Andrew Bolt: Liberals can learn a valuable lesson from Steven Marshall’s election loss

After the SA election, the Coalition must now ask: Why should conservatives vote for the Liberals, when they’re offering what sounds too much like a Labor agenda?

Talk about fake news. I read that a Liberal Premier lost the South Australia election on Saturday, and this is a big warning to Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Well, no. The premier that got smashed on Saturday was no real Liberal.

But yes, that’s exactly why it’s a warning – too late! – to Morrison.

Before he became a one-term Premier, Marshall asked me for advice. I suggested (not entirely joking) that he post a film clip of himself blowing up a wind generator, over the slogan: South Australia – open for business.

It was the last time we would speak.

Marshall, alas, instead became as green as Labor. He didn’t challenge the great global warming scare, but pushed it, promising net zero emissions by 2050, a 50 per cent jump in renewable energy in five years and $3000 bribes to buy electric cars.

The only things I saw blown up when he was Premier were old coal-fired power stations.

True, Marshall did lift South Australia’s insane ban on genetically modified crops, but he imposed an equally insane ban on fracking for gas in his state’s south east.

What could his poor state be earning now, with gas prices through the roof?

Outgoing SA Premier Steven Marshall. Picture: Brenton Edwards

That ban led to the absurd sight during the election campaign of a Liberal leader running a green scare against Labor, claiming it would overturn this ban on a safe mining technology.

When the Liberals are more irrationally green than Labor, it’s time to check its compass.

Marshall also failed to defend small business from the most absurd Covid hysteria and Big Government over-reaction. He once locked down Adelaide in the wild belief that the virus could be transmitted on pizza boxes.

Nor did Marshall fight back in the culture wars that are threatening conservatives most. In fact, his government even subsidised this month’s Writers’ Week, which gathered cultural Leftists including Grace Tame, Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull, Jo Dyer and Richard Flanagan to deliver wall-to-wall abuse of the Liberals.

Marshall also backed the new apartheid of the Left, promising to create the nation’s first indigenous Voice to Parliament – an Aboriginal-only body to advise the Parliament that actually represents us all.

I could go on, but what exactly was so “Liberal” about Steven Marshall’s government? Why would any conservatives donate a dollar to save it?

It’s much the same problem with the Morrison government. Why should conservatives vote for the Liberals, when they’re offering what sounds too much like a Labor agenda?