by PAUL COLLITS – Labor people, a tribal lot, don’t like people who rat on them. This goes back to the bitter days of the anti-communist split of the 1950s and the formation of the Democratic Labor Party.
The legendary, former Labor powerbroker and Defence Minister of the 1990s, Robert Ray, was responsible for the truly memorable description of his hunchbacked former colleague, Mal Colston.
- It is treating your voters with contempt, especially when you jump ship for selfish career reasons.
- This week will reinforce much that awake voters already know about our polity.
- The elites, even when people of colour, don’t give a toss about their electors.
Colston left the ALP to become an independent Senator and was described as “the quisling quasimodo from Queensland”.
He was (in)famous twice over.
As The Age explains: “The death in 1975 of Queensland Labor senator Bert Milliner and the cynical and inappropriate reaction to it by then premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen were the making of Mal Colston, the former senator who died [in 2023].
FRUSTRATE
“Sir Joh, anxious to frustrate and bring down the Whitlam government, decided not to fill Senator Milliner’s place in the Senate with Dr Colston, who had been number three on the Labor ticket at the previous election and who, under a long-standing convention should have filled the vacancy.
“Instead, Sir Joh gave the Senate seat to the hapless, Pat Field, whose anti-Labor vote helped create the constitutional crisis later that year.
“The ALP, incensed at Sir Joh’s behaviour, elevated Dr Colston to the top of its ticket at the double dissolution election in December 1975. Thus began a long and, for the taxpayer, expensive career for the former teacher and public servant.”
AI helpfully explains: “Quisling” refers to a traitor or collaborator, specifically someone who collaborates with an occupying force, often used as a synonym for “traitor”. The term originates from Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian politician who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II. He led a puppet government in Nazi-occupied Norway, and his actions became synonymous with treachery.
Treachery has been in the air this week down Canberra way. Like Labor, the Nats are a tribal bunch.
Despite the election of a new pope and two leadership contests, the biggest story has been about a star Aboriginal Senator, and the context is internal Liberal Party sabotage of their former leader, Peter Dutton.
This sabotage is now openly discussed, almost even in the normie media.
A new take comes from the elder statesman of business journalism, Robert Gottliebsen.
He laments the failure of the Liberals – except in Goldstein, which was recaptured from the Teals by none other than Tim Wilson, the wet, homosexualist advocate – to campaign against Labor’s abhorrent tax on unrealised gains from superannuation.
BUNGLE
Whether Gottliebsen attributes this absolute bungle to stupidity or something else, we don’t know.
The insurgent candidate for the Nats’ leadership, sadly unsuccessful, Matt Canavan, has said the Liberals asked the Nats to “turn down the volume” in the campaign so they (the Libs) could focus on winning seats back from the Teals in the cities.
In other words, to replace one lot of Leftie climateers with another (Liberal) lot. Like Wilson. Pandering to the left, as always. We know how this “strategy” turned out.
And now we are left with Sussan Ley and David Littleproud. Littleprick to his many non-admirers. God help us all. As per George Christensen, the Nat incumbent is “the aptronymic David Littleproud”.
Neither of the Lib leadership contenders could ever be described as “papabile”. I am not sure I have even heard of the new deputy Liberal leader.
Back to quislings.
Every defection from one Party to another, or to the cross benches, is subtly different.
PACK
Matt Canavan was asked the other day whether he would pack his bags and form a new Party following an unsuccessful leadership bid.
Here is what he said: “Three years ago, I was elected as a Senator in the Nationals Partyroom and I’m not going to do a Jacinta Price. I’m not going to do a Lidia Thorpe. I’m not going to do a Fatima Payman. I’m going to stay in my Party and fight.”
Ouch. Matt might have added Corey Bernardi and the former Nat, Andrew Gee, to his list. (Gee has just retained his seat of Calare as an Independent. He left the Nats because they opposed the Voice in 2023.)
The 2025 result in Calare doesn’t make Gee right to have left while keeping his seat as an Independent, whatever he might think. He has been rewarded for treachery.
I am far from sure that Canavan’s long-term strategy (of staying a Nat) is the right one for the country, but his stand bespeaks integrity. A value thin on the ground these days in Canberra. You make your bed, you lie in it.
Jumping ship from a Party for which you were elected is simply more evidence, were it remotely needed, of our flailing and failing democracy.
It is treating your voters with contempt, especially when you jump ship for selfish career reasons, a matter of days, yes, days, after you were elected on a specific platform and expectation.
LEAVE
Jacinta Price hardly has the Bernardi/Gee excuse, viz, “the Party left me, I didn’t leave the Party”.
Whether or not the “negotiations” for Price to join the Liberals and to stand, nano-seconds later, for the deputy leadership, took place before or after the election hardly matters.
George Christensen left the Libs, of course, to join One Nation. But he did it after having given up his seat and resigned as a Liberal. That is how you do it.
This week will reinforce much that awake voters already know about our polity. Words are cheap. Implicit promises don’t matter.
The elites, even when they are people of colour, don’t give a toss about their electors. They have broken the bonds of trust.
Canberra is a UniParty merry-go-around. There is no accountability, only a sullen recognition by the electorate that … words are cheap.
As Canavan had it: Why people are sick of politicians: Matt Canavan hits out at Jacinta Price’s move to Liberal Party.
Quisling set off a trend. (Well, he wasn’t really the first. See under Cassius the First and “et tu Brute”, per Shakespeare.)
It is pretty sickening when you defect to a fascist megalomaniac and inflict him on your country. Some of Churchill’s War Cabinet (like Lord Halifax) wanted to do something similar to the Vichy French.
Thankfully, Churchill was of the Canavan school of politics. Stay and fight.PC
