This has been the year when the Liberal party teetered to the edge of oblivion. Unless something dramatic happens, next year will probably be the year it teeters over completely. Mind you, I am not a member of the Liberal party and have not been so for many years. I fell out of love with the Liberal party when it turned away from its basic beliefs and started to flirt with the Left. So, there may be things going on behind the scenes to arrest the party’s decay, but I doubt it, judging by its public performance, which seems to get worse by the day, as its senior personnel become increasingly apologetic and unconvincing. In any case, I would not want to be a member of any political party that would have me as a member, especially one where its policies are increasingly alien to those I believe in. I would be living a lie if I remained a member. You see, I believe in free enterprise, small government, self-help, reducing the size of government, preserving our constitution and our institutions, and avoiding all weird social experiments. The modern Liberal party believes in none of these positions. And its abandonment of each of them in turn has been in lockstep with the steady decline in its electoral support. In fact, the Liberal party is now the NFT party, a non-fungible token where the operative word is ‘token’. It makes a token nod to conservatism, free enterprise and traditional social structures but has none of their substance. When you buy an NFT of the Mona Lisa, you don’t buy the Mona Lisa. All you get is a token, a piece of paper that says you bought it, so that you can sell it to the next sucker. Likewise, when you support the Liberal party, you do not get a real conservative party. You get a token one, a virtual piece of paper that says you thought it was a conservative party and it said it was one, even if it clearly is not. And as well as being a token, it is also a non-fungible one, because what you buy is what they give you, and what you get today is a party that appeals to no one, stands for nothing and shows no sign of getting a hold on what it is supposed to believe in. So, it is now a token version of what it was, because what you get from the NFT Liberal party is a pale shadow of the goods on offer from the ALP, the Greens and their camp followers: big government, extravagant spending, no personal self-reliance and a willing flirtation with every fashionable cause as it comes along, from the Aboriginal Voice to climate extremism. No wonder the voters have opted for the Labor party and the Greens. Better the devil you know than the NFT you don’t.

Just look at a few of the policies that were on offer from the Liberal party in Victoria at the recent election. First, free school lunches, as if parents have no responsibility to feed their children; second, a mad auction with the Labor party to induce parents to dump the cost of child care on the government; third, virtually free public transport for all, as if this could be done without massive public expenditure. Then, as its contribution to the voodoo and witchcraft of climate change, the party went the extra mile by proposing an even larger reduction in emissions than the Labor party! Not even civil liberties were safe from the heavy-handed authoritarianism proposed by the Liberal party: one of its candidates, Renee Heath, was a member of the non-woke City Builders church, so the party leader, Matthew Guy, so blithely made the outrageous decision to exclude her from the party room if she were elected, which she was. Then there was the complete absence of any incentive to start a new business or expand one. Worried about our disappearing manufacturing industries? Fear not, because a Liberal government would have put $2.5 billion of government money into a vague socialist ‘investment’. And, as our education standards wallow somewhere between Kazakhstan and Upper Volta, there was not an ounce of policy that might improve them, like the successful moves in the United States to give power to parents to have a say in what their children are taught, rather than leaving it all to the teachers’ union and the government. So the policies seemed little more than copying the Labor party and the Greens, instead of offering a real alternative, as the Liberal party used to do when it actually won elections.

Now for the future. In the wake of the Victorian loss, there will be the inevitable inquiry conducted by party leaders who will recommend that there should be more female and ‘diverse’ candidates, that they should be vetted to keep out anyone who might be even vaguely conservative and that there should be new policies that (surprise, surprise!) should all be left-wing bromides.

And so, at the end of this eventful year the Liberal party is in what the commercial world calls ‘administration’, one step from liquidation, and it is in that parlous state because it does not appeal to its market. And, as the market has dumped the mirage of cryptocurrency, the political market will do the same for the NFT party unless it is prepared to articulate the traditional and proven policies of the party and, more importantly, its philosophy. Why, Albanese was even allowed to mark 50 years since the election of Whitlam by claiming that it ended a long winter of torpor and stagnation, without  a single objection from the Liberal party to such nonsense. The party must return to policies based on less government control and spending and removing the restrictions on starting a business and employing people. If this is not done, the party will probably go the way of a Banksy picture: fed into the shredder.