Piers Akerman: ‘The Liberal Party is on a path to certain oblivion under Malcolm Turnbull and his team’

IT IS impossible to misquote or take out of context the remarks made by the Leader of the House, Christopher Pyne, caught boasting of his disloyalty to Tony Abbott.

PM Malcolm Turnbull and Christopher Pyne. Picture: Kym Smith

THE embattled Turnbull team’s attempt to stifle any criticism of its policies with the ridiculous argument that any examination will inevitably lead to the installation of a Labor government only highlights its abject inadequacy.

Yet, such is its inarguable failure that this has now ­become its sole defence.

It has reached this point ­because it has abandoned the principles of the Liberal ideals laid down by the party’s founder Bob Menzies and through a total lack of political understanding and strategy.

It has learnt nothing from last year’s federal election, nor the elections in the UK and the US. Last year, Liberal pollster Mark Textor was widely ­quoted as dismissing core conservative voters when his views on members of a far-Right website were somewhat taken out of context.

Speaking of those bloggers, described as “disgruntled conservatives”, he said: “The qualitative evidence is they don’t matter. The sum of a more centrist approach outweighs any alleged marginal loss of so-called base voters.”

PM Malcolm Turnbull and Christopher Pyne. Picture: Kym Smith

It is impossible however to misquote or take out of context the remarks made by the influential Leader of the House, Christopher Pyne, who was caught boasting of his disloyalty to Tony Abbott and who last week on the ABC’s Q&A effectively told disgruntled conservatives in his South Australian electorate of Sturt that they didn’t matter because they had nowhere to go.

Asked by host Virginia Trioli whether Australia faced the prospect of minority governments, he said: “No, absolutely not. I don’t think that’ll happen. Because we have this preferential, compulsory voting.

“So an unhappy Liberal voter has still got to turn up, and when they vote between seven candidates or six candidates or nine candidates, do they put Labor ahead of me if they’re unhappy with me?

“They know how the system works and they tend to know that, ‘If I put Labor ahead of Christopher, they get the vote, so I won’t — I’ll just show my unhappiness by voting for everybody else.’ And in the 150 seats ... But I hope they don’t do that very often.”

But it’s probably they will in future given that Pyne suffered a swing of 9.95 per cent against him at last year’s federal election when he should have been riding a swell of popularity after the Liberals pumped up his chances with a $90 billion pledge for defence spending, including billions to the French company DCNS for a submarine fleet to be delivered in 20 years.

The Coalition (thank you Nationals) scraped back in with 50.4 per cent of the two- party vote, which translated into a one seat margin.

According to the latest Newspoll, they’d lose if an election were held now. Last week, Newspoll had the ­Coalition behind Labor 47 to 53 per cent and in South Australia, where the dynamic Pyne runs the Liberal Party, it polled a dismal 44 per cent to Labor’s 56 per cent. With those sort of numbers, Pyne shouldn’t be permitted to run anything.

The former Queensland Premier Campbell Newman, who believes Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull should resign his leadership, told the ABC on Thursday the Liberal vote in South Australia is down to 29 per cent.

Last year, Pyne received 44.4 per cent of the first preferences, Labor 22.2 per cent and Senator Nick Xenophon’s candidate 21.2 per cent.

Should the former Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi run a candidate in Sturt (and he’d be mad if he didn’t) and did a preference deal with Xenophon, Pyne  would be gone, submarines or no submarines.

Malcolm Turnbull has had one year in power. Picture: AAP Image/Perry Duffin

He’d be torpedoed below the waterline and not only because of the manner in which he has bragged of his support for Malcolm Turnbull, even when Turnbull’s interests were clearly not in the interest of the Liberal Party or the nation.

Those conservatives who have left or are leaving the Liberal Party (and Bernardi’s fledgling organisation has more than 11,000 members while Pauline Hanson commands growing numbers of older Australians nationally but particularly in her home state of Queensland where the Coalition would be decimated) see Pyne and his factional companions as destroyers of the Liberal brand.

They blindly support Turnbull’s charge to appease the Left with the adoption of dubious but expensive Labor policies, including but not exclusively, Gonski 2.0, the NDIS and the unrealistic and economy damaging emissions target, and they scorn attempts to launch proper policy discussion.

In doing so, they reject the role clear policy goals played in the Coalition’s thumping victory under Tony Abbott just four years ago.

But as Abbott pointed out while delivering a sweeping manifesto in Brisbane last Tuesday, in 2010 and 2013, the Liberal-National Coalition made big gains promising spending cuts, tax cuts and regulation cuts.

“It wasn’t easy once in government, but in just two years two big new taxes were scrapped, three stalled free trade deals were finalised, about 300,000 new jobs were created in the economy while 14,000 public servants were shed, business handouts were stopped, and $50 billion was cut from the forward estimates,” he said. “As John Howard recently observed, while compromise is necessary in politics, conviction is the foundation of success.”

Neville Chamberlain’s ­Munich Agreement reminds us vividly where compromise eventually leads, though Barack Obama’s Syrian “red lines” now come a close second.

The Liberal Party is on a path to certain oblivion under Turnbull and his team and nothing suggests they have the intellect to prevent that fate.

The inescapable legacy of the Turnbull team’s arrogant and injudicious braggadocio will be a union-dominated Labor government that will continue its wilful destruction of the nation.