It’s no secret that the Liberal Party is in a bit of a mess.
Despite holding power at the Federal level, the well-fed functionaries of the light blue leftists seem a little off their game.
They’re bleeding votes to One Nation, their leader has all the charisma of a wet towel, and they look likely even at this early date to lose power to a rabble of corrupt kleptocrats led by the least inspiring alternative Prime Minister since Alexander Downer.
Their grassroots members hate the leader so much they refuse to hand out how to vote cards, and the Parliamentary party is stacked with a mixture of leftists and incompetents so pathetic that even if they did replace him it wouldn’t do more than pause the bleeding.
Recently Tony Abbott, in an attempt to stem the rush of Liberal voters to the right, released a rather mild semi-manifesto arguing for a few policy priorities that might actually make a small yet positive difference in the direction of the country.
Most of his suggestions sounded like shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic, but he also called for a reduction in immigration to take pressure off house prices.
Naturally, the Prime Minister, his cabinet toadies and the leftist media went nuts.
According to the totally-unbiased-one-hundred-percent-reliable-never-tell-a-lie-Mark Kenny at the Sydney Morning Herald, Abbott’s “Attempt to drag the Liberals to the right” had “backfired spectacularly”.
Christopher Pyne, fresh from attempting to build submarines in South Australia out of hundred dollar bills, managed to mince his way into a Sky News interview where he declared any decrease to the immigration intake or government spending to be “catastrophic”.
He didn’t explain why, he wasn’t asked why, it was just assumed that everyone would agree and that good old Christopher would never be required to explain his thinking on the matter.
The spluttering, rosy-cheeked puppy-like denunciations of Mr Pyne and the similar squawkings from senior liberal ranks represent more than the usual circling of wagons.
The Parliamentary Liberal party is clearly confused about what it stands for, and aside from continuing to hold office, it doesn’t seem to stand for much of anything at all.
Watching the truly repulsive visage of the Honourable Mr. Pyne and listening to his effeminate sing-song voice, I recalled a recent Spectator article written by Kyle Benton, a former Liberal Party staffer.
In an echo of the frantic scribblings of last year’s #NeverTrumpers at the National Review, Kyle attacks Pauline Hanson and her populist movement on the laughable grounds of being insufficiently Conservative. He admits the popularity of Hanson, curses the party leadership for not attacking her more stridently and describes the policies that continue to increase in popularity as “lunacy and madness”.
If valuing the cultural integrity of our country and wanting to preserve the birthright our ancestors gave to us is lunacy, we may need to increase health spending.
If believing that our nation is more than a GDP, more than a place to shop, more than just a marketplace but instead a living, breathing culture with a past worth preserving and a future worth fighting for is no longer Conservative, then what the hell is the point of Conservatives?
Kyle in the article suggests that it is “anathema to almost everyone in the broad church of the Liberal Party” to reduce immigration to allow the housing market to stabilise and to give recent immigrants at least a modicum of a chance of assimilation. If that is true, if his views really do represent the worldview of the modern Liberal party, then the organization founded by Bob Menzies not only has lost its reason for being but is now itself a danger to the future of our nation.
Immigration and demographics may be the only issues that truly matter in the twenty-first century West.
If the Liberal Party leadership thinks that addressing such concerns is catastrophic madness, then it may be time for the party to die so that a national rebirth can begin.