This week I want to talk about two things that at first sight might not seem to be related. Let’s start in the US. The Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has been making actual conservative appointments, including to the governing body of the flagship University of Florida. And a week ago that body fired every single Diversity, Equity and Inclusion employee at the university. It was effective immediately. Believe it or not these DEI people accounted for some five million dollars a year on the payroll. DeSantis and his appointees have made it clear that that money will now go to academics and to the core function of the university. This, dear readers, is the first step any conservative politician who cared in the slightest about fixing our universities should take. I’ve said it myriad times before but nine years of Coalition government in this country saw our universities get worse every single year. (And believe me those international rankings are laughably meaningless, focus overwhelmingly on doctoral students in the hard sciences, rest in large part on the views of other academics, and are gamed by everyone.) Under the Coalition, ‘allowed speech’ on campus in practice narrowed. Grade inflation was rampant. Viewpoint diversity – as in having a critical mass of right-of-centre academics – collapsed. Don’t believe me? We have three-dozen-odd law schools and during the Voice referendum you could count on one machine-operator’s hand the number of law professors who came out openly for No. That was me and maybe three others. Yet the Libs spent their decade doing what? Bringing in a top judge who read the university policies and decided we don’t have a free-speech problem on campus, which is risible.  Oh, and when Peter Ridd was fired and our High Court issued what I think was a woeful decision that virtue-signallingly pretended to care about academic freedom but let the code of conduct trump it so that Ridd could be axed, the Libs did nothing. DeSantis would have ended all research funding to that university until Ridd was rehired. Or worse. And he would have pointed out that Ridd was correct on the merits too. But here in Australia the Coalition never spoke to any actual conservative academics. They preferred to chat to vice-chancellors, who are the problem.

Of course, if any minister had chatted to us few conservative academics the Libs would have heard that the first thing to do was to take whatever steps were necessary to have every single DEI university employee fired. These people push division, identity politics, the undermining of merit, cause students to self-censor and contribute directly to the collapse of conservative academics on campus – although to be fair they do provide a campus where you get to guess each morning how many multi-coloured flags will be flying on the registry tower or how many acknowledgements of country might be on offer that day. Query: During the Voice referendum how many of our unis do you think came out explicitly for Yes? Correct answer: almost two-thirds, the rest nominally staying neutral, with zero for No. Want to know why conservatives don’t work at unis?

In fact, I think DEI employees should be fired everywhere, law firms and big companies included. They are toxic to the principle of merit, to the Martin Luther King ideal of judging people by their deeds and the quality of their character rather than whether they happen to help manipulate some statistical group quotient related to the type of one’s reproductive organs, skin pigmentation or how long your DNA has been on the continent. They peddle toxic group-based identity politics and inject a cancerous worldview into liberal democracies.  They hold ‘bullshit jobs’ – meaning that if they weren’t employed at all the institution or company would do just as well, probably better. So maybe, just maybe, one day our spineless Australian conservative politicians will mimic Governor DeSantis on this one.

My second topic relates to the two pieces in the Australian last week in which Greg Sheridan and Paul Kelly both concluded that on balance Scott Morrison would be judged kindly by history. This, I’m afraid, is laughable. Yes, as both men noted the Aukus agreement was a big achievement, though even there Sheridan lists some very real reasons for scepticism. Oh, and they both mentioned his farewell speech because apparently that’s important. But what about Morrison’s complete disregard for the presumption of innocence? He was a disgrace as regards Bruce Lehrman, and Christine Holgate, and a couple of his own cabinet ministers. Morrison also signed us up to net zero despite winning in 2019 by promising not to. His appointments barely consisted of any actual conservatives. Neither Kelly nor Sheridan mentioned ScoMo’s key role in defenestrating Tony Abbott that set the Liberal party on a woeful trajectory from which it still has yet to recover – and if you think the answer to Abbott is Turnbull you are the problem.

But worst of all was Morrison’s conduct during the Covid pandemic. Frankly, it was a disgrace. Every single civil liberties consideration was sold down the river as thuggish, authoritarian lockdowns came into play. ScoMo made up out of thin air the idea of a ‘national cabinet’, in part to get cover for the above-mentioned lockdowns. He refused to sign the Feds up to the border case leaving Clive Palmer to fight the states. I think Palmer had the stronger legal argument but you really can’t blame our top judges for opting as they did when Morrison refused to join the case. During this public policy fiasco Morrison and Frydenberg ran the biggest-spending government since the war; they oversaw a ballooning debt; ScoMo enabled the premiers to do such things as close the schools, meaning some, especially poor, kids will never recover (the research is inarguable on this). He enabled vaccine mandates.  Massive wealth via printing money and asset inflation was transferred from poor to rich and from young to old. The small business sector was devastated. But this is all passed over in a very polite silence, except for Sheridan saying the current excess death data is wrong. Actually, Greg, you are wrong.  Read world-leading epidemiologists like Jay Bhattacharya and many others. Comparing like-with-like and no lockdown Sweden and Florida have clearly outperformed similar jurisdictions even on cumulative deaths since the start of the pandemic. Throw in destroyed productivity, people unwilling to work, spiralling debt, soaring mental health problems, sacrificing the young in the name of those over the life expectancy age and this was clearly the worst and most illiberal public policy set of choices ever. (And any time you want to debate this country’s lockdown response, Greg, I’m available. I think you were wrong at the start of the pandemic supporting the government thuggery and you are more clearly wrong now.)

Many, many people (me included) will never forgive Morrison his choices and behaviour during the lockdown years. He didn’t have a liberal bone in his body. He will certainly not be remembered well by history.  Nor will the coalition of views that make up today’s Liberal party come back together if people like Sheridan and Kelly try to sweep what happened under the carpet. Personally, I was glad ScoMo lost in 2022 even though I knew Albo would be terrible.

All of us need some Old Testament in our approaches. In the end, then, my two topics are related, and they relate to the Liberal party and what is needed to ensure its survival.