by PAUL COLLITS – THERE has been an expected change of government in Macquarie Street following what seems like an eternity but, in fact, is twelve years of Liberal National rule.
Last time Labor was in office, names such as Kristina Keneally and Eddie Obeid were making headlines.
- The Liberal Party of today has no ability to reflect upon its many deficits.
- The old rule is, that if you haven’t got the capacity to be ideologically sound, at least be competent.
- The miracle was that they won in 2019. They didn’t deserve to.
By 2011, Labor had been in office for sixteen even longer years, marked for the first decade by Bob Carr’s unimpressive though strangely lauded leadership.
A Treasury-led obsession with the State’s triple A credit rating – who even talks about that now? – and an almost biblical belief in not building any new infrastructure, this government was marked in the final years by instability, revolving door premiers and ministers that would end up in prison.
STABLE
Regular readers will know NSW has had (now) nine premiers since 2005. If you add the seven leaders of the opposition since 2005, that makes sixteen leaders of the major Parties over the same period.
Almost a change in leadership every year. Hardly evidence of stable, competent governance.
It is, rather, an astonishing story of mayhem, strife and change without improvement. Of embarrassingly bad management. Of intra-Party hatreds and factions. Of a succession of grifters being found to be not up to the job. And running a State isn’t that hard.
There is certainly a book-length treatment needed on why NSW gets such awful governance, decade in and decade out. Perhaps a PhD thesis.
We produce champion cricketers with monotonous regularity but not champion politicians. Most prime ministers these days come from Sydney too.
Apart from Howard, a star when compared with all the others, and Abbott – never really allowed to grow into the job before being knifed in the back – we are left with Turnbull, Morrison and Albo. Like I say, we produce damned fine cricketers.
The election decided this past weekend delivered a mere 72 per cent of the primary vote to the majors.
Nearly a third of the NSW electorate doesn’t have a “voice”, still. At a time when having a “voice” is all the rage.
There will be talk of mandates. There always is. Labor’s 37 per cent of the primary vote means that 63 per cent of the people didn’t want this government.
That is not a mandate for anything. Of course, even more people didn’t want the other mob. Perhaps this lack of enthusiasm among the voters for that which was on offer explains why there seemed to be so few political coreflutes in front yards.
All the headlines about “landslides” are a bit of a joke. Labor will barely get a working majority.
They were simply regarded as the least-worst option. (Of course, they also said that Gough Whitlam stormed to power in 1972. He didn’t. He just scraped home by the skin of his teeth).
Nor is there any joy likely among real liberals and conservatives that the recent lot have, mercifully, been sent packing.
REFLECT
The Liberal Party of today has no ability to reflect upon its many deficits. The old rule is, that if you haven’t got the capacity to be ideologically sound, at least be competent. The Coalition of four failed premiers couldn’t even get this minimalist rule right.
The governing class in NSW should be termed the Uniparty. Yes, the two major Parties are that much alike.
In a real sense, it doesn’t matter who is nominally in charge. On all the major issues, both Labor-lite and Liberal-lite disagree on few, if any.
The progressive, green, global, woke, COVID class always wins. You wouldn’t know it, from all the breathless corporate media talk of “change”. There is no change.
A truly bizarre period of NSW politics is over. An era of gross mismanagement, minor corruption, scandal, self-confessed pork barrelling, huge incompetence and medical fascism.
Oh, and a few new toll roads and railway lines. The greatest achievement of the former government was the construction of infrastructure, what was once simple core business for a State government and nothing especially to be commended.
It was an era in which great social change occurred, for example the legalisation of infanticide on demand and mercy killing, all on the watch of a Party that was once committed to family values, tradition and social conservatism. The forgotten people of Menzies.
The Eunuch Premier is no more.
This was Dominic Perrottet, who recently admitted infamously to Ben Fordham on 2GB that he didn’t have the power to end vaccine mandates even though he admitted that vaccines didn’t stop transmission of the virus. Instead, the mandates remained on Perrottet’s watch.
Dominic Perrottet is a man whose best friends in politics seem to have been Paul Keating, Anthony Albanese, Chris Minns, Daniel Andrews and Matt Kean.
The most Left-wing of the lot was Perrottet’s own cherished deputy! The unfortunately surviving Member for Hornsby.
Kean has ruled out leading the Liberal Party in opposition, perhaps already packing his bags and getting someone in Canberra to measure out his Senate office for the prize that will, no doubt, be shortly coming his way.
The under-performing Marise Payne, a passenger for several decades, perhaps will finally be persuaded to vacate her seat and return home to comfort the now departed Member for Penrith and former State Liberal Deputy Leader, Stuart Ayres.
Ayres is another, unlamented casualty of the wrath of the voters last Saturday. And a victim of Pork Barilaro’s failed New York push that caused so much grief for the flailing Government in 2022.
