By Niall McLaren
Before the toreador moves in for the highly-staged kill in a bullfight, picadors and clowns taunt and humiliate the trapped animal, injuring it and goading it to a frenzy so that it becomes incapable of defending itself. We see much the same process going on in the Liberal Party.
Dumped PM Tony Abbott is reported as congratulating his nemesis by moving the party to a “strong centre-right” position where it embraces “what might broadly be called conservative positions.” If the LNP does not do this, Abbott warns darkly, people who favour such policies will follow “other standard bearers,” clearly implying hard-right fringe parties.
It should be noted that the concept of a “conservative centre-right” party is an oxymoron. Politically, “centre” and “conservative” are far removed from each other. A conservative policy is by definition not centrist. One would expect a former Rhodes Scholar to know this. However, Mr Abbott is much more cunning than the average voter. He knows perfectly well that when he uses the term “centre-right,” he actually means “right of centre,” and that his supporters and financiers fully understand this small point. “Right of centre” embraces everything from the very moderate welfarist-protectionist policies of Menzies and Fraser, out to the rabid right which has just thrilled Mr Abbott and his friends by annointing Donald Trump.
Abbott’s goal is to shift the concept of a political centre, which is defined as “the avoidance of extremes,” to somewhere far to the right of the people who built the Liberal Party. In the process, he and his supporters intend to scare or drag the Labor Party into following them, effectively somewhat to the right of Menzies, in fact. In this, he is proving very successful.
The anti-establishment insurgency of Donald Trump (which was actually a vote against the corruption of the globalist elite, which the Clintons represent so ably) has greatly excited Mr Abbott. Dressed in his clown uniform, he has jumped down into the arena to taunt and goad the (Turn)bull that deposed him into making some impulsive, ill-judged move, thereby exposing his neck to the toreador’s rapier.
Putting aside the rather painful puns, the danger is that the political “centre” has been dragged far to the right. The globalist-corporatist Malcolm Turnbull saw that, in Australia, this is politically risky and attempted to halt the process but he had to sell his soul to the so-called “make Australia great again” brigade. Turnbull and Abbott have no fundamental disagreement on the basics of their respective programs: to advance the goals and ambitions of the transnational financial-industrial-militarist elite. They differ only on tactics. The concept of a “conservative centre-right party” is part of the obfuscation that has allowed Trump to put his stubby fingers on the nuclear buttons. Voters need to beware of such Orwellian thought crimes.
