The writer is in Australia.
When the so-called ‘moderate’ MPs in a Westminster conservative political party remove a sitting Prime Minister from their own party, one who has delivered a majority government but is to the right of these moderates, the long-term effects are not good. Back in 1990, and after delivering 11 years of majority governments, Maggie Thatcher was knifed by the wets or moderates in the British Tory party. It is arguable that the party has never recovered. Sure, it won elections – we had 14 years of Tory governments in the UK until Keir Starmer won for Labour last year. But those Tory governments under David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak governed full on as Labour lite (to not so lite) ones. Liz Truss was almost immediately forced out for trying to shift direction. Spending, up. Taxes, up. Total capitulation on the culture wars that relate to schools, patriotism, free speech, massively over-powerful unelected judges, attacking the democratic parts of the constitution, over-the-top huge immigration, being prepared to appoint actual conservatives to anything and being afraid to take on the worst aspects of multiculturalism. And don’t forget for two-and-a-half years a stunning willingness to travel down the path of lockdown thuggery, weaponising the police, embracing ‘nudge’ propaganda, closing schools and spending on steroids, all to ape the approach of the Communist Chinese politburo. Right now it’s an open question whether the world’s oldest political party, the British Conservative Party, will be able to survive the coming electoral inroads of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party – such is the total lack of trust that its base voters have in anything the Tory leaders promise or pledge. (It’s not easy to run the line ‘okay, we made these promises four times in the past and never delivered, in fact did the opposite, but this time guys, well, we double-promise-cross-our-hearts that this time it’ll be different’.)
My claim is that something a little bit similar has happened to the Australian Liberal Party. It has not recovered from its axing of the man from the Right-side of the partyroom who was one of the most effective Opposition leaders ever and who had delivered the party a large majority government in 2013. He was defenestrated by his own party MPs. (And yes, I know Tony Abbott was a disappointment on free speech and a bunch else beside when in office but as I said back then, “if your answer to Abbott is Malcolm Turnbull then you are the problem, not Tony”.) Since then we have seen the same pattern as in Britain. The partyroom is hopelessly divided between Black Hand Gang wets and what I would call ‘actual conservatives’. The former want to park the Liberal Party an inch to the Right of Labour and then move Leftwards as soon as Labour does. They revel in focus groups and shun value-based campaigning. Truth be told, many were quietly for ‘Yes’ as regards the Voice, at least until the writing was on the wall. Very little concern for free speech. And as with the British Tories, we had myriad supposed ‘liberal’ MPs who disgracefully embraced lockdown thuggery at least as enthusiastically as their British cousins.
All of which brings me to the current Coalition election campaign. It has been pretty woeful. But why? My guess here is that it boils down to trying to drive down the middle between moderates and conservatives in the partyroom. If Team Dutton had come out bravely and run an election on pulling us out of Net Zero, with all the massive economic advantages that would entail, I think the Coalition would have romped home – despite the vitriol the ABC and Fairfax Press would have thrown at them. If it’d come out way earlier and harder on immigration cuts (because 100,000 isn’t that big a cut and anyway, do you believe they would follow through?), taking on the big business and university lobbies that disgracefully funded and full-on supported the ‘Yes’ Voice campaign, it would have romped home. A values-based campaign would have been more like Pierre Poilievre’s in Canada. (And if Poilievre’s Tories win and Dutton loses the attempt to blame Trump will be patently laughable, remembering that Trump has relentlessly mocked Canada and that three-quarters of Canadian exports go to a US putting tariffs on them. Actually, a Poilievre win should shame the Dutton campaign team for the rest of their working lives.)
The incoherent half-matching of Labour spending pledges and refusal to fight the culture wars that so desperately need fighting all seems to stem from trying to keep both camps in the partyroom if not happy, then not incandescently angry. Call it the ‘let’s try at all costs to win Tim Wilson’s seat back from the Teals’ strategy. And boy oh boy do I hate that strategy and think it worthless.
