Peta Credlin: Darren Chester no match for a warrior like Barnaby Joyce
Darren Chester was nowhere that mattered the last time the Coalition was out of office and only promoted under the Turnbull regime, which says everything you need to know about his core beliefs, writes Peta Credlin.
Analysis
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The one party in the federal Coalition to hold all its seats last weekend was the National Party. Yet Darren Chester, a dumped former Minister who looks and sounds a lot like a Green these days, says he’s going to challenge Barnaby Joyce for the leadership – not because Joyce failed to win votes for the Nats in the bush but because he failed to win votes for the Libs in the poshest of inner-city seats.
Go figure!
But what would Chester know anyway? He was nowhere that mattered the last time the Coalition was out of office and was only promoted under the Turnbull regime, which says everything you need to know about his core beliefs.
Instead, it was warriors like Joyce who held the Rudd-Gillard government to account because opposition is hard, there’s little support, no public service to tell you what to think, so the best leaders are those that have a history of standing for something and are genuinely connected to the people they represent.
Defeat is always hard to take. Sensible MPs, though, accept that no government lasts forever, that changes of government are essential for functioning democracy, and that defeat is actually a chance to rethink, regroup and come back stronger than ever.
And this defeat was hardly a rejection of centre-right politics. Together, Labor, the Greens and the Teals won just 47.9 per cent of first preference votes. Between them, the Libs, the Nats, One Nation, the Palmer party and a miscellany of rightist parties (such as the Lib-Dems, Katter and Shooters and Fishers) also won 47.9 per cent of the primary vote. Why would the Liberals (let alone the Nationals) think that they had to move substantially to the left after an election which was pretty much a tie?
It was never going to be easy for the Morrison government to win. What made defeat almost inevitable was the total absence of a fourth term agenda, other than “superannuation for housing”, a worthy policy but released far too late in the campaign to make much difference.
Add in Scott Morrison’s manifest unpopularity right across the country and we’ve ended up with a new PM that seven out of 10 Australians didn’t vote for. So it makes no sense whatsoever for a political movement that’s just been defeated because it had little product differentiation from its opponents to then decide to have even less.
As a former assistant treasurer in the Howard government, and more recently border protection and defence Minister, Peter Dutton is ideally placed to restore the Coalition as the best party to manage the economy and national security.
And make no mistake, these are going to be front and centre over the next few years. The Ukraine war is not going to end anytime soon and could easily produce a new iron curtain in Europe.
China’s communist government remains bent on taking democratic Taiwan, with incalculable consequences for the global order that’s made the modern world more safe, more free and more prosperous than ever before. And by corrupting the weak governments of the Pacific, Beijing’s tentacles now stretch almost to our own borders.
Then there’s inflation, already at 5 per cent and certain to go higher, with inevitable interest rate pain; plus galloping cost increases, led by power prices that are going up almost 20 per cent on 1 July and are likely to go much higher still, thanks to climate policies and energy market disruption.
Plus the fact that governments won’t be able to scratch every electoral itch with more spending thanks to free money from the Reserve Bank.
Dutton is unlikely to fall for Labor’s demands that the Coalition accept the new government’s (non-existent) “mandate” for higher emissions targets and to legislate net zero. Almost certainly, he’ll keep faith with Coalition voters who expect the MPs they’ve just elected to honour their own commitments to the electorate: not to put cutting emissions before saving jobs and not to try to bind the hands of future governments and parliaments.
The last thing that Liberal Party (and the Coalition as a whole) needs is an essentially theological debate over whether to be more “progressive” or more “conservative”.
The so-called “moderates” like to quote Menzies’ post-retirement statement that he’d intended to create a “progressive” party, ignoring his other statement (in a letter to his daughter) deploring “ ‘small-l’ Liberals who believe in nothing” as he voted DLP instead of for the party he founded.
At its strongest, the party has always been both small-l liberal and small-c conservative, depending on the issue and the circumstances. By far the best course is to maintain Menzies’ concerns for today’s version of the “forgotten people” – the voters he hoped to represent that weren’t to be found, he said “in the “fashionable suburbs”.
They’re far more likely to be worrying about cost-of-living pressures in Penrith and Chadstone than obsessing over emissions in Vaucluse or Toorak.
The job of opposition is not to improve bad legislation or to find common ground with your opponents. It’s to present a clear alternative and make the case for it in the community. It’s to prepare candidates capable of representing an electorate without forfeiting their values. That will be a lot harder for the Coalition if the National Party decides to transition into the party of Palm Beach and Byron Bay.
The Nationals have always prided themselves on having a character all of their own, distinct from that of their Coalition partner. Instead of trying to turn themselves into rural Teals, the Nats should tell the woke types in the inner city to get real.
INDIGENOUS RECOGNITION NOT THE REAL DEAL
WITH the election safety won, Labor’s true colours are now on display with an agenda for cultural change such as pushing for a constitutionally entrenched Indigenous “Voice to the Parliament”.
Rather than be taken in by beguiling language, let’s consider what this “Voice” actually means. It’s a body of Indigenous leaders only, elected by Indigenous people only, to look at all laws through the prism of how they impact Indigenous people, and to give their views to the parliament before any legislation is voted on.
It’s not a voice to government, which is what every other Indigenous body in the past has been. It’s to the parliament which means it can be used to make mischief by everyone who might oppose the government of the day. Also on the table is the “Makarrata Commission”, a new body to supervise “a process of agreement-making and truth-telling about our history”. Basically, this means rewriting the Australian story with 97 per cent of us as the bad guys.
Plus a treaty, as if any country can make a treaty with a section of its own people. And with a treaty of course, comes claims for compensation. I’m not against constitutional recognition of Indigenous people, provided it doesn’t divide our country by race.
Something like former PM Tony Abbott’s suggestion the preamble be amended to acknowledge the country we’ve created has an “indigenous heritage, a British foundation, and an immigrant character”. This is factually true and includes everyone.
It’s also worth recognising that this new parliament will have up to 10 MPs that identify as Indigenous. In percentage terms, that’s more in the parliament than in the actual Australian population destroying the left’s cry that our country is inherently racist. Surely that shows more than anything else that a separate race-based ‘Voice’ is redundant?
Pushing ahead with a “Voice” referendum that’s almost certain to fail would put real reconciliation back by decades.
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Originally published as Peta Credlin: Darren Chester no match for a warrior like Barnaby Joyce
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