Australian PM Scott Morrison has been flying high for the past year – but he’s in sudden danger of being brought crashing back to earth after one of his upper house MPs abruptly resigned from the Liberal party.
MP for Hughes, Craig Kelly, has been targeted as a “maverick” by the PM, party powerbrokers and the media for months. His crime has mostly been unapologetically pushing traditional, conservative Coalition policies, as well as using evidence-based arguments to push back against conventional wisdoms on the Chinese virus and climate change.
Kelly’s sudden resignation places the PM on the edge of minority government.
Scott Morrison has lost a working majority in parliament after Craig Kelly’s resignation and move to the crossbench, with the Hughes MP warning he is prepared to vote against the government.
Mr Kelly’s decision to quit the Liberal Party came after the Prime Minister demanded he stop spreading misinformation about COVID-19 treatments and take action against his office manager, Frank Zumbo, who faces allegations of inappropriate behaviour.
“If I’m to continue to act in line with my conscience and principles … and to speak fearlessly and faithfully represent my constituents, I have no alternative other than to resign as a member of the Liberal Party effective immediately,” Mr Kelly wrote to Mr Morrison in a letter dated Tuesday.
The first charge, “misinformation”, is pure garbage. All that Kelly has done is truthfully report the findings of studies that purport to show that hydroxychloroquine and Invermectin may be effective treatments against the Wuhan plague. But that’s apparently an unforgivable heresy to the pandemic dictators who’ve subsumed democracy with shocking speed.
The Liberal party has long prided itself as a “broad church” party which tolerates dissenting views. Increasingly, though, it’s beginning to look more like a Labor-lite “solidarity” party where all MPs must toe the party line, or else.
As to the second charge, like it or not, Kelly is right: his staffer has not been charged with any crime and vehemently protests his innocence. Until such time as Zumbo is at least charged, he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. Certainly, Zumbo is subject to an AVO, but anyone who denies that AVOs can be and are used vindictively is living in feminist fantasy-land. Craig Kelly is, rightly or wrongly, standing by one of his most longstanding associates.
“Mr Zumbo is entitled to the presumption of innocence and he has been a target of factional warlords for some time,” he said. “They have run a slander and smear campaign against him.
“The Prime Minister asked me to investigate allegations. When I investigated them, I found they had little or no substance. In fact there were numerous factual errors. I gave a report then to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff.”
But the “MeToo” movement has come to Canberra – and “Scotty from Marketing” has come out to cower and grovel. The same PM who has shown admirable backbone against the Chinese Communists and Big Tech has a bad habit of turning into a spineless jellyfish at the slightest provocation from the domestic left. Canberra is already rocked by a series of allegations against a former staffer – although, again, no police complaints have been laid – and Morrison is clearly running scared of the media harpies.
His jelly-backed gutlessness has come back to bite him.
His departure increases the number of crossbenchers to seven and trims the government’s numbers in the lower house to 75, leaving Speaker Tony Smith, a Liberal MP, with the casting vote.
Mr Kelly told Mr Morrison he would support supply and confidence bills and “seek to vote in a manner consistent with all official policies that the Coalition took to the 2019 election”.
But he told The Australian he was open to voting against other legislation and is expected to resist any move to legislate a target for net zero emissions by 2050.
The Australian
Kelly’s pointed jibe about “official policies that the Coalition took to the 2019 election” is aimed straight at “Scotty from Marketing” – and will ring dismayingly true for many Coalition voters. The Coalition was sailing to disaster under blue-green Malcolm Turnbull – until voters delivered it a remarkable turnaround, largely on the assumption that they were electing a genuine conservative PM who was going to put an end to the climate alarmist nonsense in parliament – Morrison, remember, famously presented a lump of coal in Parliament.
Instead, they’ve watched the Coalition blush increasingly teal – and join the feral media in its constant bullying of apparently one of the few conservatives left on the government benches.
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