Politicians must keep fighting to retain conservative party values in Liberal party
THIS new Liberal Cabinet suggests Prime Minister Scott Morrison knows he must move the party back to its conservative base, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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BOY, am I under pressure to become a hypocrite for Scott Morrison, our accidental new Prime Minister.
“Give him a go!” a friend texted, after Morrison last week defeated Peter Dutton by 45 votes to 40 in the battle to replace Malcolm Turnbull.
My friend isn’t alone.
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On the other end of the scale, Greens MP Adam Bandt texted: “At least Andrew Bolt lost.”
Still, if it’s bad for me, how much worse is it for the MPs who voted for Dutton?
They are under intense pressure to now back Morrison unquestioningly, to either avoid seeming to their friends as wreckers, or to their enemy as losers.
But the worst they could do for themselves, or Morrison, is to now stop fighting for the policy changes they demanded from Turnbull.
That would just make voters think that all this back stabbing and chaos really was for nothing — and driven entirely by personal hatred and not principles.
Worse, their surrender would make Morrison seem just a Turnbull clone, pushing the same dud policies.
Much of this pressure on the 40 Liberals is driven by a media pack that has bought Turnbull’s line that he was doing well in the polls, and was brought down only by the “deliberate, destructive” campaigning of “insurgents” like Tony Abbott, backed by conservative journalists who simply “wanted to bring the government down”.
Leftist journalists have eagerly parroted this delusional analysis from a prime minister who actually lost 16 seats at the last election, lost five by-elections last month, lost the past 23 months of polls, lost the Liberal base, and last week lost the support of half his Cabinet.
ABC political reporter Andrew Probyn, for instance, echoed that the Dutton voters were “insurgents”; The Australian’s Peter van Onselen called them “utter fools” and “reactionaries”; and Channel 7’s political reporter, Mark Riley, berated them as “goons”, “knuckle-draggers” and even “terrorists”.
But here’s a warning to those Liberal MPs who think their duty now is to shut up. Didn’t you say you were not motivated just by hatred of Turnbull?
Didn’t you say you simply opposed him taking the party to the left?
So why stop arguing for a return to the party’s base just because he’s gone?
To stop your push now would make you seem indeed like haters and losers, just as your critics say, rather than as people of principle who actually won with Morrison’s rise.
And Sunday showed these MPs have won at least something, when Morrison moved Angus Taylor, Alan Tudge and Dan Tehan into key portfolios to fix the problems that have most angered their fellow conservatives — immigration, electricity and the brawl with Catholic schools.
This new Cabinet suggests Morrison knows he must indeed move the party back to its base, a move made easier by the resignation of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop on Sunday.
But this shift can’t be done just by giving prize jobs to a few conservative MPs.
Policies must also change because Morrison cannot afford to seem just a new salesman of Turnbull’s old ones.
In that case, voters will ask why Turnbull has gone and why Morrison has stolen his chair.
Labor is already hitting him hard on that front.
After all, as Turnbull’s treasurer he did argue for the tax cuts for big business that were such a hard sell that the government last week ditched them.
His deputy, Josh Frydenberg, even designed Turnbull’s National Energy Guarantee, the global warming scheme that was such a pointless dud that 13 Coalition MPs threatened to vote against it in parliament.
Both men also backed the flawed new education funding scheme that furious Catholics say punishes their schools.
But Morrison is no idiot. Nor is he a Liberal that a Greens zealot like Adam Bandt should gloat over, given that he’s a Pentecostal Christian who opposed same-sex marriage, stopped the boats as immigration minister, and waved a lump of coal in parliament in defence of coal-fired power electricity.
Morrison knows he must win back the Liberal voters who have packed up in disgust and even deserted the party for One Nation.
He already has the support of the Liberal Left, but must now offer his party’s conservatives some compromises.
Immigration must be cut, even if not by the 80,000 a year Abbott demanded.
Turnbull’s global warming extremism must go and electricity prices must be driven down. Morrison should also fight some culture wars that Turnbull wimped.
Morrison won’t have to tick every box, but must tick some, and his new ministerial team is a good start.
More is needed, or his rise will seem utterly pointless to voters, and an unbearable defeat to conservatives. Either will ensure the Liberals face utter destruction.
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