Australian election: Liberals must not abandon core conservative voters. By Greg Sheridan.
It is the great unravelling. All over the Western world, all over the democratic world, traditional political structures are collapsing.
The incoherence and shabby emptiness of the Australian election campaign offered an Australianised version of the political breakdown under way in many nations.
Whoever is the Australian government has a mandate for almost nothing. All that either side of politics offered was spending, spending, spending as far as the eye could see and nothing much else at all.
This indicates a deep crisis in politics, a loss of faith in politics by ordinary people. No one any longer believes in a political cause or grand narrative. The only thing voters accept from politicians is cash. …
There were some mercies in the Australian campaign. It did not contain the vicious hatreds of the last two US presidential campaigns — Donald Trump versus Joe Biden in 2020, and Trump versus Hillary Clinton in 2016 — although there was much vitriol and madness on social media, and this did have a broader influence. …
That’s only because both sides were on board with the globalist agenda in 2022. The viciousness only arises when a major party threatens the globalists, such as Tony Abbot in 2013, who promised to roll back the climate change nonsense. Abbott won a huge victory — 90 seats, which the media never mention. Then the globalist forces in the bureaucracy and media hammered Abbott viciously and relentlessly, forcing him to turn over the leadership to their man Turnbull, and eventually forcing Abbott out of parliament by supporting his challenger in his Sydney seat of Warringah.
The great realignment is now so obvious that most people not on the left are getting it:
The deeper trend is simple: the rich go left, the poor go right. …
In the US, the poorest states — West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi — are solidly Republican and pro-Trump. The richest states — Massachusetts, California, Connecticut — vote Democrat and hate Trump.
In Australia, the Coalition represents some of the poorest electorates. Whatever happens this time, a lot of affluent electorates will become harder for the Coalition to hold. …
The monetary collapse approaches:
One near universal feature post-Covid across the Western world is the collapse of any budget discipline, or indeed any fiscal reality. In our election the Coalition promised $1.2 trillion of debt, and Labor promised the same plus a few billion more. At five paces they were indistinguishable. In the US in 2020 the budget deficit exceeded $US3 trillion. In Britain in 2020-21 the deficit was £250bn.
Because John Howard left Australia with so much money in the bank, there is no Western country quite as carefree as us about the eye-watering levels of debt we are incurring. …
All Western nations have become like the chronic debt and deficit economies of Western Europe. Long term, those economies are sclerotic and stagnant, and so are their societies.
Everyone is operating in a high-inflation environment. It’s 5.1 per cent in Australia, likely to go to 5.9 per cent later in the year. In Britain it’s 9 per cent. In the US it’s more than 8 per cent. We are all heading back to the 1970s. Prolonged inflation and massive debt ultimately produce high unemployment. For the moment, with the massive amounts of stimulus spending, unemployment has declined throughout the West. There is very little prospect this will continue.
Remember, the ’70s was the last time it looked as though the West was in terminal decline. Communism kept expanding the territory it controlled. Western politicians — leaders such as Jimmy Carter, Ted Heath, Billy McMahon and Gough Whitlam — didn’t have a clue how to handle their economies and were even worse in national security.
The West is heading into similar entropy now, but with a new chief competitor, China, infinitely more powerful than the Soviet Union ever was in the ’70s. …
After 40 years of bubble nurtured by low interest rates, the money system is breaking under the weight of debt. Governments borrow (and “print”) too much because they know it will never being meaningfully repaid. But now the inflation has started, and inflationary expectations have been awakened. The money system is speeding towards collapse — at which point the globalists will introduce a digital currency to rule as all, if we let them.
In Australia, the centre-left vote fractured years ago, and now the Greens get 10 per cent or more. This is difficult for Labor, which stalls in the low or mid 30s. But it has two advantages. The Greens cannot bear the idea of supporting a Coalition government so they delver a solid 80 per cent of their preferences back to Labor. And as a party they absorb a lot of the nuttiest activists of the type that once made Labor branch meetings so exotic, unruly and unmanageable.
It was a great strength of the Liberal-National parties that they held their broad centre-right big church together so long. But now Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party have taken a great deal of their vote. …
The Liberals are losing social conservatives to Hanson and UAP and losing inner-city affluent progressives to the teals. Their panic over potential teal losses is leading them into destructive decisions. The Victorian Liberal Party is the most spectacularly unsuccessful political outfit in Australia. Generally, it wouldn’t make an impression on a soft pillow. The parliamentary party, almost entirely unknown to anyone not in Parliament House, is planning next Tuesday to expel its only MP from the western suburbs, Bernie Finn. This is allegedly because he is ill-disciplined. Yet the proximate cause is obvious – he is unfashionably pro-life and anti-abortion. …
The Victorian Liberals are not socially conservative. But if they actively drive out social conservatives from their party they will force the creation of minor parties on the right. Such action looks simultaneously terrified and cowardly in the face of the teal threat, authoritarian in terms of MPs’ free speech and effectively putting an end to the idea of the Liberal Party as a “broad church”. At the same time, the Liberals’ most dedicatedly woke member, NSW Treasurer Matt Kean, was able to denigrate and call for the defeat of the endorsed Liberal candidate in Warringah, Katherine Deves, without a peep of expulsion talk for him. …
Martyn Iles, the leader of the Australian Christian Lobby, thinks the Liberals are missing potential big gains in western Sydney, southeastern Melbourne, western Melbourne and other parts of Australia: “Socially conservative migrant Christians are a huge conservative goldmine. There are votes there for the taking in huge numbers for the Liberals. But only if they operate in their traditional conservative lane. If not, they confuse these voters. The way they’re going, the Liberals are losing social conservatives and progressives.” …
The future of conservative politics throughout the West surely lies more with working-class and trade-oriented people than with the elites. Nationals senator Matt Canavan made this point when he told Liberals not to be scared of the “boganisation” of their support base. After all, there are a lot more bogans than rich people. A key element of all centre-right politics throughout the world now is nationalism. …
As Gerard Baker has argued in The Wall Street Journal: “If the GOP (Republicans) can find a genuine standard bearer for this ascendant conservative populism, shorn of the vulgar narcissism of the former president, and the lunatic extremism of the QAnon crowd … it would have a winning formula.” This is because, as Baker argues, Trump didn’t create the base. The base created Trump. Republican primary voters in 2016 were sick of left-wing identity politics, trash talking the US, hyperactive foreign policy, illegal immigration out of control, China cheating on the trade rules, allies loafing in their own defence efforts and jobs going overseas. …
What do we have to show for nine years of “conservative” federal government in Australia? What difference would it have made if a competent version of the ALP had been in power instead?
The weakness of Australian conservatism has led to nine very hollow years of conservative government. As Roskam observed, after three terms of conservative government we get a national school curriculum requiring students to find their “eco-identities” and all other manner of Green religious nonsense.
Three terms of conservative government achieved little beyond not being Labor. Once Tony Abbott lost his mojo, all sense of contesting the zeitgeist, talking back to the culture, was gone.
Time for the Liberal Party to recognize their destiny as the party of those who don’t like the globalist agenda of big government and bureaucratic rule. Seize the day. Let the teal electorates go — they were your past, but they are woke globalists now. Oppose the globalist media and bureaucracy, instead of meekly doing heir bidding. You might be surprised at how popular you become.
But they probably won’t, because not enough of them see it yet.
Was this the loss the right had to have?
