The important thing to remember about Christopher Pyne is that he was once a highly factional Young Liberal. The rot sets in early. Beware. Fresh rot is setting in with the next generation even as we speak. Australia may be shocked, but Party members have had time to get used to the left’s triumphalism. Let me paint you a picture of another Party event not so long ago.

It’s the night that everyone loves (or loves to hate), the Young Liberal Ball.

To the average punter, it would all have seemed rather grand. Acrobats dangled from the ceiling, pouring cheap bubbly into the glasses below. In expensive dinner suits and glittering gowns, the Young Liberals lapped up the opulence, toasting to the near-disasters, sorry the, ah, victories of the Liberal Party in the state by-elections that day, 28 April 2017.

There was never a youth movement that tucked its knees under more lobbyists’ tables, than the self-described Young Liberal left or moderates. Boy, did it show in their speeches, filled with acknowledgments of Michael Photios, a power broker in the NSW Libs.

In return for this gratuitous deference, Photios delivered a congratulatory speech. He confidently declared to the Young Liberals, without a hint of irony, that they “all belong to a political class that will be the master class.”

That’s right, “master class”.

One would think in today’s political climate, anyone who self-identifies as the establishment, elite, “master class” or any variation thereof must be itching for a political thrashing.

Even so, the question remains, what are they doing with this status? As the presumptive ‘masters’ of the Liberal Party (and presumably, the nation) what is their action plan?

The clearest insight came from the keynote speech delivered by Matt Kean MP. According to the newly minted co-chair of the left faction, the ‘forgotten people’ are the youthful yuppies who can’t afford an inner city pad and corporate women who don’t yet make up 50 per cent of board members. Please.

But before lamenting an apparent shortage of supply in the housing market, Kean declared that he got involved in politics to “prevent the development of medium density housing” in his parents’ suburb. There’s the rub, you might say.

Beyond the above display of oblivious self-contradiction, there is so much more we’ve got to look forward to from the Young Liberal Left. They persevere with ludicrous policies on renewable energy. They meekly defer to identity politics and the quota-based (not merit-based) promotion of minorities and women. They eagerly abandon the cause of freedom of speech. They fail to hide their fetish for open borders. They jealously demand that the Liberals co-opt the latest and greatest cause for social upheaval, gay marriage, from the Labor/Greens alliance. During the auction of a copy of the doomed Bill to reform the AHRC and 18c, most of the room erupted with laughter at Photios’ suggestion most of them would only bid so they could “send it up in smoke”.

No one would dispute that John Howard would have felt uncomfortable being in that room as the Young Liberal left collectively forgot the Howard battler, distracted by bubbly, acrobatics and Photios’ zingers.

The “master class” look forward to effortlessly inheriting Howard’s Liberal Party. But if they don’t aim to help the Howard battlers, how long will they survive?

To distinguish themselves from the conservative Howard, they identify themselves as ‘small l’ Liberals. But Sir Robert Menzies, writing to his daughter about the state of the Liberal Party in 1974, seemed to have other ideas. “The main trouble, ” he said, was that we have a party “which is dominated by what they now call ‘Liberals with a small-l’ — that is to say, Liberals who believe in nothing but who will believe in anything if they think it worth a few votes. The whole thing is quite tragic.”

Blowing hard at the Young Liberal Ball, sucking hard at winning the war against socialism, the Young Liberal left are hardly leaders for tomorrow. They’re middle-management types who crave the attention the private sector can’t offer. Like the new member for the North Shore, they’re mediocre marketing hacks who would prefer to be marketed.

Some of the more recent capitulators to the left of the party busy themselves trying to reconcile two philosophical streams, liberalism and conservatism. They vainly attempt to justify their acquiescence to the left and abandonment of conservative principles. As if the left of the party even stands for classical liberalism? In realit, those conducting logical acrobatics to justify defection are just empowering a movement that believes in nothing. The Photios crowd don’t believe in conservatism, they don’t even believe in liberalism – even if we could pretend the concepts are tautological (they’re not). At best these sycophants adhere to some form of managerialism.

It’s simple. The Liberal Left, young and old, don’t stand for much. Not for liberal principles. Not for conservative ones. Not for Australian values. Not for economic management.

This future “master class” of the Party – the soft, left, present masters of the Young Liberals – are blind. Obscene. Decadent on their ‘night of nights’. Losing will be beneath them, until it’s on top of them.

Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.