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Recently the former ALP Minister and bovver boy from New South Wales, Carl Scully (who I knew briefly in the mid 1990s when seconded as a public servant to his office) suggested that Malcolm Turnbull had courted the Labor Party in quest of a seat in parliament.
This is not remotely new. Upon Turnbull’s election to the Liberal leadership after the second and successful coup attempt, an intrepid anonymous blogger started a website called Stop Turnbull, at which he or she catalogued in graphic detail the complete history of Turnbull’s Labor connections and his attempts at forging a political career through the ALP.
Fast forward to this week’s breaking news on the Liberal Party’s latest (leaked) moves on same sex marriage, and the Turnbull game plan is out there for all to see.
Those of us ancient enough or sufficiently interested in great old movies will know the story of The Manchurian Candidate in its original form, starring Frank Sinatra and the chilling Angela Lansbury, among others. Younger readers might know the inferior Denzel Washington version. For those who neither, the story recounts the planting of a brainwashed American, captured in the Korean War, who unwittingly becomes a secret communist agent and is years later injected into the US presidential election cycle to wreak havoc and to bring down the whole system.
Apart from Obama, schooled in Alinskyism and the by-any-means-necessary mores of Chicago politics, the most obvious candidate for the modern title of Manchurian Candidate must be one Malcolm Bligh Turnbull.
Conspiracy theory? Consider this.
One would be at a loss to come up with a more perfect scenario of a conspiracy to destroy the Liberal Party and hand government to Labor, while in the meantime actually implementing Labor policies, than what has actually transpired under Turnbull.
- All but lose to Labor an unlosable election, through appalling campaigning? Tick
- Perform so badly in office as a politician so as to make a Labor win at the next election all but inevitable? Tick
- Sideline and attempt to silence any resistance within the Liberal Party to the emerging direction? Tick
- Kill any semblance of conservative policy development and implementation? Tick
- Follow core policy directions of Labor (and indeed the Greens) while keeping the ministerial leather warm for Bill? Tick
Need one actually list examples of active Labor/Greens policy enactment? Well, here are some.
- Big and growing government spending? Tick
- Gonski? Tick
- Safe Schools? Tick
- Same sex marriage (on the way apparently,without the promised plebiscite) Tick
- Ludicrous support for renewable energy, general climate lunacy and the careerist debasement of science? Tick
- Labor-friendly appointments of left-leaning mates to the ABC? Tick
- Cut assistance to traditional families with stay-at-home mothers? Tick
Equally, one could compile a dossier of conservative policies not implemented to make the same point. Cut the ABC back to size? Don’t make me laugh. Cut the overall size of government? Perish the thought. End subsidies to renewable energy and support for the climate scam? See above. Embed conservatives in key strategic areas of government? Again, see above. Strengthen traditional marriage, even defend it in the public square? Don’t be ridiculous! Kill off useless QANGOS? Nope. Give comfort to private schools? Righto…..
Keith Windschuttle: Tony Abbott on Leadership
Mark Steyn recently commented that great politicians (like Thatcher and Reagan, to name but two) are successful because they are able to move the political centre towards themselves. He contrasted this talent with Theresa “Therexit” May, who moved the centre towards her opponent, massively and in a very short time, and paid the price at the ballot box.
Well Turnbull makes Theresa May look like a rank amateur, the big difference, so far as I am concerned, being that May didn’t mean to do it!
As Mr Scully and the anonymous Stop Turnbull blogger remind us, Turnbull’s intent has been in plain sight for a very long time. The useful idiots currently running the Liberal Party apparently have signed up for this one-way journey. When not actively abetting the white-anting they stand mute as the destruction continues apace. A train wreck in slow motion? No, the Liberals’ headlong rush toward self-destruction accelerates with every passing day.
Incidentally, one might wonder where the Nationals have been in all this? Indeed, one might. What is it about the whiff of ministerial leather?
Turnbull as Labor Lite? No. Just plain Labor.
Nothing that you have said is news to me, including the Stop Turnbull blog. The question is, what can we, better still the party, do about it??
About 47 years ago an American Army PR officer answered your question after the USAF napalmed a Vietnamese village. He said (with a serious look and a straight face) “To save that village we to destroy it”.
The Liberal Party is so infested by infil-traitor termites that it cannot be saved. The key ones are not too difficult to identify (check the names of those so disloyal and self-serving they knifed our own PM), but others continue to exist even more deeply. They are also so embedded in the party m management structure they leave the treasonous Kim Philby gasping with awe.
The answer is an alternative Party. Hanson’s One Nation, the LDP and Bernardi’s ACM are potential starters for a mass defection, but each of them needs a real leader who can bring them together while being articulate and strong enough to ignore (suffer) the slings and arrows of the violent leftards and the hatred of the once, but no longer ‘mainstream media’ – and the ABC (they were never mainstream).
