Rita Panahi: Malcolm Turnbull leaves Liberals fractured, weakened
TURNBULL should’ve never been in the Liberal party, let alone leading it. The Liberals have only themselves to blame for allowing an impostor to take over the party of Menzies and Howard, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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MALCOLM Turnbull is the ultimate wrecker. It will take years to repair the damage he has done to the Liberal party which is a fractured, weakened shadow of its former self.
Under Turnbull’s Labor-lite leadership the party has lost not only its way but also a sizeable portion of its base.
A sizeable portion of conservative voters abandoned the Coalition because the Coalition abandoned them.
Turnbull’s disastrous prime ministership may be finished but his refusal to step down, even as 13 ministers tender their resignations, tells you everything you need to know about a man whose level of self-obsession is unparalleled in modern Australian politics.
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He has further shown his disdain for the party that made him prime minister by threatening to quit and force a by-election that could jeopardise the Coalition’s one-seat majority in the Lower House.
The Liberals have only themselves to blame for knifing a first term prime minister and allowing an impostor, who relentlessly white-anted two leaders in Tony Abbott and Brendan Nelson, to take over the party of Menzies and Howard.
An overrated pretender who was ill-prepared for the role and ran a woeful election campaign that rivalled John Hewson’s disastrous 1993 effort.
Let’s not forget that Turnbull should’ve never been in the Liberal party, let alone leading it.
As Labor stalwart Graham Richardson wrote on the weekend “Turnbull never belonged in the Liberal party”.
“The PM could not have been more effective in his task if his primary aim had been to destroy the Liberal Party from the grassroots to the top of the tree,” Richardson wrote.
“How the Liberal Party ever thought that a person who had sat in my office in the early 1990s and begged to be placed on the Labor Senate ticket could ever be a true Liberal, let alone lead the party, is beyond me.”
As it stands Turnbull is making the extraordinary demand that a letter be signed by at least 43 Liberal MPs declaring their hand before he calls a party room vote.
He is hoping that he can hold on until the House of Reps return on September 10 and that during those two weeks he can win back the MPs who’ve abandoned him.
The most destructive course of action is for the PM to call an election; an act of political suicide that is not beyond him.
Of course other challengers could emerge to join Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison.
Julie Bishop should not be discounted though the Minister for the Portsea Polo would be a disaster as leader once the initial honeymoon period was over.
The transactional cost of changing leaders is significant but many in the party have come to accept that Turnbull cannot beat Bill Shorten and they’d rather have a leader who has a clear vision and ideology than a man whose ambition never matched his abilities.
The sad reality is that Turnbull should’ve been replaced at least 12 months ago. Whoever takes over as leader faces an enormous challenge.
The small ‘l’ liberals in the party, assisted by a predominately Left wing media who cannot stomach genuine centre-right leadership, have caused enormous damage to a party that once prided itself on its stability and lack of factional warfare.
Voters deserve stability but they also deserve a clear choice at the polling booth, not two versions of Labor who are on a unity ticket on critical issues such as population and climate change.
Robert Menzies’ description of small-l liberals as unprincipled opportunists rings as true today as it did when he wrote it in 1974.
“The main trouble in my state is that we have the state executive of the Liberal Party, which is dominated by what they now call ‘Liberals with a small l’ — that is to say, Liberals who believe in nothing but who will believe in anything if they think it worth a few votes … the whole thing is quite tragic,” Menzies wrote.
As I wrote in July 2017 “it’s all well and good to be a broad church, but at some point the Liberal Party has to stand for something and give frustrated voters a reason to trust it again.”
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