“The Liberal Party must monitor Teal statements and commitments as they will be the basis for future candidates campaigning against Teal incumbents. In addition, public comments by Teal campaign leaders are foreshadowing the possibility of Teal campaigns in additional seats currently held by the Coalition at the next election. The Party should be conscious of candidates as they are announced and work with Liberal incumbents to develop plans to counter these future candidates’ campaigns.” (The Liberal Party Review of 2022 Election).
It’s interesting that one of the takeaways from the election loss was that they need to campaign against the Teals…
Now there’s a lot to unpack in that sentence before I even start on the rest of the Liberal review of what went wrong.
Let’s start with their problem of talking about the Teals as though they’re just another political party. You only have to read a bit of Tim Dunlop’s book, “Voices Of Us” to understand that one of the big pluses that the so-called Teals had was that each one of them was a local and built their campaign with locals. The idea that they were somehow the puppets of Simon Holmes A Court misses the point that each individual group was working hard to get an independent candidate elected because they were tired of having their views ignored by a candidate who’d toe the party line.
The idea then that you need to keep a record and try to “counter the campaigns” overlooks the fact that each of these independent candidates will have either built up a strong support base with their performance as a local member or not. The “campaign” will only play a minor part in their re-election.
But even allowing for that minor part we’re still left with two problems:
- The idea that you need to drag the other candidate down by attacking what they’ve done and said rather than changing your policies so that people are more likely to vote for you because you’ve embraced the parts that appealed to people. This may work in one electorate but not in another depending on what the individual candidate has achieved, but it’s not like fighting another political party where what one says or does reflects upon them all.
- In the possible event of a hung parliament, you’ve just made it more likely for the Independent to stick with the Labor Party rather than embrace the party that’s been attacking them. Let’s not forget that a number of the independents natural home is the Liberal Party. Even ignoring the family pedigrees of Allegra Spender and Kate Cheney, there’s no certainty that any of them would support a minority Labor government if the Coalition were holding out the right incentives. Conservative independents have supported Labor in the past; there’s no reason to think that the Liberals couldn’t persuade a number of the independents to support them… Well, no reason apart from the fact that they’ve spent all their time trying to suggest that the Independent MP’s ideas are radical and that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
But let’s leave aside the Teals and ignore the fact that even if the Liberals won back every one of these seats, they’d still need to pick up seats from Labor.
Now I’m not going to be silly enough to suggest that the Liberal Party are finished as a viable party but when you look at their inability to learn from their mistakes, you have to wonder.
Let’s begin by looking at the choice of people to do the review: Brian Loughnane and Jane Hume. The latter was a major contributor to the 2022 campaign and I’d suggest that she may have been a little too close to the action to be considered a dispassionate observer. It’d be hard for her to view things objectively. While Brian hasn’t been federal director of the Liberal Party for a number of years, he IS married to Peta Credlin, so clearly his judgement is a little suspect.
Anyway, rather than getting people with an outside perspective like Rob Baillieu and Julia Banks OR Michelle Grattan and John Hewson, they chose two people with close connections to the party. This is like being asked to do your own performance review at work and then to evaluate what you were like as a reviewer.
Nevertheless, there were a number of problems identified by Hume and Loughnane, including not having enough women and having too much Scott Morrison…
In order to solve the problem of not having enough female candidates, it was suggested that they have more, and, in order to achieve this, they need to look at things like preselections and branch structure and don’t even think about a quota… Of course, while it would be nice to have more candidates who weren’t white males, it doesn’t help when your female candidate has all the charm of Holly Hughes – who it may surprise you to learn is NOT the love child of John Howard and Bronwyn Bishop. Indeed, the idea of “love child” and Bronwyn Bishop being in the same sentence is a very, very difficult concept.
One of the other problems they identified was Scott Morrison…
Now, I know I’ve pointed this out before but whenever I read something about Peter Dutton being a warm, cuddly sort of guy who we’d all warm to if only we knew the real him, I always think that in 2018, his close colleagues considered him for leader and decided that they’d rather have Scott Morrison as PM.
Anyway, the report told us:
“Perceptions that the Government and the Prime Minister (in particular) had not adequately managed the response to the pandemic (despite Australia’s internationally leading position in responding) and, very importantly, that the Prime Minister was not attuned to the concerns of women and was unresponsive to issues of importance to them.”
As for that last point, I wonder if Jane had to ask Jen to clarify…
As for the bit about adequately managing the response to the pandemic, I liked that they added the brackets about “Australia’s internationally leading position in responding”, just so we knew that the voters didn’t know what they were talking about.
