There are days when I wonder if the idiom, ‘You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink…’ was penned purely for the benefit of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

A broad church and ideological crisis in conservative politics – caused by the infiltration of wets, seat-warmers, and career charlatans – means there are few topics behind which the conservative movement can unite.

Mass digital censorship is one of them.

The existence of dystopian architects, such as the former Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher, has already made conservative voters pretty angry. They want to see anyone and everyone associated with Digital ID and other anti-liberty policies banished – preferably with a grovelling apology.

It might also help if current conservative MPs were forced to read aloud their party pledge seeing as they have forgotten the words that wrote the narrative of modern conservatism.

Peter Dutton is the bloke brought in to patch-up the house after the last election. I have said publicly and will repeat here that rarely is a police officer a good fit for high office, except in a Defence portfolio. In the same way that we saw medical bureaucrats trash civil liberty in their single-minded pursuit of Covid, often those from a law enforcement background become distracted by an over-exaggerated sense of ‘justice’ which fails to determine the nuance between good laws and bad laws.

They are a type of individual made uncomfortable by the necessary level of chaos present in a free society. Allow me an example. Jaywalking is a crime. It’s dangerous and sometimes people die. Let’s erect surveillance monitoring with facial recognition that automatically fines you if you step off the curb. No more jaywalking – but how do you feel about walking the streets now? Would you rather suffer the odd accident to keep the eyes of Big Brother closed? It’s the exact slippery slope playing out in relation to social media. Personally, I’d rather dodge the jaywalkers than live under the microscope of digital police in the same way I will happily have my feelings hurt instead of letting the eSafety Commissioner decide the boundaries for global conversation.

Remember, the communists are the ones who curtail every liberty in exchange for absolute safety and a zero crime rate.

Governments are pitching ‘child safety’ as the cheat code for extensive political power. Every dangerous policy you can imagine has ‘child safety’ in the forward. We have to stop allowing politicians to con us from the heartstrings and realise that ‘child safety’ serves the same function as ‘Net Zero’ – propaganda.

Being guilty of … all of the above, the Coalition has a lot to prove and plenty of agitated supporters who are glaring at them from the other side of the road, threatening to put their vote in the box of an independent.

The Voice to Parliament was a gift from Albanese – a chance for Dutton to race up to the microphone and declare the Coalition absolutely and fundamentally against embedding racial privilege in the Constitution.

And yet for months frustrated conservatives were forced to watch Dutton hesitate, mumble, and request ‘detail’.

His weakness of conviction allowed the press to verbal his silence and in doing so, level accusations of racism against every conservative voter.

Dutton sent the government 15 questions about the Voice to Parliament, saying, ‘What I have done is ask for detail of the Voice, and I don’t know how that’s an attack.’

What he actually did was leave the question of Marxist racial privilege and a permanent racial division hanging over Australia. Dutton pencilled-in a question mark next to the Coalition’s support of racial privilege – a deeply disturbing favourite of the left-wing agenda.

‘My job is to question him, and hold him to account,’ added Dutton, of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

No. With due respect, your job is to oppose him. Your job is to champion conservative beliefs without fear or restraint and to understand the fundamentals of conservatism to the point you can voice a clear stance as easily as breathing.

A Farage or a Trump would not hesitate. Hesitation is fatal in a fight.

It was under Jacinta Price’s wing that Dutton finally campaigned against the Voice to Parliament – it also true that both Price and the conservative press did all the heavy lifting for the Opposition Leader. They wrote the words, they gave the speeches, and they confronted the mobs of activists to defend the Constitution. Ordinary Australians proved themselves to be extraordinarily resistant to an assault from the radicalised race-warriors on the left. Although they could not speak, in the end they voted.

Dutton escaped the Voice to Parliament debate. He did not win it.

Dismantling racism has been a prelude to the main event – mass global censorship of the public conversation.

The Coalition are in serious trouble for appointing the worldwide laughing stock known as ‘Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner’ – the only bureaucrat in our history who has tried to censor content across the whole world.

Her office and her actions sit at odds to every fibre of the party built by Menzies.

If Dutton was truly a conservative leader, he would stage a press conference and apologise – to Elon Musk, to social media users, to Australians, and to citizens around the world. He would shake his head and admit that the party made a mistake with this e-Safety Office and that they have learned their lesson. He would give a speech about the dangers of censorship and re-commit his party to the pursuit of liberty and promise to fight for the people against the ever-expanding state.

It’s a fantasy press conference conservative voters know they will never see.

Instead, we got this:

‘Julie Inman Grant (the e-Safety Commissioner) is one of the finest public servants in the employment of the Commonwealth of Australia.’

He also said: ‘There is no more important task than making sure we keep children safe in our community and that is true in the real world as much as it is online. These companies operate in a lawless environment and have no regard even for the rule of law in a country like ours.’ And with that, Peter Dutton consigned himself to a footnote in history.

He was led to water, but he will forever stand next to the pool.

Instead of stopping Silicon Valley companies from collecting and selling our private biometic data, they have penned legislation to share it with the government. Instead of keeping violent criminals off our streets, the government releases them. Instead of keeping children safe from horrific fringe leftwing activists movements, the government censors anyone who tries to protect them.

Safe? Please. None of this has ever been about safety. We would rather be free.

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.