Conservative wreckers will put Shorten in the Lodge
ABBOTT’S leadership longings poison every legitimate conservative issue and with his hijacking of the so-called Monash Forum, that now includes energy policy, writes Miranda Devine.
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THE biggest negative for the Turnbull government is the perception of disunity.
This is lethal in the year before an election and all but guarantees a loss to “Shifty” Shorten and his “class warfare” party.
No genuine conservative would desire this outcome. You just have to look at Labor in Victoria: the lax law and order, the climate alarmism, the union control, the fiscal incontinence, and the ascendancy of identity politics with its most obvious representation in the gender fluidity brainwashing of school children via a revitalised Safe Schools program.
And yet people who call themselves conservatives keep wreaking havoc on behalf of Tony Abbott’s doomed leadership prospects, almost three years after the majority of his colleagues dispatched him as PM.
The latest gambit is the so-called Monash Forum, a ginger group of Coalition MPs calling for government support for the construction of new coal-fired power stations.
A week before the fabled “30th Newspoll” moment, the Monash insurrection just looks like more mischief. No one is more pro-coal than I, but this smells like a proxy for a leadership spill Abbott knows he’d lose.
Troublemakers claim that it is modelled on the Lyons forum of 1992 which played a “vital role” in elevating John Howard to the leadership. But the Lyons forum promoted a suite of social conservative policies and Howard would dispute it had a major role in his 1995 ascension.
The numbers of MPs in the Monash Forum are unknown, although Abbott’s former chief of staff Peta Credlin, who broke the story on Sky News Monday night, claims 30 MPs have joined and the Australian newspaper reported “more than 20”.
The only confirmed signings are the usual suspects among the tiny delcon contingent of Liberal MPs, Abbott, Eric Abetz, Kevin Andrews, Craig Kelly and that well-known hyperbolic fizzer George Christensen, of Queensland’s LNP, who doesn’t get a vote in the Liberal partyroom anyway.
The idea of pushing for more coal-fired power is hardly novel for the National Party, so it’s no surprise that eight Nats are on board but, notably, not Barnaby Joyce, who actually always has been the best advocate for coal in the government.
Three MPs publicly named yesterday are believed to have told colleagues they’re not associated with the Monash Forum. At least five more conservatives are believed to have refused to sign.
What had started as a WhatsApp chat group of conservatives genuinely discussing ways to push Malcolm Turnbull into a more hairy-chested defence of coal power had been hijacked by Abbott.
As soon as the informal group was given a name it became clear “that was done in order to be leaked”.
“If this is a Tony Abbott ginger group, count me out”, is how one conservative puts it.
“We’re the Liberal party, we shouldn’t be talking about taxpayer funded coal fired power, anyway.”
This is the tragedy of the relentless Abbott insurgency. It poisons every legitimate conservative issue, from energy to immigration to party reform, which come to be viewed through the prism of Abbott’s leadership longings and force the most persuasive conservatives to fall silent.