Still, that seems to be a popular refrain from the Liberals. Even today Paul Fletcher was suggesting that Labor had “demonised” Morrison rather than accepting that Scotty had made that possible not only by what he’d done but by the large list of what he hadn’t done. Playing “April Sun In Cuba” on the ukulele and not knowing all the words works as an example of both and pretty much sums up his time as PM.
The Liberals consistently overlook the fact that their views on a number of issues are inconsistent with the majority. They’ve been elected on a number of occasions because of their perceived ability to manage the economy. This is like when your hairdresser gives you a running commentary that you ignore because you like the way he cuts your hair and the rest of it doesn’t seem important enough to find a new one. However, with their inability to actually deliver the Budget surplus they promised and the blowout in government debt to triple what it was when it was an emergency have left people feeling like they’ve been given a mullet they didn’t ask for.
It’s all very well to blame Labor, the pandemic and various other things, but if Labor do actually balance the budget the Coalition will have a long road back to government.
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The liberal party has been full, overfull, of rubbish, rot, refuse, people who have less brain matter than a can of dogfood. There have been some who are outright repulsive, unintelligent, out of touch, devious, regressive, substandard, incapable. The country party lot are usually worse. Thieving, scheming, lying, rigging, rorting, robbing, rooting, ranting and raving are policy positions.., HAH. However, if one launched an honestly named conservative group as the LYING, BRIBERY, CORRUPTION, RENT ME NOW, CASH IN PARTY, it would not go well.., or would it? How that bowel load of boofheads got so many votes is indicative of the regular outlook of the “Doers and Pooers”.
The ONLY way the self-serving, totally corrupt, callously inhumane pathological liars in the LNP can win the next (or any future) election is to become more like the left-wing democratic socialist ALP whom the LNP continually slander and despise! To be honest, the HUGE majority of Australians are SICK TO THE BACK TEETH with all the irrational hatred, rage and angst spewed out by the life-long parasites in the LNP. The LNP is over-run by malignant misogynists, intellectual midgets, xenophobic racists, rorting, totally corrupt self-serving miscreants, remorseless pathological liars and political psychopaths who have not one iota of compassion, foresight or integrity! We all thought the LNP couldn’t do worse than that swaggering, inarticulate misogynist and habitual liar, Phony Abbott, but Morrison and Dutton are every bit as depraved! The worst of them is that internationally condemned, totally depraved Scott Morrison, a callously inhumane bible-thumping hypocrite with zero insight! As long as he and that child-torturing demonic sociopath and undemocratic autocrat, Peter Dutton, are at the helm of the LNP, that corrupt and irrelevant pack of elitist political miscreants will remain in isolated OPPOSITION for decades to come. The justifiable obscurity currently forced upon the LNP is probably a very GOOD THING for our democracy, our egalitarian society and the future of our children! There is absolutely NOTHING GOOD one can find to say about the LNP – they are the bottom of a very deep political barrel! The LNP is now over-run by malignant misogynists, intellectual midgets, xenophobic racists, avaricious rorters, totally corrupt self-serving miscreants, remorseless pathological liars and political psychopaths who have not one iota of compassion, foresight or integrity!
yep, what you all said.
I am looking forward to a Menzies-like term of government – 20+ years
In all due respect to Brian Loughnane, not that he deserves very much, and nor does his wife, the Victorian State Liberals were given a master class in what not to do by someone I wouldn’t ask or give the time of day to. Namely Hanson! “Not to embrace the wokeness of the Greens.” She also farted about conservatism. I put two prospects to that font of all nonsense. One, Guy ran on a policy of law and order and conservatism and was soundly rejected by the Victorian public. And two, after stumblebums for leaders and a politician who crashed his parliamentary car before returning a reading of 0.13, Guy was back again and had learnt precious little from the 2022 loss.
The Liberal Party will never have credible policies on climate change, while it has influencers like Gina Rinehart and Twiggy Forrest! This was another factor that contributed to the Liberals’ loss. Botty farted that he was vindicated by the floods, but all he was made to do was look like a bigger idiot than when he farted that climate change could be doing more good than harm!
I take it you are very sure that no one in the LNP, or among their supporters, reads the articles on this platform. If not, WTF are you doing giving them clues about how to crawl out of their collective rectum. While I enjoy the schadenfreude this article induces, I would happily forego the joy of gloating over their incapacity to bang two ideas together to achieve critical thought. Oh but wait! Maybe if they did get hold of a couple of unstable theoretical constructs and went to play in the traffic….
