The Liberal Party needs some deodorant, urgently. One currently advertised brand appropriate for the task might be “No Pong”. 

The problem, you see, is that the Party nominally of the Right and often preferred by Australian voters for its efficiency and pragmatism in government now suffers from familiar twin problems – wetness and odour.

WETNESS

The “wetness” has been addressed already by a number of keen observers.

Seizing the moment following the South Australian drubbing, Peta Credlin and others have urged the Party to return to its Right-of-centre roots, to cease being “Liberal” in name only.

Credlin’s headline read, “PM, these moderates will lose you your job”. Never let a crisis go to waste, as Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, used to say.

Another critic of the South Australian Liberals was, astonishingly, David Elliott, currently NSW Minister for Transport. He was formerly the Minister for Emergency Services, then for Police.

While Minister for Emergency Services, he absented himself in London while NSW was literally burning to death.

As Police Minister, he impersonated a policeman in order to bully a teenager. As Transport Minister, he presides over some of the worst bungling and incompetence, not to mention industrial unrest, in the rail system, seen since the bad old days.

Elliott, a factional heavy who few people in the Rum Corps State would mistake for a thoughtful conservative, is the personification of the Liberals’ other, less discussed, problem. This brings us to the odour. 

The term “odour” might be used as a catch-all for the Liberals’ awful performance in government, everywhere you look and can think of.

In opposition, they are even worse. They are a rabble and virtually non-existent in Western Australian politics. They could not field even half a parliamentary cricket team.

In Queensland, they made no inroads at the most recent election against a corrupt and neo-Nazi administration led by a non-entity.

HOPELESSNESS

In Victoria, well – the less said, the better.  These three States are, in effect one Party jurisdictions, due in no small measure to the utter hopelessness of the oppositions.

In Tasmania, yes, the Liberals rule but, well, who cares?  What percentage of mainlanders could even name the Tasmanian premier?

All this failure isn’t just because the Liberals are “wet”.  They are now hopeless at governing, too.

While any ideological tacking to the Right would be welcomed by the Party’s base – and by me – I suspect it means little to the average voter, who rarely thinks in ideological terms.

Jo Punter – at least Jo Outsider – values competence, certainly, but much more than this.

He or she wants basic human honesty, keeping promises, not pulling policy ideas out of your back pockets without warning voters (the principle of “no surprises”, seemingly a thing of the past), aligning your priorities with those of the voters, having a modicum of direction and purpose, not rorting, not looking after mates, saying what you mean, meaning what you say, being prudent, and not annoying voters with lies, propaganda and malfeasance.

Like endless television commercials on every topic under the sun, paid for by the taxpayer and having solely political purposes.

CRITICS

The expectations of voters might be summarised simply as “governing well”. Having standards. And, contra the current Liberal internal critics, this means far more than simply “managing better” than the other side.

Mind you, anyone from the NSW Liberal Party criticising another State Division for being too wet (aka moderate, Leftist, “modern”) clearly doesn’t get irony.

The NSW Liberals are the most Leftist Liberal government in Australia’s history.

Former premier Gladys Berejiklian had 13 moderates out of 17 in her first, factionally imposed Cabinet, after all.

The NSW Government has been in office for a decade and more. It’s on its fourth premier.

The last one left – despite a fawning media – in disgrace and may still be found to have been corrupt. She was shacked up with a crook.

The NSW Government is rabidly green. It is fiscally incontinent. It is run by factions and unelected lobbyists who are also Leftists.

It is also run by unelected, Leftist bureaucrats.  Its “management” of COVID, inaccurately thought by some observers to be relatively “liberal”, in fact involved savage and unnecessary lockdowns, crushing dissent, sacking public servants for refusing to submit to a potentially dangerous, ineffective and needless vaccine, and bringing in army helicopters and mounted police to enforce curfews.

HAZZARD

It has a totalitarian Health Minister who is a “hazzard” to the people of NSW.

This doesn’t sound too liberal to me.

Its two most recent appointments to the most senior positions in the NSW public service have been, respectively a former British communist and a convicted former drug dealer who is married to a far-Left member of Federal Labor’s shadow cabinet.

(The Liberals’ Coalition partners, the Nationals, are now the Leftist, socially liberal, pro-abortion, pro homosexual rights Party with a soupcon of pork barrelling thrown into the brew just to keep the rural gun clubs happy and the koalas miserable. They actually do zip to prevent rabid, bungling city-centrism in government, the thing that still gets regional tempers steaming more than anything else. Especially during and after a barely noticed flood. This is supposedly why the Nationals exist).

So, having a NSW State minister accusing those in other jurisdictions of being too wet and illiberal is borderline farcical.

Of course, Elliott might have been really having a go at his own State Division, though I doubt it since he himself has been the recipient of much largesse from the corrupt NSW Liberal factional system that underpins the Division.

Anyone who wasn’t a factional heavy would have been shown the door as quickly as the current Premier is attempting to with his colleague, the former minister charged, among other things, with raping a teenage boy. (The politician concerned denies the charges and is innocent till proven guilty, of course). 

DEMAND

No, voters demand basic competence and reasonable governance. They just might make this very demand of Canberra in the months ahead.

By all means, make Liberal Governments act like fair dinkum Right-of-centre Parties with spine and moral compass, and not the woke, socially liberal, green-Left globalist, careerists they sadly have become.

But it is a mistake simply to refer to them as “Labor-lite”. That is far too generous, not to mention inaccurate.

It is often the line trotted out by the internal or sympathetic critics who focus only on ideology.

They are not Labor-lite. They are the full deal. The Labor-lite charge also misses the bigger point about the tectonic shifts in political alignments that mark our era.

At a time when the major Parties are “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” and mostly share a post-Left/Right world view, legacy labels will not cut it with the many disgruntled Australians who have had a gutful of the shared elitism, certainly, but also the pap, lies, PR-driven governance, overreach and bungling. 

The other fatal difficulty for leaders like Marshall, Morrison and whoever finds himself in charge of the NSW Liberals come March 2023 is that there is no single angry constituency out there waiting with the proverbial baseball bats.

These second-raters have let down and/or offended just about everybody. And just about everybody is really underwhelmed and angry.

(Certainly, the COVID deplorables who number about 20 per cent of the electorate – using unvaccinated status as a proxy – are.  But it isn’t not only these folks).