Why I Support Liberal Values…

In the wash-up after the Aston by-election, Peter Dutton asserted that there was nothing wrong with Liberal values and that he saw no need for any basic change. This is not to say that he didn’t heed the lessons from the loss which apparently are that Labor ran a nasty campaign by reminding voters that he was leader of the Liberal Party.

Now I’d just like to say that I do support Liberal values. All right I did have to look them up on a website because it’s one of those things that everyone talks about as though we all know what they are because everyone must know or else they’d have to be clearly defined.

Once I looked them up, I found that there were heaps and heaps of them and that they were slightly different in each state but, here in Victoria, they were contained under three subheadings: People, Families and Communities, Free Enterprise and Reward for Effort, and Parliamentary Democracy and Rule of Law. Under each subheading was a list of things such as: “We believe in the inherent dignity, responsibility and potential of all people” and “We believe in conserving, protecting and sustaining our natural environment and national heritage”.

Even the potentially more contentious Free Enterprise and Reward For Effort subheading had things that were hard to argue with. Take this one, for example: “We believe that where the private sector can deliver a service efficiently and fairly, an unnecessary burden should not be imposed on the taxpayer.” While it’s possible to argue about the relative success of privatisation, it’s very hard to suggest that one thinks that “an unnecessary burden” should be imposed. Ok, we may get bogged down in semantics about whether it’s necessary for those who are providing jobs for people out of some sort of altruism should have to pay tax just because they’re making several million a year from their philanthropy.

So, I can certainly see where Mr Dutton is coming from, even if it’s hard to see where he’s going to. But then I guess that’s been the whole problem of the Liberals ever since Tony Abbott was so effective in stopping Labor from achieving anything in government…

Well nothing apart from the NDIS, beginning a National Broadband Network, the Gonski blueprint for reducing inequality in education, a carbon pricing scheme and avoiding a recession during the GFC.

Once Tony replaced Labor he set to work on his agenda for government which basically consisted of the following:

1. The adults are back in charge and we’re open for business so the economy should be all right now.
2. Women can have a rolled gold maternity leave scheme so what more do they need? (Later scrapped because it cost too much)
3. More Knights and Dames will give Australians the sort of rewards they need for their work. However, before we’ve given them to more than a handful of Aussies, we need to give one to Sir Prince Philip… or should that be Prince Sir Philip.
4. Handing down a Budget that rewarded the lifters and punished the leaners, making the leaners even leaner.

Abbott was considered so bad that the Liberal Party replaced him with Malcolm Turnbull who they’d dumped just a few years earlier. Turnbull, as a millionaire from Point Piper, was a bit too left but after he promised that he wouldn’t do anything as PM apart from tell everyone that things were ok now that they’d removed that Abbott character who didn’t do anything wrong but just didn’t sell his message, the conservatives and the extremists buried the hatchet and made Turnbull leader. Unfortunately, they didn’t bury far enough away from Tony Abbott who once again showed his determination to outdo Labor by becoming even more destabilising than the deposed Kevin Rudd.

Of course, not doing anything wasn’t enough for some in the Liberal Party who felt that even though Turnbull was sticking to his word, he didn’t really want to do nothing and that he probably even harboured impure thoughts about doing something to prevent climate change and, while impure thoughts aren’t enough to convict you in a court of law, Peter Dutton announced a challenge which he lost. After the loss he pledged to be loyal but not so loyal that he wouldn’t rule out another challenge.

When it became clear that simply doing nothing as PM was no longer an option for Turnbull, he did the only thing that he could do which was resign. While this seemed to open the door for Dutton, Scott Morrison had been quietly telling colleagues that when it came to doing nothing as PM, he could make Malcolm look like someone who had a full agenda.

And so it came to pass that those who knew him best, rejected Peter Dutton as leader because they found Scott Morrison a more appealing candidate.

I think that I should probably repeat that: Dutton was rejected by his colleagues in favour of Scotty from Marketing.

Yes, when it comes to Liberal values, I must say that now that I’ve looked, I find that there’s a number that I’d find it hard to disagree with… It just makes me wonder why on earth the Federal Liberal Party ignores most of them, most of the time.