Andrew Bolt: Wentworth poll panic makes Liberals look weak
THE Liberals are so panicked about losing Malcolm Turnbull’s former seat on Saturday that they’ve made their weakness embarrassingly clear, and the party now faces destruction, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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THE Liberals are so panicked about losing Malcolm Turnbull’s former seat on Saturday that they’ve made their weakness embarrassingly clear. The party no longer knows what it stands for and faces utter destruction.
Internal polling reportedly shows the Liberals will lose this weekend’s by-election in Wentworth — a result that would cost the government its one-seat majority and destroy the honeymoon of new Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
That polling claims Left-wing independent Kerryn Phelps will smash the Liberals’ Dave Sharma by 55 per cent to 45, after preferences.
SENIOR LIBS FEAR THEY WILL LOSE TURNBULL’S FORMER SEAT
LABOR CANDIDATE ADMITS PARTY WON’T GO ALL OUT
MORRISON MAKING THE RIGHT MOVE ON JERUSALEM
That seems an exaggeration, but the Liberals will be humiliated even if they lose Wentworth by a whisker, given Turnbull last won it by a margin of 17.8 per cent.
To lose now by any margin would prove the Liberals have campaigned hopelessly since dumping Turnbull as prime minister two months ago.
Blame that in part on Turnbull and his furious family. Turnbull, sulking in New York, refuses to even send a tweet to help Sharma win; his daughter attacked the Liberals for lacking “strong female role models” and his son urged Wentworth voters to punish the Liberals for not doing more about global warming.
But in the end the Liberals would have only themselves to blame and not just for being so ideologically clueless as to have made Turnbull, a man of the Left, the leader of a party of the Right.
Yes, Morrison has done a great job at selling himself since replacing Turnbull, but he hasn’t yet sold his party. The Liberals still lag Labor in every poll.
Morrison’s failing is that even before this week it was impossible to work out what policies he’d really fight for. Sure, we know he is a devout Christian and wants us to “love all Australians”, as he said in his waffling Menzies Research Institute speech.
But he was never a policy wonk or visionary. He is a machine man — a former state director of the NSW Liberal party — and this week cruelly exposed the danger of having a leader to whom “ideology” is a dirty word.
Freaking over Wentworth, Morrison on Tuesday suddenly announced he could shift our embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the capital, Jerusalem.
Morrison’s decision is clearly the right one. Most countries keep their embassies out of Jerusalem to force Israel to cave in to the Palestinians, but West Jerusalem will always be Israeli under any peace deal and the Palestinians should not be rewarded for endlessly holding out for more.
And forget Labor’s outrage. One reason Labor opposes moving the embassy is that it must please the huge Muslim minorities of up to 20 per cent in its seats in Sydney’s west.
The real problem is Morrison’s motive. He’s obviously making a desperate pitch for the votes of the Jews who make up 12.5 per cent of Wentworth’s population.
Morrison is driven by self-interest, not conviction. Indeed, his conversion to the cause is so recent and so rushed that he promised only to “consider” moving our embassy until he’d thought it through.
Likewise with his other policy switch this week — saying he’d consider sending 150 illegal immigrants on Nauru to New Zealand.
Morrison was the immigration minister who’d boasted he’d stopped the boats. Now he’s softening, apparently to appease voters in a rich Liberal seat that leans Left.
But it got worse. On Tuesday, Liberal senators voted “yes” to a Pauline Hanson motion acknowledging it was “OK to be white”.
That’s fine, if you really want to make a pugnacious point about the hypocrisy of the “anti-racist” movement and the intolerance of our language police.
But the next day Morrison and his Attorney-General blamed the decision on an “administrative error” and forced their senators to reverse their votes.
Had Morrison acted from principle, or from sheer fear that the Liberals would be branded the friends of neo-Nazis just before Jews voted in Wentworth?
It was the same yes-but-no last week when Morrison was undermined by the leaking of a government report on religious freedom.
On Wednesday, he defended the right of religious schools to ban gay children but, on Friday, he said it was actually so bad that he’d ban the bans.
So how can anyone work out what Morrison would fight for?
Yes, Labor on such issues — Israel, religious freedom, free speech, identity politics — is very much worse and a real menace.
Morrison must keep pointing that out, but will voters take him seriously when he’s as likely to surrender as to fight?
Lockdown will kill Victorians — but not from coronavirus
Politicians are destroying Australia — throwing a million people out of work, causing suicides — because they’ve fallen for two great weaknesses, both of which will extend crippling lockdowns much longer than necessary, writes Andrew Bolt.
Record day proves crude bans on freedom don’t work
Victoria’s new record of 725 infections is more evidence that the government’s hard line policies on masks and lockdowns aren’t working as planned, writes Andrew Bolt.