You reap what you sow, as St Paul once said. Thanks to Israel Folau, we know that St Paul said many things, some especially controversial in these Woke times.
Setting that to one side, his words to the Galatians about harvesting what we planted come readily to mind in these dark days for Australia’s future. They are fiddling in Macquarie Street – with the Liberals possibly about to embark on a course that would see their fifth premier in eleven years and skirmishing over the tidbit that is the NSW Party presidency election – while Australia is burning.
Barilaro and friends litter the front pages while the real analysis of our far worse national predicament is consigned to the depths of newsprint. The likes of the estimable Terry McCrann and Graham Lloyd have set out in forensic detail what we are to face in eight short years. But it isn’t just about Net Zero. In all three areas of emerging disaster the right-of-centre ‘broad church’ only has itself to blame. These are the surveillance state (born of Covid totalitarianism), the Net Zero fossil fuel shortage, and the impossibly Woke generation who place their faith solely in ‘feelings’.
In relation to the crushing of king coal, it will be said – no doubt it is already being said – that electing Albo was akin to facilitating a fast track to economic disaster, especially with the latest deal for a 43 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030.
If only we still had ScoMo and the Liberal Teals!
Hold it right there.
The deal that is emerging now had its roots in the reasonably distant past and descends directly from Coalition dilly-dallying, inaction, and virtue signalling.
Cast you mind back to 1998. It was on the Coalition’s watch that we were gifted the National Renewable Energy Target that came with principled (but only minor and easily sidelined) opposition from stalwarts like the late Ron Boswell. Then there were all the subsidies given to renewables projects. John Howard promoted Malcolm Turnbull to the front bench and to, yes, of all portfolios, the Environment. Years later, Howard then managed to persuade the Malchurian candidate to stay in politics when we all thought we had finally rid ourselves of his presence.
Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory…
Howard was never a full-on climate sceptic, of course. Even Tony Abbott, by far the most sensible Liberal on climate garbage, seemed constrained regarding the sharing of his true thoughts. Yes, Abbott did stop certain taxes related to mining, just as Howard had manfully resisted Kyoto, but the broad church that Abbott briefly ran and served so faithfully lurched further and further into the murky depths of climate centrism, being neither one thing nor the other.
Paraphrasing John O’Sullivan, you might say that any institution that doesn’t begin by being a climate denier will end up being a full-on climate warrior, or at least indifferent to the economic disaster that such a position portends. And so it has proven. The embrace of Net Zero by so-called conservatives has embedded in the Liberal Party a position of wishy-washy timidity. As a political movement, it fears standing up to what the late, great Peter Walsh might have termed ‘economic vandalism’ pursued by ‘the (green) fairies at the bottom of the garden’ (though he possibly might not get away with that last one today).
The Coalition has been culpable in opening the door wide to the green-leftists who are now in charge of policy. The great American conservative William F Buckley Jr described himself as standing athwart history yelling ‘stop’. In contrast, our Coalition parties have been whispering, ‘proceed cautiously towards disaster’. With the Liberals in power, it (sadly) does not follow that all is right with the world. In any sense of the word ‘right’…
Who, we may ask, has overseen the education system responsible for the current generation of bureaucrats running the show? They were all educated in third-rate schools and universities before emerging with fixed ideologies pre-weaponised toward the three national threats outlined above.
None of the strategies and tools that might have been deployed to arrest the leftwards movement in our education system have been contemplated. Right-of-centre politicians simply ceded the territory. Now, radical ideology appears capable of rendering Australia a barren of culture, robbing us of our freedom and rights, and leaving us (literally) without power. On the life-and-culture issues that are so important to the ‘outsiders’, like freedom of faith and the freedom to oppose dogma, the major parties have outsourced their principles to the safe haven of a ‘conscience vote’.
By all means, let us continue to worry about the Barilaro saga and whatever the latest deviance of morality is within our political class. Let us nail the corrupt and the liars in our political midst when they appear, and remove bad governments where we see them (as we should). But, for God’s sake, let us not forget to read and ponder the Terry McCranns and the Graham Lloyds, who are telling us with a megaphone that our days are just about numbered.
There is nothing much in the legacy parties and their acolytes (the Lib-Lab-Greens-Teals ‘quad’, as Lyle Shelton calls the new governing class) that raises even a glimmer of hope.
Approaching Armageddon at a steady pace is still following the road to oblivion. The unwillingness of conservatives to fight the great conservative fights is born from a mix of spinelessness and self-interest, rather than being a true desire to serve the nation. The Liberals have overseen an identity crisis at a time of an existential national crisis. Well, the chickens are now flapping home to roost, and the words of St Paul ring loudly in our ears.