The Eunuch Premier never escaped his controllers. The puppet was never allowed to break free from his puppeteers. The NSW Liberal Party string-pullers. This is the Greenwich-Kean-Photios machine.
There are two words that you didn’t hear in the election campaign, and will not read in any of the post-election “analyses”. COVID and Photios.
It was interesting that just about the only seat that didn’t experience a huge swing against the Liberals (certainly in Sydney) was Badgery’s Creek (formerly Mulgoa, before the redistribution), in Western Sydney.
BRAVE
This was, and remains, held by Tanya Davies. Davies was a brave and staunch opponent of her own government’s totalitarianism, particularly its imposition of vaccine mandates and Western Sydney-specific lockdowns and curfews, enforced with the help of Army helicopters. She, almost alone among Liberals, prospered.
Then there is Michael Photios, the lobbyist’s lobbyist. A “curse word” for Right-of-centre Australian publications and editors, apparently. You just do not mention him.
The former Fahey Government minor minister who, single-handedly, erected the NSW Liberal model of governance, has, more than anyone, steered the Party to its seedy 2023 demise.
LEFT-WING
He has, after all, embedded turbo-charged factionalism and Left-wing policies into the Liberal Party.
He is reputed to have picked Gladys’s first Cabinet. With 13 out of 17 Moderates in power.
As Graham Richardson – who joined his firm, Premier State Consulting – once said, nothing happens in NSW without his permission. And no voter would have ever heard of him.
Tony Abbott once tried to put him in his place. No luck there. Photios’s greatest trick was to convince the people that he did not exist.
A year ago, the then recently demoted Liberal Senator, Concetta Fierraventi-Wells, spoke of the “putrid stench of corruption” emanating from NSW Liberal politics.
It will be said – has been said – that the defeated Premier wasn’t given enough time, nor a fair go from his own side.
Someone even said that he had two hands tied behind his back. This is rubbish.
Dominic Perrottet chose to be craven, chose to be impotent, chose to lead a rabble, chose to be the Eunuch Premier. It has also been said that he was a true conservative leading a Leftie Government. This only means that his conservatism, to the extent that anyone could see it, was worse than meaningless.
MIRACLE
Equally spurious is the claim that it was “fourth term blues”. They weren’t kicked out because they had governed for 12 years. They were kicked out because they had governed badly for 12 years. The miracle was that they won last time. They didn’t deserve to, then.
Hardly a soul, apart from the astonishingly loyal Liberal statesman, JWH, bothered to turn up at the Liberals’ election night “celebration” in downtown Sydney.
Most of Dominic Perrottet’s ministers, like Stokes, Dominello and Hazzard, had already scurried from a building that was collapsing, too embarrassed to remain for the “last drinks” call.
Their seats (Pittwater, Ryde and Wakehurst) suffered especially ignominious swings (and possible losses in all three). Scurrying Gladys’s old seat (Willoughby) was in great danger as well, but the Libs may pull it off. The rats deserted. The ship sank.
Much of the post-election white noise has been a discussion of the future of the Liberal Party.
The usual suspects (like the appalling Senator Andrew Bragg) are making their usual glib, broken-record-like explanations for the loss of government.
Not being Left-wing enough is particularly other-worldly.
Frankly, who on earth cares anymore?PC
I agree wholeheartedly. Until we realise that we are called Liberal,for a reason we will continue to flounder. Perhaps we are past floundering and have dropped to the bottom. We need to have values and stick to them and don’t kowtow to the left and greens. We need to get all LNP MPs and Senators in a room with Tony Abbott and let him inspire them. Now there is a MAN. Unless they wake up, God help us.
I remember the day that Prime Minister Tony Abbott was replaced by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, he held a media conference and one gem was his advice to journalists not to take notice of leaked information unless the source is willing to be named.
It reminded me of a photograph taken of Minister for Communications Turnbull and the ABC Managing Director at an official function, not long after PM Abbott had apparently asked the Minister to admonish the ABC, the Minister and the Managing Director smiling as the Minister pretended to wag his finger.
In my opinion the Coalition lost the day Prime Minister Abbott was replaced in 2015 after leading the Coalition to effectively defeat Gillard Labor at the 2010 election forcing Labor into an alliance minority government, and in 2013 defeating Rudd Labor in a landslide against Labor.
The Turnbull Government (as he referred to it) lost the seats that the Abbott led Coalition won in 2013 at the 2016 election and was saved from defeat by the National Party gaining one new seat.
However, times have changed and now it’s almost impossible to find differences between Union Labor & Greens and Liberal National.
