Stoker says Coalition ‘scared to fight for its values’

Conservative figures attack the Morrison government’s unwillingness to confront issues of culture and identity.

“Too many Liberals were willing to just go along with cultural movements,” Amanda Stoker, with former prime minister Tony Abbott, told CPAC in Sydney. Picture: Monique Harmer

Former Liberal senator Amanda Stoker has lashed her former ­Coalition colleagues for failing to fight the last election on party principles, saying the federal opposition needed to urgently reconnect with its core values if it wished to return to government.

In an address to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Sydney, Ms Stoker joined several high-profile conservative figures in criticising the Morrison government’s unwillingness to confront issues of culture and identity at the election.

Ms Stoker, who was unsuccessful in her 2022 re-election bid, said too many Coalition colleagues were afraid to publicly oppose “cultural movements” and paid the price at the ballot box in May.

“Too many Liberals were willing to just go along with cultural movements that they didn’t truly believe in because they weren’t willing to take on the zeitgeist or (risk) being called a nasty name to speak up,” she said. “When you don’t show up and make the case, you lose by default.

Amanda Stoker during a Senate inquiry in parliament

“Fresh into opposition, the Liberal Party is, or at least should be, in a period of building. The time spent doing that now, reconnecting to principle as the foundation for good policy and decision-making, will be determinative of our capacity to be relevant to the Australians.”

Ms Stoker’s comments echoed former prime minister Tony Abbott’s call on Saturday for the Coalition to embrace “the conservative instinct”, while criticising lockdown measures and radical approaches to climate change. “We always take seats off Labor when we make climate an economic issue that will cost jobs and raise prices; rather than a moral issue requiring swift change to a survivalist lifestyle lest the planet self-immolate by 2030,” he told the conference.

“We still have to be the freedom party.”

Former senator Nick Minchin was met with jeers on Sunday afternoon after he said the party

did not need “a whole lot of changing” following the election, with angry audience

members shouting down his suggestion that “a strong Liberal Party is the only

way to defeat Labor”.

The two-day CPAC event, modelled on the long-running US Conservative Political Action Conference, was picketed on Saturday by up to 100 protesters claiming to be from activist groups including Community Action for Rainbow Rights and Campaign against Racism and Fascism.

CPAC speakers included UK politician Nigel Farage, ­Coalition senators Matt Canavan and Alex Antic, and Indigenous leader Warren Mundine.

Protesters outside CPAC at the International Convention Centre, Sydney. Picture: Monique Harmer

On Sunday, veteran broadcaster Alan Jones joined other speakers in decrying the Morrison government’s economic mismanagement and response to Covid-19, saying it willingly oversaw the “immobilisation of the country” and failed to consider expert opinion that dis­agreed with Australia’s hardline approach.

“We had federally the worst fiscal record of any post-war ­government, bigger than the Whitlam government,” he said.

“The Liberal government inherited a gross national debt of 20 per cent of GDP. By the time coronavirus came, it was 28 per cent of GDP. And now it is 43.5 per cent … and the budget papers say will go on to 44.9 per cent of GDP. This was meant to be conservative government.”

On Sunday, organisers said more than 150,000 people worldwide streamed the event.