Andrew Bolt today crucifies the Coalition for failing to be Liberal:
TELL me how Liberal the Abbott Government really is. Or, if you’re the Prime Minister, tell the deflated party members.
After all, this Liberal Government last week dropped its plans to restore free speech, frightened off by the Muslim lobby.
…This Liberal Government has also promised to change the Constitution to divide Australians by race.
It still endorses the fiction that man-made global warming threatens the world and that spending another $2.5 billion can help stop it.
It still promises a huge new welfare program — a paid parental leave scheme.
It still maintains absurdly high levels of immigration, despite a 6.4 per cent unemployment rate and evidence of social dysfunction.
It has even increased government spending, despite rightly warning the cupboard is bare.
It has left the ABC too big for a democracy, crowding out other voices and giving the Left an intimidating bully pulpit.
It has kept oppressive workplace restrictions, despite a struggling economy.
It meekly accepted the United Nations’ refusal to take 70,000ha of second-rate Tasmanian forest off the World Heritage List and open it to foresters.
It raised the top tax rate by 2 per cent in a failed attempt to placate class warfare critics.
OK, judging by this list, to be Liberal one must:
- defend the right to express racial hatred
- resist constitutional recognition of an indigenous people
- disregard science on global warming
- decrease welfare
- be anti-immigration
- seek lower government spending
- shrink the ABC
- liberalise labour markets
- resist the UN on forests
- resist tax hikes on oneself
Being a liberal myself (that is, believing in freedom, property rights and markets where they work), I agree with items 4, 6 and 8 in principle. But because, as a liberal, I also believe in personal responsibility, the other seven items make no sense to me at all.
But then, we’re not discussing what it is to be a “liberal” here. We’re discussing what it means to be a “Liberal”. That is, what it means to be a part of contemporary and increasingly arbitrary political party that has only the most tenuous relationship with liberalism.
In fact, the person represented in Bolt’s seven other characteristics is irrational, indecent, ahistorical, internationally-closed, anti-national broadcasting, anti-environment and selfish. Pretty much the kind of list that would make Robert Menzies vomit (not that his family values were especially liberal, either). More to the point, although the following list is not exhaustive, I reckon most Liberal Party members would agree. From Crikey:
So, one might ask oneself, where have all the decent Liberal voices gone?