Don’t forget that when the Howard led Coalition lost the November 2007 election Dr Brendan Nelson was elected by the Liberal MPs as Opposition Leader for the Coalition, and the undermining commenced immediately, as outlined by Dr Nelson an angry Turnbull MP storming into the Opposition Leader’s office to have words with him. By 2008 Mr Turnbull was Opposition Leader after convincing enough Liberal MPs that he would do a better job.
Thereafter Opposition Leader Turnbull sided with Labor Prime Minister Rudd on his proposed Emissions Trading Scheme and other global climate hoax agenda. The Liberal MP majority replaced him with Tony Abbott Opposition Leader. Mr Abbott led the Coalition to defeat Labor at the 2010 election forcing Prime Minister Gillard to form an alliance minority Labor Government of Greens and Independents, and like Albanese Labor is in the news for today, introduced Carbon Tax as a reward to the Greens in that alliance.
[History repeating for Labor, the announcement that coal and gas projects will be abandoned, “Albo’s $95B Bandt Wagon”: A Federal Government deal with the Greens to deliver its Carbon Reduction Pledge.”]
In 2013 the Abbott led Coalition defeated Rudd back again as Prime Minister Labor in a landslide defeat, and the Coalition abolished Carbon Tax, Renewable Energy Surcharge and lowered Labor’s Renewable Energy +30 per cent Target to below 30 per cent. In the background Mr Turnbull was again undermining the leader, now Prime Minister Abbott and by 2015 Prime Minister Turnbull replaced him. At the 2016 election all of the electorate seats won at the 2013 election were lost and the Turnbull Government as he referred to the Coalition was saved by a one seat gain by the National Party.
By late 2018 Prime Minister Morrison replaced Prime Minister Turnbull who was again being criticised by Liberal MPs not happy with his Labor-like positions.
The rot set in as far as I can research when Mr Turnbull joined the Liberal Party and determined to become an MP, branch stacking at Wentworth Electorate and replacing sitting MP Peter King, and then at the election winning but with a much lower margin than Peter King MP had delivered.
The LINO left – Liberal In Name Only are globalists with more interest in cooperating and making names for themselves with foreigners in United Nations and related octopus arms attached to other organisations of a left leaning global rule the world mentality mob. “Build Back Better”, “You will own nothing and be happy” and all the other Marxist-style nonsense the left try to push us into.
I don’t know what the answer is, but comment from Tony Abbott warning against Labor-lite imagery is a good starting point.
Perrottet proved to be a complete failure in terms of being a ‘conservative’. The last straw for me was when he joined the other States’ Labor premiers in supporting the racist and divisive Voice. I resigned from the Liberal Party soon after his virtue-signaling announcement; I’d been a member for over 40 years.
By supporting the other State premiers instead of his own federal leader he isolated Peter Dutton and made it that much harder for Dutton to make the right decision – saying ‘No’ to the ridiculous Voice proposal.
The libs lost because they’re labour lite. In fact kean has gone much further with his climate and ruinables extremism. There’s something sick in the libs and poor little Johnnie with his broad church must take some of the blame.
Broad church means of course factions within the Liberal Party, the most powerful as far as I can tell are the Turnbull LINO left globalists, Liberals In Name Only.
On the opposite side Union controlled Labor have factions too, their most sensible centre-left are not traditionally far from Menzies’ Liberal Party beliefs. On the far side left now dominating again are factions including for example Julia Gillard’s Socialist Forum that before she was appointed Deputy Leader to Kevin07 in 2006 was merged with the Australian (Marxist Socialist) Fabian Society, subsidiary of the formed late 1800s UK Fabian Society. Kevin07 admitted to ABC Compass that he was proudly a Christian Socialist like his friend UK Labour PM Blair. Look at the ALP Constitution references to socialism.
And note that “Tory Hunter” Prime Minister Albanese is a follower of Russian Revolutionary Marxist Leon Trotsky, and has many communist organisations he has been involved with over past years.
In The Bulletin Magazine 2006 journalist Max Walsh warned readers that a “corporate-style takeover” by the Union Movement of the ALP had been completed, union executives given safe Labor seats for example. The objective being to control all Australian governments.
I understand that the founder of LINO left had/has a similar political objective and before joining the Liberal Party made representations to join the ALP. That story is far too long for this comment.
It could not be true, could it, that political forces left and right, but not Menzies’ Liberals, are planning to join forces in an alliance to control and manage our nation by forming an alliance that has no real opposition to challenge it for control of our governments?
From my research it is true and it is underway.
Brilliant article, true and fearless. This is why so many of us resigned from the NSW Liberal Party. They were and are simply hopeless, undemocratic and woefully left leaning and WOKE. They stand for nothing. Now watch as the rats who destroyed the party move on to high paying appointments or a safe federal seat. Turnbull, Morrison (the most deceitful PM we have ever had), Kean, Perrottet and ilk have destroyed the Liberal Party for purely selfish and self-interest reasons.