashed and the care of children turned over to the ideologues of the union movement who want to create a unisex nightmare in which boys and girls are criticised for displaying normal behaviour.
Morrison has to ignore the squeals of those, like most in the media, who will never vote for him and stick to his personal values.
Morrison also nailed the whole failure of energy policy by outlining Angus Taylor’s role — he is now the “Minister for getting electricity prices down”.
His job is to maintain a safety net on power and “to put the big stick in to keep the big electricity companies in check, and thirdly to provide an environment where you can get more investment in new, fair dinkum power generation”.
He drew a most important line in the sand saying: “What I mean by fair dinkum? Stuff that works when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. That is the reliable power that we need in our system.”
He might have rammed home the message to the Green-Left which has been effectively destroying the nation’s industrial base, driving up electricity prices and leaving the most vulnerable suffering, in some cases, dying, because they can’t afford the virtue- signalling renewable policies driven by both Labor and Malcolm Turnbull’s government.
But underlining that his government is “absolutely focused on getting people’s power prices down” is a good start and there’s no denying the truth in his statement that “cheaper power is good for business, cheaper power is good for people’s household budgets”.
It’s inevitable that the usual suspects will take offence at his remarks. There are already self-appointed leaders of the LGBTIXYZ (and another letter you care to name) “community” who claim he hasn’t given them enough time and there is a really weird group of conspiracists who claim that something called Big Coal brought Turnbull down. (Let’s be clear, Turnbull destroyed himself, having nearly succeeded in destroying the Liberal Party and the nation.)
Morrison is now appealing to the same strata of society, ordinary Australians, with the same core basic family values that swung the women’s vote
When Menzies was speaking in Albury, he was talking to an Australia that was being threatened by the Labor Party with full-blooded socialism, starting with the proposed nationalisation of the banks.
He was speaking to men and women who knew Labor wanted to control their savings.
Today, Labor wants to hand over the running of the country to the trade union movement and in particular, its big union donor, the CFMEU.
Most thinking Australians know the record of the CFMEU is one of illegal activity and that it flouts the law.
These are the values of those bankrolling Labor and its leader Bill Shorten.
Morrison must target the ALP with the same vigour Menzies applied to Labor 74 years ago, winning election after election to make him the longest-serving prime minister.
Morrison quoted Menzies’ truism “no party seizes the imagination of the people unless the people know the party stands for certain things”.
Menzies said “we’ll fight for those things until the bell rings”.
Morrison pledged to affirm the same beliefs. Until the bell rings. Just like Robert Menzies did, and his team, and they went on to do great things for Australia.