With the election now over, all that remains is the tidying up of the final count to see if Labor will win in its own right or require the assistance of a few crossbench members.
As the winners, Anthony Albanese and the Labor government are already spruiking change and a better way of doing government, including a rejuvenated Question Time.
After a decade of shouty chaos, this will be a welcome relief to an electorate worn out by the intensity of ineffectual leadership and pure political bastardry. The Coalition was nothing more than a rabble led by two authoritarian Prime Ministers and one hypocrite, with a collection of lying, corrupt, self-indulgent, educated shysters who achieved nothing in nearly ten years.
Abbott was a pugnacious street fighter eventually put down by our first female Prime Minister. Malcolm Turnbull had a formidable mind but belonged to the wrong party. Morrison’s politics often contradicted his Christianity.
Of course, the first thing both conservative parties must do is elect their respective party’s leaders. For the Liberals, there wasn’t a choice. Peter Dutton is their new leader because he was the only one standing. The new leader is a person detested everywhere (except in his own state). Why? Well, mainly because of an inflexible inhumane attitude towards refugees and deeply conservative views that are out of touch with a modern pluralistic society.
Rachel Withers writing for The Monthly predicts that:
“The electorate won’t forget who Peter Dutton is, no matter how much the Liberal Party tries to rebrand him.”
And rightly so.
You might also recall that the medical profession voted him the worst Health Minister in over 35 years during his time in that portfolio. His public image will be difficult to erase.
Any gains in his rise up the political ladder have been made through a dark force of character. It is said that his private persona is very different to the one he shows through the medium of television. However, as I have said many times, life is about perception. Not what it is, but what we perceive it to be.
He comes across as a very intimidating former copper who you wouldn’t want to meet up with in an alley on a dark night. With Dutton as the leader, the Liberals will remain in opposition for at least two terms, given that Labor performs well.
The WA Premier McGowan said this of Dutton:
McGowan on Dutton today: “He’s an extremist. And I don’t think he fits with modern Australia at all. And he doesn’t seem to listen. He’s extremely conservative… I actually don’t think he’s that smart. I’ve seen him present on things. I don’t really think there’s much there.” pic.twitter.com/vd04SDV0os
— Chelsea Morning (@Chels_E_Morning) May 23, 2022
Most of us would agree with that assessment!
As for the National Party, leadership it has to decide whether to stay with a yesterday’s man in Barnaby Joyce or look to the future and elect a person more in touch with today’s world. They also need to represent their traditional constituents instead of just being additional votes for the Liberals.
That a party founded by Menzies would deal with a person of such ill repute and ratbaggery as Joyce is incomprehensible.
Both parties – the Liberals and the Nationals – might decide to go their way until they find an identity that differentiates them from Labor and, at the same time, philosophically marries them together.
Already there is a call for the party to go further to the right. A mistake because the world has now had a glimpse of where far-right or left politics leads. For ten long years, like rust, the insidious hand of neoliberalism spread itself through every dimension of our society.
Neoliberalism is an often-used term, but what does it mean? Most people, I think, use it to:
“… describe what they see as the new right – the extreme of conservatism. The Liberal party needs to return to its roots of true Liberalism, and the Nationals need to drop that name and return to being a country party.”
It will be embarrassing to have so many ladies of the right sitting in the Parliament, so their dismissive contempt for feminism has to be addressed: A problem that conservatism won’t fix in five minutes.
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Neoliberalism is an often-used term that describes the new right – the extremes of Liberalism or conservatism.
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They must now admit that they have lost the climate war and surrender to the public will.
In this election, we have made a seismic shift in the make-up of our new government. I feel that a great weight has been lifted off Australia’s shoulders with this shake-up ideology. The Coalition needs to decide what it stands for. A rethinking of what constitutes, the common good.
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The most objectionable feature of a conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge, science, in other words.
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We can even rejoice in the public rejection of Murdoch media’s attempts to hijack the election using the Trump-Fox saturation of its mastheads, social media and television.
This doesn’t mean that we should congratulate the public for their decision to dump Morrison and his government. On the contrary, it took almost a decade for them to realise that Labor and a “chorus line” cast of women were a better proposition than a few crooks and liars.
Alan Tudge, when he returned from hibernation, said on ABC TV that a critical reason the LNP was defeated was that Labor badly damaged the Scott Morrison brand…
I think that is correct.
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My thought for the day
We all incur a cost for the upkeep of our health. Why then should we not be liable for the price of a healthy planet?
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