Nigel Farage labels Malcolm Turnbull a ‘snake’ during CPAC speech

Britain’s Nigel Farage calls former PM ‘a snake’ who hijacked the Liberal Party in feisty speech at conservative conference.

Nigel Farage has labelled Malcolm Turnbull a snake as he celebrated Australia and Britain’s shift from “trendy, metro” leaders to real conservative leaders.

Introduced as “quite possibly” the next British prime minister, the Eurosceptic and right-wing figure on Saturday addressed a crowd of about 500 at the Conservative Political Action Conference Australia in Sydney. Mr Farage told the adoring crowd Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s election victory in May seemed impossible, after the recent hijacking of the Liberal party by “the other side”.

“Malcolm Turnbull ... pretended to be a conservative but actually turned out to be a snake,” he said, to applause.

“You’ve now got someone conservative, mainstream media (and) those in the middle of Melbourne and Sydney may not like him,” he said of Mr Morrison. “But out where real people live, they voted for him.” He said he had thought “the greenies had taken over this country”, especially after heading to Melbourne and having 600 people rally against him. The UK member of the European Parliament for the past two decades was a crucial figure in the 2016 Brexit referendum’s Leave campaign.

He now leads the newly-established Brexit party, which unexpectedly won the most UK seats of any party in the European Parliament election in May. Mr Farage said the right-wing revolt was moving across the West, against parties that said they were conservative but run by leaders who were nothing of the kind.

“(Former conservative UK prime minister) David Cameron was someone who was not conservative at all but a part of the trendy, metro, liberal elite masquerading as a conservative.” Mr Farage, who wants a no-deal Brexit, said he wanted the UK free of Europe so it could re-engage with its real friends in the world.

“Australia is right up there at the top of my personal list,” he said. He said he wanted a complete rebalancing of where Britain was in the world, an increased engagement with Commonwealth countries and fewer people forced into universities.

‘Australia has losts its anchor posts’

The man Mr Turnbull replaced, Tony Abbott, yesterday told CPAC Australia had “losts its anchor posts” and was adopting “fundamentally inhuman positions” in recent years.

“Restoring them is no simple task,” he said. “They used to be anchored in the Christian faith. Faith is a gift, some people have it, some people don’t.

“This is why it is so easy for people to put forward what I think are fundamentally inhuman positions and have them taken much more seriously than they should.”

Mr Abbott used his speech at the conference to lash legislation to decriminalise abortion in NSW, warning it would lead to “death on demand”.

Tony Abbott spoke at CPAC on Friday.

The response came as medical and pro-choice groups ­refused to discuss “unfounded fearmongering” in the debate surrounding the legislation, which they maintain simply recategorises abortion as a health issue, rather than a criminal one, making it “free of stigma”.

Mr Abbott called the legislation “morally shocking”.

“The biggest single problem with what’s happening in the NSW parliament at the moment is that it has been sprung on ­people,” the former Liberal prime minister said.

“If they really want to allow abortion right up to the time of birth, surely there should be a proper public debate about this. It shouldn’t have been something that was just ushered in … and then attempted to be rushed through the parliament.”

Richard Keith, moderator of the NSW Presbyterian Church, said “this is a time of great sadness in NSW”.

“God loves unborn babies. Abortion is always a tragedy, to be limited and avoided as much as possible,” he said.

The bill — which passed by 59 votes to 31 after a late-night parliamentary sitting on Thursday — allows terminations up to 22 weeks, as well as later abortions if two doctors considering all the circumstances agree the termination should occur.

The Australian Medical ­Association (NSW) previously blasted “unfounded fearmongering” for threatening to “derail” the discussion on abortion, and maintains its view that the decriminalisation of abortion was intended to “keep things for ­doctors and patients as they are now”.

With AAP