Piers Akerman: What Gladys can teach federal Libs about victory
There are lessons to be learnt from last weekend’s NSW election, but unfortunately the federal Liberal Party doesn’t seem to be listening, Piers Akerman writes.
There are lessons to be learnt from last weekend’s NSW election, but unfortunately the federal Liberal Party doesn’t seem to be listening.
The first is that, despite the best will in the world, Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s stewardship was not the reason her government was re-elected.
Former opposition leader Michael Daley was — as the London Sun newspaper might have said — “wot won it for her”.
Mr Daley’s stumbling performance on budgetary issues in The Daily Telegraph and Sky News debate was jaw-droppingly dismal.
Tied with the revelations of his racist and anti-immigration words in his almost forgotten speech bagging Chinese students, Mr Daley proved to be a real vote-winner for the Coalition.
Forget just thanking him for his service, the dumped Labor leader should be rewarded with cases of Grange for services to the Coalition.
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The second lesson is that all the arguments in the world citing economic statistics demonstrating respectable governance and sound administration will not ensure a good government is re-elected.
The electorate has been over politics since former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull wasted his time in office and ran down the Coalition’s political capital by dragging it to the left.
As eastern suburbs spivs go, he and certain members of his family, showed just how far from reality a Point Piper address can be. Perhaps he might have been closer to the people if he had moved to Kirribilli and pounded the pavements there as that illustrious Liberal predecessor John Howard did.
Mr Turnbull’s endorsement of the nonentity Julia Banks, a former Liberal nobody now running as an independent against sitting Health Minister Greg Hunt in Flinders (not even Ms Banks’ own electorate), illustrates the depths of the former leader’s wilful political bastardry.
The third lesson is simple. It’s time to take the gloves off. The Labor Party, dictated to by the notoriously criminal CFMEU and the ACTU under the increasingly bizarre leadership of Sally McManus, stands for the destruction of the economy and hastening Marxist domination of its culture through the dissemination of that failed philosophy through schools and universities.
The taxpayer-funded ABC and SBS are the green-left’s media allies in this cause. The fight has to be taken to Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, and the deals in which he sold out his union colleagues to feather the political prospects of union bosses must be put before the public chapter and verse.
Big business, seduced by the green fifth column, is also the enemy.
Unfortunately, under the Turnbull government, attempts were made to woo voters from the left in inner-city suburbs with little connection to the majority of centre-left and centre-right constituents. Unless the Coalition starts calling out these destructive forces we will only see a further rise in minor parties to the right.
The National Party will this week resolve to discipline MPs who aren’t pulling their weight. Hardheads in the federal party are reacting to the loss of former National seats to the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party. The Liberals, dominated by its damagingly impotent so-called moderate faction, have yet to show the same resolve.
Nowhere is this now more obvious that in Warringah, the seat of forthright former prime minister Tony Abbott, who is now being challenged by mercenaries operating for the internationally bankrolled activist group GetUp!, which supports left-green candidate Zali Steggall.
GetUp! has provided its doorknockers with a professionally produced push-polling document and intends to flood the electorate with backpackers provided with a list of suggested remarks designed to undermine Mr Abbott’s reputation for good representation.
GetUp! claims climate change is the major issue in the electorate — although polls indicate most people are actually focused on soaring electricity costs — and boldly states that Mr Abbott is to blame.
Ms Steggall’s foolish demand for a greater cut to carbon dioxide emissions than Labor’s stated goal of 45 per cent by 2030, with a view to zero emissions by 2050, proves how positively insane her grasp is of the need for baseload power to keep the lights on and what remains of Australian industry alive.
She has also taken advice from Kerryn Phelps, who wrested Wentworth from the Liberals at the by-election caused by Mr Turnbull’s dummy spit.
Unsurprisingly, apart from her bungled attempt to undermine the successful border protection policies that have saved lives at sea, Dr Phelps has so far failed to impress and the likelihood is that Wentworth will be won by the Liberals’ Dave Sharma next month.
GetUp! is claiming that Mr Abbott is a wrecker, but look no farther than Point Piper to see who was the real wrecker of the Liberal majority.
Certainly Ms Steggall, who the ABC claims is a centre-right candidate although she has never voted Liberal in her life, is not the person to entrench Liberal values. Nor will GetUp!’s favoured candidate ensure sound economic guidelines remain in place.
The punters want more than a milkshake’s worth of tax cuts from next week’s Budget.
They want reassurance that the lights will be kept on and that their power bills will not continue to go through the roof. And they want to know that people such as Zali Steggall and Kerryn Phelps won’t make it easier for evil people to slip into the country.
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