Abbott, supported by the right management organisation is the best available in the next 5-years.
The ABC are blatantly part on the privately funded progressive MSM with their joint efforts with Fairfax and the New York Times. So much for their being a a “public broadcaster”.
I’m furious with the IPA for hosting Abbott to do his carousel barking. Not on my meter anymore; they can go to the devil.
Try as keenly as one possibly could, it seems impossible to discern any consistency in your various comments. Quite puzzling. Is it perhaps more to do with personalities than with the relevant issues?
Self interest, Bill, the only interest of the Managerial Class.
I have serious concerns about Abbott’s mental health and what it’s doing to his colleagues in marginal seats. He’s behaving just like Rudd. I agree with Virginia Chadwick; it’s time for Abbott to go and find a well-paid job outside the parliament. His manifestos versus his real action whilst in the PM’s job are completely at odds with each other. Taking the lead from Peter’s article:
Safe Schools….tick
Same sex marriage…refused a parliamentary vote (creating the chaos we now have)
Perform badly in office….tick
Well, you get the picture. Pyne and Abbott behave in the same way.
Unlike Bill Martin, I do indeed find consistency in your Tony Abbot comments, albeit unfortunate that they are.
What confuses me, particularly with your understanding of the inner workings of the Liberal Party, is your inability to acknowledge the difficulties Abbot faced in dealing with an intransigent party room. He may not have had that unique je ne sais quoi Howard possessed in being able to drag an essentially untrustworthy centre left faction towards him, but that is not for want of trying. The lack of support coupled with an intransigent senate forced him to abandon the repeal of s. 18C. Unfortunate, but understandable in the circumstance. His paid parental scheme and his refusal to back away from an inequitable, overly expensive scheme, admittedly left me scratching my head. The fact he was swayed to adopt a renewal energy platform was also a negative, but he has stepped right away from that and has gone back to his fiscal responsibility default position (and it is indeed a default position).
Forgive me for saying so, but it seems that though you sometimes wear your conservative racing stripes, at other times you seem not too far from a Christopher Pain-in-the-butt position.
Incidentally, the IPA is an extremely important conservative ‘think tank’ and certainly not worthy of being sent ‘to the devil’.
The Minister charged with repealing 18c was the leftie George Brandis. Repealing 18c with him overseeing it was a forlorn hope.
Jody, you’d love George he has a hate for Tony too, and he loves Malcolm. But youwanting repeal of 18c might be a problem
He likes most men; I’ll say no more.
And that Jody just shows how far out of touch you are with wisdom.
It could be said you keep playing the man.
Maybe our changing and volatile times DO indeed call for a more nuanced response to the polity rather than a rusted-on political position.
Tell us your alternative to Malcon? Shorton? Pauline, or one of the other hopeless bunch.
Don’t say Dutton he’ will lose his seat without Abbott leading.
Abbott identifies with the wage earner and the entrepreneurial classes. Dutton doesn’t.
That’s why you hate Abbott as much as you hate Trump.
All the managerial class hat Abbott and Trump.
And btw aren’t you spectacularly wrong about him. Repeal of Obama care is proceeding and the courts have upheld his travel ban.
So far Trump has held on but he’s a thin-skinned nutjob and I’m certainly right about that. Incoherent as well. Can it get any worse?
I see your point Warty, but Tony Abbott’s success is largely because when he stood against Rudd on climate change, Rudd blinked – and with “the great moral challenge of our generation” shown to be a discardable policy, Rudd’s reputation took an irreparable hit. Surely it was obvious, even at the time, that turfing the abolition of 18C would be equally suicidal?
Having read much of the material on the Stop Turnbull, I will say one thing in his defence: most of us have done the oddest things when we were young, and many of us have undergone sometimes massive ideological swings since. Peter Hitchens and Mark Stein come to mind.
Recent events have perhaps shown that these swings are perhaps not universal, with Turnbull moving the Liberal Party from a largely centre right to a predominantly centre left one, or at least with the conservatives effectively muzzled, by thrust into cabinet, or left twitching on the back bench, like Eric Abetz.
In all fairness one might argue that the centre left contrived this in the first place through their various machinations to get rid of Abbot, with significant support from the MSM, Nikki Savva and Peter van Onselen in the vanguard.
But Howard himself persuaded Turnbull not to pull up stumps and leave the Libs. And the party hierarchy cannot have been unaware where Turnbull had originally come from, in other words the party itself must be seen as being complicit in facilitating its shift from it conservative base to its current Labor-lite profile. And this is where the problem lies, and one that Pyne (that pain in the rhododendron light-weight) gloated about last Friday evening after the few too many sherries Richo Richardson alluded to.
