Apart from Tasmania, every state and territory has a Labor government as does the Federal government. In Victoria last year the Liberals couldn’t win against a premier nicknamed Dictator Dan. At the last Federal election, seats that in the past had been regarded as safe Liberal seats were lost to Liberal Party types who decided that they weren’t into climate change and divisive social issues enough. It makes you wonder about what is going on in the Liberal Party.
The Liberal Party has always been a strange beast, it was, as is the tradition in Australian politics, the anti-Labor party. Made up of people with very different views but who all agreed that Labor must be opposed. For decades it worked, but there has always been the question, ‘what does the Liberal Party stand for’?
In the past it stood for individual liberty, small government, fiscal responsibility and social conservatism.
But the truth was that it has always been ready to drop support for one or more of these if it was convenient. In fact a common theme in the history of the Liberal Party has been its attempts to out Labor the Labor Party. Which of course fails, because when people have a choice between the real thing and the fake thing they will choose the real thing.
Which leads me to the Victorian Liberal Party, a party that couldn’t win against a government that locked its citizens up for 200 days in 2 years. It has no plan for what it will do once it is in government. It claims that it opposed the tyranny of the state Labor government, but if you took the time to look you found out that they only mildly disagreed with that government. If they had been in government the only difference might have been that things were not so bad because they lacked the backbone that Dictator Dan possessed. Dictators have backbones, not something that can be said for the Liberal Party.
It has expelled one of its members for going to a pro-women rally.
That same party is now looking into having more ethnic minorities and more female members of parliament. So a party that claims that it values the individual is looking at quotas. It just cannot decide what it really believes or stands for.
That extends to finances, it used to be accepted that Labor ran up debt and the Liberals were responsible with money. But that is simply no longer true. Neither are responsible with money, both run up debt, both print money. I still encounter people who think that the Liberals will sort out the debt, but I have to wonder in what world are they living in?
This decade Victoria is going to relive the 1990’s, when the state nearly went bankrupt. Labor is spending money that we simply do not possess and that will come back to bite us. In the 1990’s the Liberal Party saved Victoria, at least financially, but today we cannot rely upon them even for that.
Maybe it is a good thing if the Liberal Party does die. It has no answer but more immigration, the same answer it has towards debt. If this country is to survive it should die, and why not at its own hands.
Originally published at Upon Hope. You can find Mark’s Subscribestar here.
