Lightweight Banks’s defection is good news

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Robert Menzies created the Liberal Party in the tradition of Western civilisation. During Malcolm Turnbull’s term as prime minister, Menzies’ vision disintegrated. The Liberals allowed the party of civilisation to devolve into a party of tribes. Where once noble ideas and enduring principles guided Liberals towards the light, tribal mentality and identity politics have taken root. However, signs of growing unrest among Liberal MPs who embrace identity politics over classical liberal and conservative values augur well for the party’s future.

The defection of MP Julia Banks to the crossbench is a political inconvenience, but indicates the Liberal Party is recovering its philosophical roots. A political party is a cultural entity. If someone with Banks’s predilection for identity politics is deemed a good cultural fit for the Liberal Party, there is something gravely wrong.

Banks’s betrayal of Liberal colleagues would be interesting if it weren’t so predictable. She is an unremarkable politician with a talent for self-promotion.

In September, I wrote in these pages that the Liberal MPs claiming to be bullied by conservative colleagues were Turnbull backers angered by his fall from grace. I suggested their motives were less than pure.

Those in seats that lean left stood to lose if the party recovered its socially conservative principles after Turnbull failed to win the leadership contest. Defecting to the crossbench was a way of saving their own skin in the coming federal election.

Like many Liberal wets, Banks appeals to identity politics with depressing regularity. She also shares the wets’ habit of stigmatising conservatives in language once common among communists. For example, some leftists have taken to shouting “reactionary!” whenever they spot someone who leans right of Mao Zedong. In her eulogy for Turnbull’s lost tribe, Banks lamented: “The Liberal Party has changed … due to the actions of the reactionary and regressive right wing.” Has a Liberal MP ever sounded more like the ghost of Lenin?

Australia’s second longest serving prime minister, John Howard, corrected the record on the ABC’s 7.30, saying the Liberal Party is the custodian of two great traditions: classical liberalism and conservatism.

Howard is classical liberal on economic issues and conservative on matters such as same-sex marriage. He warned Liberals not to allow their enemies to define them: “I hear expressions like ‘hard right’. What is meant by hard right? Someone who has a conservative social position? That is not hard right. That is just being an ordinary conservative who sees value in preserving things from the past that are working well.”

Despite Howard’s call to reason, Liberal women offered a plethora of “isms” to distract the nation from core government business. Banks cried sexism, but has yet to provide hard evidence that she was bullied by male colleagues. In the wake of Labor winning the Victorian state election, Industrial Relations Minister Kelly O’Dwyer dumped daft left propaganda at the PM’s door by attributing the loss to sexism and homophobia. Like Banks, O’Dwyer won’t benefit from a renaissance of classical liberal and conservative values in the Coalition. She holds the blue-ribbon Liberal seat of Higgins, where the Greens won 42 per cent of the two party-preferred vote at the 2016 election. A poll last week showed O’Dwyer stands to lose the seat next year.

In the past sitting week, federal Victorian MPs gave Labor plenty of ammunition to run a negative campaign against the government. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and deputy Tanya Plibersek used it to pulverise Liberal MPs in parliament. Instead of providing Labor with material for a negative campaign against conservatives, perhaps Liberal wets could try something novel, like taking the fight to the opposition.

The coming week will provide ample opportunity for the government to turn the tables on Labor. But it will have to catch up. The Labor team is tight, focused and gunning to win. It is impressive to watch in action. It has seized control of the legislative agenda by proposing legal reform to prevent schools being able to exclude gay students. The reforms were already on the government’s agenda and were to form part of its response to the review of religious freedom. It lost control by delaying action.

Labor is refusing to back the government’s new encryption laws targeting terrorists and pedophiles. On that count, Christmas has come early for the Coalition, but its members are too busy backbiting to realise it.

The Coalition has a reasonable record on policy to prevent violence against women and children. This week, it should spread the news. It has funded programs on domestic violence. It has supported a range of measures to counteract transnational pedophilia and sex trafficking. It introduced Operation Sovereign Borders to destroy the business model of people-smugglers.

Recently, Attorney-General Christian Porter overhauled the serious overseas criminal matters scheme after The Australian revealed legal aid granted to notorious Australian pedophile Peter Scully totalled $525,000 in taxpayer funding. Scully was later sentenced to life in jail for child rape and human trafficking.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has used his powers to identify and deport serious criminals, including sex offenders. He holds taxpayer-funded bodies such as the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to account for soft treatment of foreign criminals. He opposes judicial activism.

By contrast, Labor has rejected proposals designed to safeguard women and children from sexual predation. In response to the federal inquiry into migration settlement outcomes, the Coalition government recommended reform of the Migration Act to allow mandatory cancellation of visas for violent offenders aged between 16 and 18. It also sought to cancel the visas of adults convicted of violent crimes such as ­assault, sexual offences or possession of child pornography. The Labor Party rejected these reforms as well as others related to counter-terrorism.

This week is the government’s last chance to present a united front and take the fight to Labor. Religious freedom and counter-terrorism are set to dominate the debate. Both are essential to the future of freedom and civilisation in Australia. Our country needs freedom to flourish. The Liberal Coalition must prepare for the week ahead and fight to win.