So, Dutton’s campaign launch praising of the Morrison government approach to lockdowns won not a single vote but sure got an awful lot of Right-of-centre voters like me thinking we might preference a minor party before the thuggish Libs. Ditto for Dutton evading the ‘what’s a woman?’ question, as though there wasn’t loads of political capital in being honest and not cowardly and afraid of people and groups who’d never vote for you. Ditto for Dutton’s support of the eSafety Commissioner and for Kevin Rudd as ambassador? Why support them? And why hasn’t Labour’s failed Voice referendum self-indulgence been front and centre in the campaign? (You win if you think it’s because an awful lot of Lib MPs wanted a conscience vote and don’t want to drag that up again.) Why give Jacinta Price the Musk-like job of finding budgetary waste rather than a big-ticket cultural role? (You could be forgiven for thinking the idiots in campaign central were deliberately trying to sideline her.)
Likewise, why is it so hard to make political hay out of an Albanese Government that has seen living standards drop nearly 8% and electricity prices skyrocket? Correct answer: because you haven’t got the cojones to tell voters the truth. That Net Zero is impoverishing and totally stupid with the US now abandoning it and joining China (two new coal-fired plants a week) and India. No, Albo, Australia is not some moral beacon whose economic suicide any other countries will mimic. But commit to this idiocy, only 20 years slower, and your whole set of policies becomes incoherent. ‘You’ve agreed the world as we know it will end so tell me why we should be going slowly-slowly?’
Back on April 5th in the Spectator I argued that every Coalition campaign advisor should be fired. Three weeks on and the case for that is now blatantly clear, such is the value-free vacuum and incoherence of what we voters are being offered. Sure, maybe we can limp over the line. Let’s hope. But it beggars belief that a Government like this Albo one has the Liberal Party so afraid of its own shadow. Actually, make that afraid of the shadow of the Tony Abbott wing of the party, the one that Mr Dutton was supposed to represent.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.
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The Chinese will be laughing.
All the way to the bank – literally as Rishi appears to be aware.
Zero Carbon, Zero Covid – this fixation with ‘Zero’ before some made-up crusade or the other but what always seems to be just another excuse to control and micro-manage every aspect of our lives – where did it come from? Sounds extreme and uncompromising – a decision to wipe-out or eradicate something completely and without logical thought or even mercy – reminds me of that other genocidal programme to destroy and transform society by that maniac Pol Pot – Year Zero.
I think our political class have all gone stark staring mad and we are being governed by control freaks and megolamaniacs..
Fits in with Zero Brains!
I would be happier if inddeed they’d gone ‘stark staring mad’ but I’m afraid this is yet another scheme hatched decades ago under the banner of Agenda 21/30 for the complete control of our lives and depopulation..
But what will be the point in the west aiming for zero carbon, which I think is bonkers, when there is India, Asia, China, Africa and South America? I doubt the globalist movement can take control of these populations. And which people are the ones doing the over populating? On a personal level of my friends inmost keen on depopulation it is those with children. I don’t understand at all what the west thinks will happen to it if it tries to depopulate itself?
Wendy.. in my post above I mentioned a man named Maurice Strong. Instigator of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. This man openly called for the collapse of the first world industrialised nations.. that’s exactly what’s happening now right before our eyes. The chain of events and timing is no accident or coincidence.
It can’t be long before the idea of carbon dioxide overproduction gets wedded to the idea of oxygen overconsumption.
Will they announce something big at COP26? I thought yes, but now I think the main message may turn out to be “Fight China”.
Welcome to Britain – its armed forces got their a**** kicked to kingdom come in Afghanistan for 20 years until the rulers eventually “realised” there was no mileage in defending Afghanistan against the Afghans when the US, which had sent them in in the first place, decided to withdraw. But wait… Hot on the heels of NATO’s humiliation, the British press now tells us the government of Taiwan views Taiwan as an independent country (it doesn’t), as opposed to a “renegade province”, so…hey, let’s have a Pacific version of NATO too, to help Australia fight China. It’s reminiscent of Monty Python’s Black Knight.
Zero carbon, zero Covid, all thanks to Bill Gates and his lackeys like braindead Johnson.
WEF puppets
It would be an insult to fag packets to say that all this farrago of nonsense has been scribbled on the back of one.
