Andrew Bolt: tribalist stance is killing politics
HYPOCRISY only hurts politics today, writes Andrew Bolt, and if conservatives continue to defend their sinners, then sinners are all we’ll get.
Andrew Bolt
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FOR Barnaby Joyce, the past two weeks could hardly have been worse. But for conservative commentators, covering his sex scandal hasn’t been so easy, either.
I wouldn’t be the only conservative presenter on TV getting an avalanche of emails from viewers furious that I’ve damned the Nationals leader.
Christine, a viewer of The Bolt Report, wrote: “I am sick to death of your vendetta against Barnaby Joyce. Get real or risk losing your loyal viewers.” And Bridget wrote: “Get rid of your grudge or bring on (Labor leader) Bill Shorten who you want as PM.”
There’s the rub. Conservative commentators must go easy on conservative politicians because otherwise, as one angry caller told me on my Macquarie radio show, we “play into Labor’s hands”.
Defend the side, not the principle. True, some conservatives in the media do that. They know a conservative audience comes to them to have their prejudices reinforced. One even publicly berates me simply for pointing out that Malcolm Turnbull is a bad PM who’d hand the next election to Labor.
Call me big-headed or pig-headed, but I can’t play their game, and don’t.
This amazes some journalists. In 2015, the ABC even led a news bulletin with an excited report that I’d accused a friend, then prime minister Tony Abbott, of “pathetic stupidity” in awarding Prince Philip a knighthood.
DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER BARNABY JOYCE’S BETRAYAL IS A MORAL ISSUE
But if I now went soft on Joyce I’d be no better than the tribalists, particularly on the Left, whom I attack as a menace to reason and debate.
I’d be no better than, say, Labor, which is now savaging Joyce for finding his girlfriend taxpayer-funded jobs despite having spent many months defending one of its own, then MP Craig Thomson, who had used union members’ money to pay for hookers.
Indeed, I’d be no better than the Liberals, who are now demanding that the Opposition refer Labor MP Susan Lamb to the High Court for apparently being British, while refusing to refer their own Jason Falinski for apparently being Polish.
Such hypocrisy is killing politics today. A third of Australians now think the main parties are no longer worth voting for. And much of this cynicism is caused by tribalism, evident in all those politicians and commentators attacking in others what they defend in their own.
Is that really what conservatives should do? If all sides defend their sinners, then sinners are all we’ll get.
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