When W. B. Yeats wrote that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”, he might well have been gazing into a crystal ball to the last few decades of Western politics. The worst, whether the zealots of fundamentalist Islam, transgenderism or climate catastrophism, are practically slavering at the mouth with passionate intensity.
And the best? Such are practically non-existent in contemporary politics. There’s only the worst, and the least-worst.
Who, after all, would dignify a Chris Luxon, a Malcolm Turnbull or a Scott Morrison as the “best” of anything? Even the least-worst opposition leader, Peter Dutton, lacks even the conviction to take an unequivocally principled stand on the odious, racist “voice” referendum.
And — not even standing, but crawling on his belly like a worm — opposite the very worst of all, “Dictator Dan” Andrews is a spineless wet shiver like John Pesutto. Pesutto is so pathetic, he beat even Andrews in slapping down one of his own MPs for the “crime” of speaking at a women’s rights rally.
But what’s happened to the centre-right in Australia is only a reflection of what’s happened right across the Western hemisphere. The loony left are running amok, and no-one on the centre-right has the guts to do a damn thing about it.
Obviously there are special factors at work in Britain to explain the spleen against Liz Truss compared with the indulgence for Albanese. Truss had a mandate only from Tory party members rather than from the electorate as a whole or the parliamentary party. Truss is the Tories’ fourth leader in this period of government. The markets that caned the Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget are driven by woke hedge-fund managers who have never forgiven the Tories for engineering Brexit. And when her mini-budget copped criticism, Truss, rather than defend it, hid in her Downing Street bunker – a fatal flaw for any leader.
On the other hand, Anthony Albanese has openly trashed nearly every election promise he made. Not just cutting electricity bills (they’re soaring), but immediately abandoning his pledge to make minimal changes in his first term. Instead, Albanese is pursuing a radical, hard-left agenda that no-one ever voted on.
And getting away with it, with impugnity.
Watching the calm expedition of the Albanese government going way beyond any real mandate to change Australia permanently in the hard-left’s image, and comparing this with the British Conservatives’ unprincipled panic at the first hurdle the new government faced, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the contemporary left’s courage and conviction far surpass that of the right.
And this is not just a British phenomenon. Consider what happened to Tony Abbott. He was elected with a thumping majority promising to stop the boats, scrap the carbon tax and fix the budget. He duly did stop the boats and scrap the carbon tax.
But after reasonable structural reforms of the 2014 budget (such as a modest price signal on GP visits, making school-leavers earn or learn rather than going straight on the dole, and changing some social security indexation from male total average weekly earnings to consumer price index) were sabotaged in the Senate, a panicked party room sacked the person who’d put them into government and largely abandoned the things he’d stood for. The green army, the Japanese submarine deal, the trade deal with India, the annual slashing of red tape, and tax and federation reform processes were all scrapped in favour of a renewed attempt to do a deal with Labor on climate.
And so it’s gone on.
Peter Dutton clearly has strong instincts. And the Coalition is considering whether to support ending the legislative ban on civil nuclear power. But it looks as if party room splits will have Liberals on both sides of the referendum campaign over the Indigenous voice even though it should surely be a fundamental liberal principle that people should never be treated differently on account of race. What’s the point of believing in smaller government and greater freedom if there are hardly any specific policies to advance these beliefs, or being against political correctness if the fight is deemed too much hard work?
Instead of doing what conservatives are supposed to do — and what their rank-and-file vote for them for — which is to stand in the way of radical change, in favour of sensible, patient moderation, the centre-right parties quiver in terror in the shadow of the watermelon far-left. Their only move ever is to slink, trembling, in the wake of the green-left, whimpering, “Us, too!”
And then they wonder why no one votes for them.
Whatever his faults, no one was ever in doubt about where Abbott stood. Unlike most politicians, he didn’t confine his arguments to media conferences but justified all his key positions with well-argued and comprehensive speeches, articles and books that he largely wrote himself.
The Australian
As a consequence, Abbott almost single-handedly engineered one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in modern political history. From a landslide defeat in 2007, Abbott brought the Coalition to within a whisker of victory in just a single term.
Can anyone imagine any of our current lot, in Australia or New Zealand, having the basic conviction to do the same?