It’s just grandstanding by stupid people who habitually reside in La-La Land.
There is a handy review of the various forecasts of climate armageddon in https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/10/16/failed-serial-doomcasters/ which shows what the true consensus is amongst climate scientists. Their predictions end dates range from 20 or more years ago to 20 years in the future.
I think the one thing that we can agree on is that the science they are using is not something they agree on.
A couple of years old but this ones good too –
As is this one from last year –
The zero carbon cult want to change the weather. Good luck with that!
I think the one thing we should agree on is that “climate change” is another load of absolute BOLLOX designed to hide the control agenda.
Carbon zero? FFS!
The climate is changing and it has always changed. Ask anyone who lives in an area where there’s lots of peat, or who has read about the ice fairs that used to be held on the Thames in London. The lie isn’t that the climate is changing. It’s that human action is causing the change. They say they want human action to stop the climate changing, which is insane. Anyone who still manages to be a little bit in tune with nature, to the extent that that’s still possible in a world of mass smartphone use and psychokiller culture like Game of Thrones and the Squid Games, should be awed at the climate changing.
“The Government may need to consider changes to existing taxes and new sources of revenue throughout the transition in order to deliver net zero sustainably, and consistently with the government’s fiscal principles.”
That if nothing else should worry us. Lower energy bills? Don’t make me laugh.
They borrow Ferguson’s Magick Modellinge Macheene when he ‘s not monkeying with it to tell us the sky’s falling in. The lunatics have taken over.
Rishi, forget your concerns, scruples and conscience. Just stick to the plan, there’s a good boy. Agenda 30, in case you’d forgotten you’re a technocrat.
Fishi Rishi, who poured magic money into the Great Furlough Scam.Has he suddenly acquired the ability to count up to ten?
‘Green jobs, lower energy bills and avoiding the disastrous impact of global heating‘.
‘Green jobs – all massively subsidised by us, the tax payer.
‘Lower energy bills‘ – rubbish. Just like we currently pay a 25% ‘green’ surcharge on electricity bills to line the pockets of Gummer and Chinese turbine/solar manufacturers.
‘Disastrous impact of global heating‘ – +0.7C over the last 30 years is ‘disastrous’? I don’t think so.
Government, lobbyists, media, climate scientists and othe rvested interests all march towards their great reset, which, conveniently, lines their own pockets with our £££.
No thanks.
There’s not a grain of truth in this climate scam. It was cooked up by the Club of Rome for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, courtesy of Rockefeller stooge Maurice Strong and his henchmen. The same people who are also responsible for the corrupt IPCC and those hacked emails..
We are now at the first stages of a global cooling after an interglacial period. Its why they had to dump the ‘global warming’ headline and rename it Climate Change which just about encompasses everything.
Read the Club of Rome’s ‘First Global Revolution’.. they tell you in that document exactly what they intend to do, and what we the masses are in for.. Agenda 21/30.. dystopia on steroids.
Carbon of course is the ideal target as there’s nothing that doesn’t include it, even us mere mortals are 2/3rds of the stuff. In short, just like Covid its a pack of lies..
The First Global Revolution: https://tinyurl.com/mkms5ncn
Ha ha.. yes.. The First Global Revolution.. I stand corrected..
The human carbon problem won’t be with us too much longer.
But spot the opportunists. A good investment for many, no doubt.
Ahh the old lead the country by leaks, classic, strong…. blergh.
Rushi suddenly finds a new found concern over the finances he happily blew up over the plandemic.
What a farce. A little punch and Judy show for the blue pilled MSM consumers.
The reality is the winner will be the Climate cultists and those looking to destroy the vestiges of the middle classes and ensure our submission to the total full spectrum control these lunatics are pushing us towards.
They are only putting this act up so those of the blue pilled that are fretting over inflation and supply shortages still think someone in the government has some modicum of sense. It just helps to keep the whole shitshow running into the next manufactured crisis so that Rishi can take over if things get too much for the electorate to bear.
BlackRock and friends don’t even try to justify this as anything to do with ‘climate’. Its just a way of making $trillions by creating new investments with all the risk covered by taxpayers.