Warty
I can’t agree with you more! We do undergo “massive ideological swings” in a course of a lifetime. For me it was rejecting my Christian roots, playing with Marxism in my undergraduate years only to come back to my natural home, safe and secure in the Divine arms once again and a thorough “conservative” – even if I am one of a diminishing minority!
That’s why I can’t understand the malice directed towards TA. Isn’t it better to learn wisdom from ones’ mistakes? I would have thought someone who is cognisant of their weaknesses and failures is potentially a far better leader than one totally blinded by their hubris.
Which brings me to the point I want to make – our crisis is a crisis of leadership. I have a rather old fashioned view of leadership as a kind of pastoral service to the nation. A “good shepherd” leads the “sheep” to safe and abundant pastures. Unfortunately though our current crop of “shepherds” are led by the “sheep”! The quest to be popular or to win the approval of the very few means that our current crop of leaders have jettisoned any sense of direction (or vision) and just chase after the fringes of the mob (SSM for example – less than 0.5% of all households but very, very, loud bleating). No principles required here – just bread (and lots of it – even if it has to be borrowed) and entertainments.
In my opinion, the only person at the moment who has any semblance of a true leader is Tony Abbott.
I realise that many have put their hope in Corey Bernardi and Pauline Hanson and while I admire both (and indeed have committed to supporting CB’s AC’s financially through monthly giving) I have stopped short of joining the movement. My reason is quite simple. Corey has yet to be tried and tested in leadership and as I have seen and learnt over many decades, power changes people (I’ll let you fill out the quote). So I want to wait and see how CB grows. Pauline has admirable qualities and has been well baked in the crucible of politics but for me (and I’m happy for others to disagree) her simple nationalism is not strong enough to carry the nation forward. And this brings me back to Tony Abbott.
It is said that those who are to be truly great must first be humbled. I have a gut feeling that grows stronger each time I hear him, that TA has actually learnt from his experiences and is a much wiser if still flawed politician. But recognising and understanding his weaknesses and acknowledging them is going to be his greatest strength and make him suitable to lead rather than just follow. There are others coming up who may prove to be great leaders in their own right in years to come but the ship of state does not require experiments with “saviours” at this point of our history. Saviours tend to disappoint very, very, quickly (see Gough, Kev and Mal) – triumphant hero’s one week – dead the next!
So Mr Abbott, if you read these articles and the comments thereunder, please steel yourself for the fight ahead. A whole generation will have no clue as to what constitutes true conservative values and how good they really are unless someone screams loudly above the bleating sheep.
‘Safe and secure in the Divine arms…of conservatism”. Good God; you’ve found yourself an alternative religion.
Jody,
See how words get twisted so easily – I wrote “….and a thorough “conservative”…very deliberately choosing the conjunction “and” whereas you have in good humour misquoted me by using the preposition “of” thus attributing the Divine Arms as belonging to “conservatism”.
And so we have a valuable and funny lesson in how we can make black white and white black. What scares me is that what we can have a laugh about, the MSM uses as a weapon….but hey…why on earth would any journo let truth get in the way of increased circulation and increased advertising revenues…..
PS oh by the way Jody….time for Tony to make a comeback!!!
The two words were in the same sentence along with words “safe” and “secure” and “Divine”. If I were teaching that to Year 9 English I’d ask them to identify the values in the sentence. (Look mummy; no hands!)
Jimbob
Yep. Have you noticed how even Savva has shut up.
They all know The poodle cooked their goose.
I can’t wait to see the next news poll. No 15 and it will be the worst ever liberal polling.
Even lefties are politicians and when they realise Abbott will probably save their seats .., they’ll back him against Malcon.
I hope you’re right, but I simply don’t trust Pyne, Paine, Sinodinos, Brandis, Julie Bishop and their fellow back stabbers. Tony might save their seats, but I can’t see them tangoing to his tune: I suspect they’d rather wreck the party than bring him back. We may need two terms of Shorten before the Black Hand gang comes to its senses (or what is left of them). The other scenario is that the Libs self destruct to the point of becoming a minor party, in which Tony will need to do a Menzies and form a new party, or transfer the remaining conservatives, as a body, to Cory’s Australian Conservatives.
Time for some Pyne-O-Kleen!! And Abbott as the toilet brush.
Here is Malcon’s problem.
Those people voted for Malcom because they thought he would save their seats.
What happens when Malcons labor party falls further in the polls and their sears are in tell.jeopardy.
History says they’ll jump to whoever will bring them a return to parliament. Whether in govt or opposition.
They, like Malcom, don’t care what happens to the party.
It’s all still just about them .