Malcolm Turnbull and the Conservatives: United Only By Mutual Contempt, by Hal Colebatch. Malcolm Turnbull has hijacked and divided the Liberal Party, whose values he despises. Many years ago, quizzed as to his prime ministerial ambitions, he was asked which party he would belong to and replied, “It doesn’t matter.” That sums up his political principles.
In the recent Cabinet reshuffle, Turnbull showed his determination to push the Australian polity further to the left, snubbing conservatives and rewarding his backers. Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews, who are conservatives and front-bench material (as is Abbott himself) were among those who missed out. In degrading conservatives while promoting his own trendy-left cult of personality, Turnbull is persisting with a strategy which has already proved harmful and, quite likely, disastrous for the Liberal Party. …
[A]t least half – probably more – of the Liberal Party is socially as well as politically conservative, and there is no reason why conservatives should have a bar of Malcolm Turnbull. He despises them and they despise and distrust him. He has nothing in common with the values of Menzies …
I have not seen in his speeches any commitment either to conservative principles or to counteracting the steadily-growing power and reach of the State. … Similarly, the euphemistically-named Safe Schools campaign is nothing less than a State-enforced attack on normality in children. …
True to what looks like an anti-British obsession, he calls the British settlement of Australia “an invasion”. … By contrast he has praised extravagantly Mao-Tse Tung for having made the Chinese “stand up” (apart, that is, from several tens of millions still lying down after Mao had them murdered). Veteran Liberal war-horse W.C. Wentworth pointed out in Parliament that Mao built a society and an ideology dedicated to the total destruction of freedom. Such sentiments should have ended Turnbull’s political career in a democracy, at least as much as if he had praised Hitler. …
[Turnbull] continued to intone the mantra “Islam is a religion of peace,” apparently unaware that for many this sentence is uttered only as a sour and sarcastic joke.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
