Why The Liberal Party Can’t Win Elections And Other Predictions That Will Looks Silly One Day…

I’m old enough to remember Gough Whitlam winning in 1972… I wasn’t old enough to vote, but I was nearly old enough to be sent off to Vietnam as a 20 year old.

That was one of those strange little bits of hypocrisy that the Liberals are so good at: in 1972 they opposed lowering the voting age because people under 21 weren’t mature enough to consider the issues but they were old enough to be conscripted into a war… or rather, “police action” because there was no war declared so that’s why it took so long for the Vietnam vets to get recognition from the government for many of their issues…

Of course, that’s the past and I only bring it up because, after the Liberals lost the election they were sensible enough to change the policies that they’d only been clinging to because they owned them and by the time they were voted out, only a handful of voters agreed with them. For example, they didn’t go to the next election promising to return National Service and send troops back to Vietnam. Neither have they ever suggested raising the voting age. As for the recognition of China, it’s only in the past few years that they’ve gone back to arguing that Labor are the captives of the CCP.

Jettisoning these policies meant that – by the time Labor had been attacked relentlessly by Murdoch and had started to fall apart at the seams – they could present themselves as a reasonable alternative… even if that reasonable alternative was the party that blocked supply and worked with the Governor-General to organise the closest thing to a coup d’état that this country has seen.

Now when we compare that to the Liberals of today what we find is that Peter Dutton is quite content to argue that they don’t need to change their values and that it’s quite ok, to be a policy free zone because they’re in opposition and that means saying no to everything because that worked for Tony Abbott and you don’t expect anyone in the Liberal Party to come up with any new ideas.

Of course, I could be pedantic and point out that the Liberals in government frequently demanded policy of the Labor Party but, as Dutton said, they intend to stay true to their values and one of the most consistent values of the Liberals has been hypocrisy.

As I may have mentioned before, I once cast a play with a group of students and one of the girls wasn’t happy that she didn’t get the lead. Being a reasonable sort of chap, I met with her and listened to her grievances which, in summary, was that she thought that she was best and so did her friend and that she thought she was better then the girl who got the role and there must be something wrong with my judgement. After listening to her, I didn’t point out that not only wasn’t she the best but she wasn’t the second best or third best or even in the top six. I merely pointed out the obvious fact that she hadn’t been in the room when the others auditioned and neither had her friend so while they formed a consensus they really weren’t in possession of any information that would inform a sensible decision. I merely bring this up because it reminds me of Liberals appearing on Sky After Dark.

The basic trouble with Dutton saying that sooner or later they’ll have to fix up the mess that Labor created is that the subtext is that you voters are all stupid and you’ve voted for the wrong party and it’ll be up to us to repay the enormous debt that Labor has run up when they didn’t pay off the debt that we ran up and interest rates have caught them out and…

Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to play well until we all forget that Josh gave away JobKeeper money to companies whether they needed it or not.

And when Peter Dutton suggests that part of the trouble was that Aston was in Victoria and the Liberals aren’t doing well there… then, the rest of his party can relax because Victoria is a fairly insignificant part of the country and not at all relevant in general election…

And when the Liberals say that they’re no longer expecting business to back them because big business has become a little too woke…

And when they tell us that there was nothing wrong with anything they did. And inquiries into Robodebt and Scotty the MegaMinister and just about anything is just a witch hunt…

And when they say that our policies are just fine because we like them and we don’t need our time in opposition to let everyone forget exactly how bad we were by not making the same mistakes…

I don’t think that they’re going to getting the lead role any time soon.