As a collective of white males gone belly-up, did their navel gazing provide them with insights as to connections to life’s balances? Nah! It just deepened their obsession for growing fluff and fiddling.
they still havent fessed up to fraudband, let alone decent policies. They still think they can do a bradbury in 3 yrs time. My bet is that in 3 yrs time the libs will suffer an even greater collapse in their vote.
As we say in thailand, sum nham nah. serves you right.
but they did nothing wrong and it wasn’t their fault the voting public ignored Mr Murdoch, so it must have been the Teals’ fault, so eliminate the Teals and hey presto Pete’s a winner…
maybe with a bit of lippy and a nice wig….
and a new policy:
they no longer want to stay in government, they now want to get back in government…
see, progress already
Morrison deserves plenty of blame but watch the LNP don’t play a straw man game. Morrison is gone. We should all learn from the disaster that he was, but LNP have 9 years of fuckery to answer for and, as the article shows, they haven’t begun to learn from their mistakes.
The libs need to rally the far right both the righteous and ratbags with the truth about labor’s inability to function economically. They can excite the media with a few controversies and the play the net with a conspiracy theory or two.
One of my facebook rabbottians, a respected former NT News journalist came up with
“The latest in wokenism.
A television report showed an interview in which an “expert” said “fat Santa Clauses” should not be allowed based on the premise clearly that overweight people are clearly not to be seen particularly if they are in a jolly red suit. Well, well….here goes.
1. Does this then mean only thin Santa Clauses allowed. This in turn means no overweight little children can sit on his knee cos he may end up with knee or thigh damage.
2. You can no longer leave goodies for him as he leaves the presents. It may put on weight and well…he then joins all the overweight red attired fellas in solitary confinement.
3. Instead now of a rich, deep “ho ho ho” He now becomes the thin machine who has a boy soprano voice scaring any kid coming near him.
4. Donna, Blitzern(sic) and company are up in arms. They only recognise a jolly old fat Santa who can control them through the skies and make them feel good about Christmas….which is what it is all about for little children.”
Loved the ‘wokenism’???
Are you trying to suggest that in order to have any chance at all at the next erection, all the liarbrals have to do is be their “honesttogodtrueselves” and not the lying cheating theiving bastards that they are when they are a guvvment.
Do they have a plan B?
Do we give a shit?
Thank you, all at AIMN.
Have a great festive season, everyone.
Frankly I believe the Libs ran the perfect campaign..a leader as popular as a floater in a public spa,and MP’s with the collective IQ of a wombat,an integrity problem as deep as the Marianas Trench, and with a memory problem a la Arfur Seenodonors.For assured success next time,all they need to do is rinse and repeat.With the charismatic Spud to the fore,they are a lay down misere certainty.Or they could just fuck off and fade into an unpleasant political footnote.
The LNP could NEVER win again, after they’ve followed the Trumpian policies and kissed his arse
and made Australia worse, than ever before.
After all, they’ve never cared about us, our democracy, nor the rule of law, only how much money
they can make, before they’re wiped out at any state or federal elections.
The LNP should all burn in hell forever, for their corruption cold-hearted cruelness against those who
need help the most.
reading George Brandis’s piece in the local “rag”. He says we should spare a thought for christians being persecuted.
See, to me this what its all about with the liberals, they are STONE MOTHERLESS TONE DEAF. What about those being persecuted who are NOT christians? are they some how sub human? This is a guy who was held up as being an intellectual amongst their ranks. Yea right, a legend in his own mind. You can name a whole host of duds on the opposition benches and has been leaders. They even tried a millionaire because, you know he knows how to run a business. yea malcolm, heres to fraudband, you fake intellectual. Anyone notice that malcolm has had the same effect as scott, the kiss of death: republic, fraudband and climate change policies. Here is a man who knows how to put a deal together and collect a ticket along the way. He has shown no ability to actually do anything else. A total waste of time and space in the political system. Yet we have had to endure the ideology of a stooge because of his ego. A blind idiot could have told him go fibre all the way.
We should hang em high for as long as they breath. At the very least we deserve an apology. Wont hold my breath, but i will let loose with some coarse language in their direction.
andy56……..
Turdball was sometimes referred to as the smartest man in the room, small room, full of fuckwits.
There he stood, smiling broadly, next to jugears, as he made the announcement about the screwing up of the NBN with jugears nodding vigorously with a feral rat like grin. What a pair of dummies.