by PAUL COLLITS – BEFORE the recent South Australian election, John Howard opined that the former Liberal Senator and former Australian Conservatives leader, Cory Bernardi, “wouldn’t trouble the scorers” in that election.
Howard is well known to be a cricket tragic, hence the metaphor.
- Hanson’s Party has pushed the Liberals down to 19.4 per cent.
- Yep, the Libs are now teens, and (of course) continue to act like teens.
- They look like a rabbit in the headlights. And still – still! – they talk about themselves.
But, not so fast, Mr Howard, as the ever-respectful Bernardi refers to him.
History records that One Nation scored 22.5 per cent of the primary vote in the Pink State’s Lower House. They did even better in the Upper House.
FINISHED
As ABC election analyst Antony Green pointed out, One Nation finished in the top two in about half the State’s 47 electorates.
Even Bob Day of the Family Party conceded that One Nation had hoovered up most of the micro Party votes.
Put another way, One Nation is no longer remotely a micro Party. This is the result of brand recognition, consistency in policy formulation over thirty years and the fact that Pauline Hanson has been proven right on just about everything.
Right and in tune with broad alt-Right electoral sentiment. To use the old cliché, One Nation says what many of us are thinking. It is a matter of both clarity and courage. The times are suiting it.
Hanson’s Party has pushed the Liberals down to 19.4 per cent. Yep, the Libs are now teens, and (of course) continue to act like teens.
Oh, and the unspellable SA Labor Premier’s “historic” landslide occurred on the back of achieving 37 per cent of the primary vote. Not a stunning mandate.
It doesn’t take much to get a landslide these days, but the electoral system (compulsory preferential and non-proportional) does repeatedly deliver government to politicians that most voters loathe, or at least don’t want to vote for.
Oh, and the same idiotic Australian preferential voting system has delivered one seat to a candidate (a girly-pops independent) who actually came fourth. In the seat of Finnis.
Yes, Independents have won four seats, equal to or perhaps better than One Nation, only with 4.8 per cent of the primary vote.
The Libs have five (at the time of writing). The system simply does not deliver what the people want, if it ever did.
Labor’s 37 per cent delivered 34 of the 47 seats. Something’s amiss.
One Nation is tracking towards three, maybe four, seats in the SA Lower House. And Bernardi has company in the Upper House too.
Here, ON scored more than 24 per cent of the primary vote, and the Liberals 17.6 per cent. There are 22 seats in the Upper House, and ON has 2.9 quotas against Labor with 4.4 and the Liberals with 2.1. Antony Green thinks ON will get three seats upstairs.
In short, Bernardi troubled the scorers.
SICK JOKE
Two developments over the weekend have confirmed that the Liberals remain a sick joke.
First, we had Andrew Hastie – once seen by some as the hope of the side – going full-Malcom Turnbull. Another Malchurian candidate by the looks, following the Canavan implosion.
A polite commenter at The Australia newspaper called Hastie’s contribution a “word salad”. Nah. It was gobbledegook.
Hastie sees the end of neoliberalism. Whatever he thinks that is, he doesn’t really say.
Here he is accidentally right but for the wrong reasons. And he is playing catch-up with ON, which pronounced neoliberalism dead eons ago.
Who actually knows what Hastie is talking about here?
Then there is the Iran war. I will deal with this separately, and I am not a great fan, but it is nowhere as black and white as Hastie suggests.
It is a bit early to call it a disaster, recalling Chou En Lai’s apt comments on the French Revolution.
Hastie needs to stay in his own lane, at the very least, and especially if veering into economic policy and foreign policy lanes involves the muddying of waters.
All this is because of ON’s rise. Clearly, Pauline is messing with Liberal heads.
They are all about, and looking more rabbit-in-the-headlights than ever. And still … still … talking about themselves.
WEIRD
The Liberals simply do not get it, like those Japanese soldiers who emerged from Pacific jungles decades after the last big war ended, still assuming there were battles to be joined with the enemies they had before.
The second, totally weird – even by Liberal standards – development on the weekend was the ejection of Moira Deeming from the VicLib ticket, and the insertion in her stead of an Indian. It is a cliché, I know, but you couldn’t make this up.
Until last weekend, no one outside the murky, bottom-feeding confines of the VicLibs had even heard of Dinesh Gourisetty. Alas, we now cannot unsee it.
Per the ABC: “A day later Mr Gourisetty was facing pressure from within the Party to step aside, following revelations he provided a character reference to a man convicted of grooming and sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl in 2021.
“Kashyap Patel pleaded guilty in 2024 to one count each of grooming a child under 16 years of age, transmitting indecent communication to a person under 16 years of age and sexual assault of a child under 16 years of age.”
The County Court judgement reveals Patel received a character reference from his “good friend of four years” Dinesh Gourisetty.
And Patel wasn’t even mentioned in the Epstein files.
The entirely obvious question remains. Why does Moira Deeming even want to be associated with these creeps?
Why does Alex Antic, for that matter? Tony Abbott? The endless JWH?
Moira’s touching faith amounts to an inversion of the old Groucho Marx line. Moira would belong to a club that wouldn’t have her as a member.
The VicLib church is clearly not sufficiently broad to accommodate Ms Deeming.PC
There’s an extraordinary similarity in politics twixt the UK and Oz at the moment. The UK Conservative Party is no longer conservative and is filled with lefties or weak liberals and a handful of true-to-base conservatives and the party as a whole is in decline and the new Reform Party (and others such as Restore Britain, Advance Party, UKIP …) have taken their place and are promoting what Pauline Hanson is promoting – a return to smaller government, freedom, tackling immigration both legal and illegal and overall being proud of nation. The sitting governments are similarly socialist/authoritarian pro Net Zero fanatics who apparently have leaders who are close in communication. I am an Aussie living in UK and find the changes afoot the only sign of hope and urge voters to consider the choices. For freedom and sound government there can only be one: One Nation. Amen.
It is appropriate that the liberals become a micro party because their courage and convictions for a long time have been so micro as to be non existent: they stand for nothing and have the courage of an empty toilet role.