Simon Holmes a Court’s play for power has little moderation

Simon Holmes a Court. Picture: Aaron Francis

For some years Simon Holmes a Court has floated on the fringe of Australian politics. Apparently this is no longer enough to keep him interested and now he is seeking power.

He is funding up to 15 candidates in a bid to grab more than the limelight which had previously been enough to sustain him.

He loves to be interviewed in the media and loves to see his own photo prominently displayed in the media.

Having achieved a high degree of prominence, he now craves power, the most powerful aphrodisiac of them all.

Alex Turnbull and Alan Jones are listed among his donors although as yet we do not know how much each donor has put in to Holmes a Court’s campaign.

Right across the nation Holmes a Court is flexing his newfound political muscle. What is odd about his choices is that he is opposing the Liberal moderates such as Tim Wilson, Dave Sharma, Josh Frydenberg and Jason Falinski.

People such as Wilson and to a lesser extent Sharma stand out as moderates.

Trent Zimmerman is a factional organiser for the moderates and he too has not been spared.

I can’t grasp the logic in posing as the anti-moderate leader when these are the Liberals with views closest to those of Holmes a Court.

The public stance of the Liberal Party is that it has no factions but when Malcolm Turnbull made this point at a recent party conference he drew only laughter and derision from his fellow party members.

The expulsion from the party of my good friend Ross Cameron shows that the NSW branch is a tightly held bastion of the moderate.

Cameron’s main problem is that he always speaks his mind even when his truth proves to be extremely inconvenient.

The only way parties of the right or the left survive and thrive is by allowing robust and rigorous debate before the vote comes.

When the crossbench rules in a parliament, the only certainty is that the passage of legislation becomes slower.

From my time in the Senate I could never understand how it came to be that at the end of a parliamentary session, normal rules are suspended and legislation is pushed through at a much faster rate as the lure of the flight home comes closer into view. Bills are bundled together and time for debate is drastically reduced.

If the crossbench know that the guillotine will be applied so often at the end of a session you are entitled to wonder why they don’t seek to minimise the time for debate earlier.

At least then more than a derisory few minutes could be allotted to the time for debate.

Our new Parliament House is more than big enough to accommodate all of a chamber’s members turning up for a debate.

The British House of Commons is hopelessly overcrowded and can take only a proportion of those elected to it.

The British should be thanked for producing the Westminster system which has served them and Australia so well over time.

By making our Constitution so hard to change our forefathers (no apology for the gender because they were all men) probably did the right thing.

While it might frustrate Republicans like myself, it has stood for more than a century and still remains a formidable document.

The small states ensured that NSW and Victoria could not run the place and establish a national capital on vacant land used for grazing cattle and sheep.

Some say that we should have left the cattle and the sheep alone and undisturbed.