After the last couple of weeks, a lot of us are left wondering what are Liberals to do?
How about we destroy the Labor Party.
For pity’s sake, let’s get out of the foetal position, harness the energy we glimpsed in Malcolm Turnbull’s sycophant speech, and take it to them.
Why are we unable to put Labor on the back foot for extended stretches? Why can’t we find the wedges and pressure points to do that, to make the progressive sycophants squirm like BS did in that glorious sitting?
I was recently steered to a hilarious short from the online station BBC III called The Unelectables. The parody follows the leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn and his band of hopeless cases as they tumble through episodes of their own incompetence and irrelevance.
This reminded me that the Labour Party is basically dead in Great Britain. Consequently, the Conservatives shine as the presumed party of government for the next twenty years. Why?
A sizeable chunk of the Tories’ big personalities, under pressure from the heroic Nigel Farage on their right flank, championed Brexit and executed a massive victory around an exclusively cultural issue. It’s hardly worth repeating, but we know that battle had nothing to do with the economy. This was a cultural struggle which devastatingly wedged the Labour Party. Its indecision was on full display as it was forced to choose between a working class base (who valued the “democracy” in their social democracy) and a reliably progressive oligarchy in Brussels.
How do we go from a political stalemate in Australia, evinced by crushingly low primary votes all round, to dream-like, complete electoral dominance as seen in the UK?
It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s culture. As Louise Clegg has eloquently stated, it’s values.
This is how we will differentiate ourselves. This is what the forgotten people are crying out for. This is how we remember them.
As Chris Kenny pointed out in the Australian this past weekend:
On paper, Labor and the Liberals agree on the major policy imperatives: rational economic policies; constrained government intervention; reliable public health and education; indigenous advancement and multiculturalism; alliance-based and Asia-focused foreign policy; free trade; and sensible action on climate.
As a right-wing movement, we should be proud that some of our ‘things’ have made it into this litany of consensus. But the point remains: as a consequence of this dull détente, all that is listed bores the electorate to despair. They’re sick of hearing us bicker over who is paying better lip service to these imperatives from time to time. If we lazily choose to campaign on these alone, we are copping out. What’s more, we’ll lose.
When challenged on why they refuse to prosecute cultural issues of the day like the repeal of Section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act, both Coalition leaders are reading from the same soft, post-Conciliar hymn sheet. They dodge the issue of freedom of speech by noting that neither this freedom nor the fight for it, creates “a single job” or builds “a single road”. As noted above, every party says they like jobs and roads. Whether it’s the original brand or ‘no frills’ – they both say the same thing on the tin now. When we trot out such an excuse, the electorate is not impressed by our focus, they find us blinkered and boring.
What might ‘not copping out’ look like?
Let’s take the Hurstville Boys no-handshake debacle. It emerged at an awards ceremony where female presenters were told that some students would not shake their hands as the school had a policy permitting Muslim male students to decline to shake hands with females, despite this practice being denounced by many senior Islamic figures.
The NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes conceded that refusing to shake a woman’s hand, because she is a woman, is “sexist”. Any Department of Education protocol allowing that behaviour is “sexist”. With this in mind, the Minister should attend Hurstville Boys with the Minister for Women, Tanya Davies. He should require the adolescents, whatever cultural excuse they may have pled, to front up and shake her hand as a sign of respect to a member of the Executive Council of the State of New South Wales.
This would be an easy win.
Every Liberal could be out on their soapbox demanding that Labor similarly denounce the same conspicuously disrespectful attitude. Every day, the Premier could challenge the Leader of the Opposition to condemn that behaviour. She could ask: would Mr Foley accept a protocol which permits students in secular, public schools to refuse to shake her hand?
This gesture wouldn’t “create a single job” and wouldn’t build “a single road”, but it would show guts and would win respect across the entire spectrum of NSW’s diverse constituency. It would unify the electorate behind an obvious acknowledgement of our shared values. It would unify them behind us, the Coalition.
It would painfully wedge Labor, highlighting the hypocrisy of their dual claims to feminism and cultural relativism. Like their UK counterparts, Labor would be crushed by indecision.
Whether it’s cultural issues like the repeal of 18C or economic ones like penalty rates, it instead seems the Coalition risks being crushed by indecision.
To fix the economy as we are duty-bound to do, we must allow the economic agenda to ride on a cultural one. We must aim for economic prosperity conjoined with unapologetic national pride as Menzies, Howard and Abbott did.
So there, let’s destroy Labor. Let’s render them unelectable. Better them than us.
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