Andrew Bolt: The Liberals have stolen Labor’s clothes as if embarrassed by their own

The Perrottet government becomes the latest to learn that Liberals who sound like Labor and act like Labor will get beaten by Labor.

Ha ha ha. Well, the Liberals turning into mini-me Labor is going just as brilliantly as you’d expect.

The NSW election result is only the latest punch in the head for a party that can’t take a hint.

Pow! The South Australian Liberals got smashed a year ago.

Smack! The Morrison government got knocked out in a landslide two months later.

Whack! The Victorian Liberals got beaten to another pulp in November.

And now, bang! The Perrottet Coalition government becomes the latest to learn that Liberals who sound like Labor and act like Labor will get beaten by Labor, because why vote for a fake when you can get the real thing?

Dominic Perrottet. Picture: Monique Harmer

And if you’re a Liberal, why bother even getting out of bed to help these sellouts?

The government of Premier Dominic Perrottet and Treasurer Matt Kean lost badly despite doing so much to make the Liberals at times even more Left-wing than Labor.

Don’t believe the commentators now crowing that the Liberals were again punished for being too “extreme”. For not taking the global warming scare seriously.

In fact, the NSW Liberals – driven particularly by Kean – set global warming targets so extreme that NSW now faces a critical shortage of electricity, forcing Labor – yes, Labor! – to consider buying the Eraring coal-fired generator to keep it running.

Utterly laughable, tragically true.

In fact, the Liberals’ target for cutting emissions – 50 per cent by 2030 – is even tougher than the Albanese Labor government’s.

What woke cause didn’t these “Liberals” back? Perrottet even said yes in principle to federal Labor’s plan for a racist Voice – a kind of Aboriginal-only parliament.

Dominic Perrottet and Treasurer Matt Kean lost badly despite doing so much to make the Liberals at times even more Left-wing than Labor. Picture: Damian Shaw

Kean meanwhile savaged a federal Liberal candidate, Katherine Deves, for wanting to exclude athletes born male from women’s sports. Deves’ position is so sane that the World Athletics Council has just banned transgender women from competing against women, but Kean wanted her drummed out as a candidate.

True, there are lots of reasons for the Liberals’ loss in NSW. For instance, they looked stale after 12 years in power. They were riven with scandals. They picked bad candidates. And Labor leader Chris Minns seems nice, honest and reasonable.

But one theme is common to all the Liberals’ recent defeats: the Liberals have stolen Labor’s clothes as if embarrassed by their own.

For instance, no Liberal government has dared push back against the warming hysteria and warned that the cost of global warming policies is much worse than the pain of any warming.

All instead backed the absurd target of net-zero emissions by 2050. Like the NSW Liberals, the South Australian and Victorian branches even backed the 50 per cent-by-2030 target.

Chris Minns seems nice, honest and reasonable. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

None truly fought the new tribalism, either, even though the Liberal Party was founded to defend the individual from the collective. In Victoria, the Liberals not only back the state’s version of the Voice, but a treaty with Aborigines.

Yet none of this worked. Scott Morrison as prime minister actually boasted to me he would not fight against Labor’s culture wars, and the Liberals have since lost every election.

I saw one Left-wing Liberal powerbroker, Michael Photios, insist on Saturday that going Left-wing had worked. It stopped the Teals from winning Liberal seats and making the loss even worse.

But even if you buy Photios’s self-serving argument, the Liberals pay a terrible price for this cynicism.

One, backing Labor crusades just tells voters that Labor was right all along.

Two, backing Labor crusades means the Liberals tends to attract low-energy candidates with few principles of their own and even fewer ideas.

Three, how can the Liberals win an argument they do not dare even put, or inspire their supporters?

And lastly, the Liberals are throwing away their biggest weapon for future elections – the right to say “we told you so”.

We TOLD you Labor’s global warming policies would destroy our electricity system. We TOLD you Labor’s Voice would make racial division worse. And now you see for yourself.

Instead, the Liberals will just share the blame for the inevitable catastrophe. The federal Liberals are already squirming as Labor blames the Liberals’ own 20 supposedly failed global warming policies for your high power bills.

But watch some Liberals claim their NSW disaster shows their party still isn’t Left enough.

How lazy. Copying Labor may save them from thinking, but it hurts the country.

There’s a reason we’re getting poorer, more irrational and more divided. And it’s not because the Liberals have tried being Liberals.