There are as usual with these things a load of willing idiots to talk about ‘climate’ and loads of politicians willing to have their bank accounts enriched.
Dovetails nicely with the covid scam to disguise the on-going transfer of wealth from the 99% to the 1% globally, along with killing any lingering hopes of demos.
We know the true cost is several trillion pounds. We also know most countries won’t attempt it so will leave us at a massive disadvantage for decades to come.
Energy costs will climb through the roof (as will blackouts) and quality of living is going to drop measurably.
Net zero as well as being impossible is the biggest act of economic and social self harm any country has ever subjected itself to.
Let’s not forget Emperor Bokassa who forced parents of school pupils in the Central African Republic to buy extremely expensive school uniforms made in a factory owned by his wife, and then started having children who didn’t wear them beaten to death. But this time it’s global.
Nowadays “the science” says an extinction like the one that did for the dinosaurs is lurking around the corner if we don’t go all-electric. Like yeah, right. Those reptiles must have been very naughty to bring a meteorite down on the planet like that.
In 2021, Antarctica records coldest winter since records began in 1957 as we head into a new grand solar minimum. Global climate will continue to cool significantly for a long time and yet the globalists will carry on hosing us all down with their climate change slime as a feint to implement their fascist regime.
Who authorised this “leak”? Don’t get excited, folks: it’s bollocks.
Boris is happy to destroy what’s left of British industry and plunge most of the country into fuel poverty if it gets him a kind word from the BBC or the Guardian for one 24 hour news cycle.
Convenient leak …. Johnson knows his Green Lunacy is alienating traditional conservative voters so Sunak has “been allowed” to send an alternative signal.
The COP26 Boondoggle will still go ahead. Johnson will still posture and preen on the world state at our expense making all sorts of unaffordable promises. And the Green Lunatics will still continue with their mission to destroy our economy; drive millions into fuel poverty and tax the bejesus out of us …….. as punishment for the Original Sin of starting the Industrial Revolution.
It seems to me we would be better off building our fishing industry and marine life instead of injecting miles of concrete into the sea bed for wind power where the blades have to be expensively renewed every 20yrs and they do no biodegrade, doesn’t provide enough energy let alone the electricity for cars that will only travel a few hundred miles before a recharge.
unless someone stops this nonsense in its tracks, yet again these loonies will destroy what chance UK has of creating a prosperous future for our grandchildren. Innovation from true entrepreneurs and not folk attached to government/corporate socialists, is the way to go.
The treasury is right to be concerned; this article shows how we have paid £20Billion to trash Oil and Gas in the North Sea and give all the renewable businesses and jobs to China. A total farcical disaster.
This is utterly obvious to anyone with the wit to put on a matching pair of shoes.
We’re not reducing emissions of vital plant food one whit. All we’re doing is beggaring (and soon to be freezing) ourselves while shifting output to the Orient, where China alone is currently building 100GW of new coal plants, double the output of our entire grid.
Nobody can credibly pretend to believe otherwise, or that this is about ecomentalism. So we have to ask what it is really about, and cui bono, because it’s not any UK prole, of that we can be sure.
The rush to a zero carbon industrial complex is laughable. Is CO2 REALLY the devil incarnate? I feel I am living in a parallel universe, where those in power and authority seem to have totally lost their minds! ( Or the evil bastards are enthusiastically following Herr Schwab’s dictats).
And herein lies yet another monumental con/lie being perpetrated by these megalomaniacal monsters, on the great unwashed and unjabbed.
Christ on a blowhole! Is there no limit to their evil chicanery?
Just have a look at this and decide for yourselves. Pretty compelling if you have an open mind. (What’s one of those?) The PDF is available to download.
http://www.beautyandthebeastlytruth.com
Unfortunately, there is little or no place in the arena we currently inhabit for calm rational discussion, just hysterical tooth grinding, spittle spraying ranting, and finger-wagging, cheered on by the puppetmasters, else this would be compulsory reading for all. It would in saner circumstances help many to achieve educated and informed opinions.
They do not want the plebians to be informed. Much better they are at one another’s throats.