In what now seems another age, in 2016, when he was the NSW finance minister, Dominic Perrottet wrote: “If you stand for free speech, you are not a bigot. If you question man-made climate change, you are not a sceptic … If you love your country, you are not an extremist … It’s time for a new political conversation that reflects the concerns of everyday people.” In short, he said: “It’s time for a conservative spring.”
Fast forward five years and Perrottet becomes premier. He led a government with a 70 per cent emissions reduction target, well in excess of federal Labor. And despite saying in 2018 that flying the Aboriginal flag permanently on Sydney Harbour Bridge was “a lavish exercise in trendy virtue signalling”, the lasting legacy of the Perrottet government will be just that. Not being “united as a nation – one Australia under one flag”, as he said back then.
NSW is now saddled with a Labor-Greens government at least in part because the Perrottet government, except on cashless pokies and a few infrastructure projects, had no real point of difference with the other side.
There was no commitment to keep coal-fired power stations open at least until there was a reliable alternative; no commitment to reverse the politically correct brainwashing taking place in NSW schools; and there was no commitment to make land release easier so more young people could be helped into the home ownership that is at the heart of a stable middle-class society.
At least in private, the former premier’s justification for being a conservative trapped into leading a progressive government was the composition of his cabinet and his party room – even though a premier’s job is to lead rather than to follow. But this is what happens when factional warlords have a business model lobbying ministers whose preselections they control.
Sadly, events in Victoria this week suggest that NSW is not alone in the woke leftism that appears to have achieved a stranglehold, at least on the state parliamentary Liberal parties.
Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming has just been suspended for nine months from the state Liberal party room, supposedly because she “brought the party into disrepute” by addressing a women’s rights rally on the steps of Parliament House 12 days ago that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis. Yet how was it Deeming’s fault that the event was hijacked by a bunch of extremists? And how could it conceivably be any sort of sackable offence for a Liberal MP to say women should have their own safe spaces, free from the presence of biological males?
In a letter to her fellow Liberal MPs on Sunday, Deeming made it clear that she “condemn(ed) Nazism unreservedly” and “condemn(ed) bigotry towards the LGBTQI+ community”. But, she said, she had not realised that “some Liberal MPs object to my advocacy for sex-based rights, parents’ rights and free speech as they relate to transgender laws. Or that they consider my views on this topic to be so politically toxic and out-of-step with a progressive modern-day Liberal Party that they believed I needed to become an independent MP in order to pursue them.”
“I had no idea,” she said, “that this was a non-negotiable issue.”
What’s happening to Deeming exemplifies what’s wrong with Liberal politics. Going into the party room on Monday, Liberal leader John Pesutto was determined to expel her. Before she took the floor as the final speaker (after 10 colleagues defended her), MP Ryan Smith pushed Pesutto to compromise. Pesutto said no, that he was pushing on with his motion. Then Deeming spoke. And that’s when Pesutto’s numbers collapsed and with it, I suspect, his hold on the leadership.
In a speech that some MPs said had brought them to tears, Deeming revealed that she had been part-raised by a Jewish uncle who had survived the Holocaust, and that she had been raped as a four-year-old child – hence her determination to not cop slurs of Nazism and, in her own words, to “make sure other children and women don’t suffer like I did”.
Yet instead of issuing the promised statement clearing her of extremist sympathies, Pesutto then spent the next 24 hours hitting the airwaves to blacken her name despite concerns that his own goal was hurting Liberal chances in next Saturday’s Aston by-election.
“I will be carefully reviewing … everything Moira says and does from here,” he said. “She’s got nine months to prove herself and if she doesn’t, she won’t be re-entering the (Liberal) party room.” Even though there’d have to be another motion to expel her and, nine months on, I doubt he’ll still be there to move it.
Who would credit that the party of Robert Menzies, John Howard and Tony Abbott now has a problem with conservatives?
Yet as well as suspending Deeming for not wanting biological men in women’s facilities or sport, the Victorian Liberal Party had expelled MP Bernie Finn in May last year for being too enthusiastically pro-life and for attending anti-lockdown “freedom rallies”; and during last year’s election threatened not to allow Renee Heath to take her position in the party room, should she be elected, on the grounds that her father was part of a conservative Christian church.
In the wake of last weekend’s NSW defeat, Liberal insiders (especially from the party’s “progressive” – LINO – wing) were congratulating themselves on a climate change policy that, they claimed, had largely saved their leafy seats from teals. And dismissing the drift of conservative voters to One Nation (despite it achieving between 16 and 8 per cent of the vote in the mere 17 seats only it contested). Imagine a mob so bereft of brains that they count the protection of posh seats versus the loss of government as a win.
The danger in putting First World concerns such as climate and identity ahead of bread-and-butter concerns over more roads, more jobs and higher living standards is that the Liberals look like a bunch of political snobs unworthy of the support of people who love their country and don’t want it to radically change. And it ignores the consistent lesson, at least at the federal level, that the Liberals win when they’re a strong alternative to Labor. As Abbott said on my Sky News show this week, the record proves that “Labor-lite Liberals lose”. Just look at Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria and, now, NSW.
This is why Peter Dutton’s decision on whether to oppose the Indigenous voice that Abbott has characterised as “wrong in principle and disastrous in practice” is so important as a test of whether the Liberal Party remains a “broad church” still capable of representing conservative voters.
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