Yes, some Liberal MPs are born gutless. Some achieve gutlessness. And some have gutlessness thrust upon them (by advisors and by genuflecting before every focus group they meet). No doubt, too, it can be a thorny and tortuous task at times to work out which Lib MP fits into which category. Personally, I’m still waiting for grovelling apologies from every single Liberal MP who voted for Malcolm Turnbull’s defenestration of Tony Abbott. If not ground zero, that is a foundational cause of the woeful state in which today’s Liberal party finds itself. (And no, Scott Morrison’s trickery and disguised treachery does not win him any free passes on this one either.)

Let me point to two core issues on which leading Liberal politicians are wholly and completely useless. One is immigration. The pathetic little token cuts with which they went to the last election were a joke given that under them Australia was running the democratic world’s biggest per capita immigration Ponzi scheme. Labor has only made it worse, upping numbers and opening the door to Gazans of all choices. Look around the democratic world, you Liberal MP buffoons, and notice the many political parties that are all-in on restricting immigration, from Trump in the US, to Farage in Britain, to half of Europe, even to Canada’s new lefty PM Mark Carney. If Dutton had gone to the last election pledging a near-total immigration freeze together with a promise to ditch net zero he would have won comfortably.  (He could at least have held his head up high regardless.) Instead, we have a Liberal party currently not even able to support the One Nation immigration enquiry. Why the heck not?

Or, issue number two, consider the Liberal party’s record on free speech issues. I’m assuming you have strong stomachs and can bear to do this without feeling an all-encompassing despair. I’ll be blunt. It’s so bad that if there were ‘truth in advertising’ laws that applied to political parties then the Libs would have to change their party name. As prime minister, Tony Abbott caved in to the ‘new Labor’, Black Hand gang, lefty faction in his party room and repudiated his promise to the voters to try to ditch the awful Section 18C hate speech laws. Malcolm Turnbull appointed our current e-Safety Commissioner. (’nuff said, right?) Then we had to suffer through prime minister Scott Morrison who thought free speech a third-order irrelevancy that ‘never created a single job’. This is the same guy who was clueless about the presumption of innocence when it came to the whole Brittany Higgins saga and as regards his own cabinet minister Christian Porter. This is the same guy who was a flat-out thug during the Covid lockdowns, overseeing the biggest inroads on all of our civil liberties (most definitely including speech-related ones) in two or three hundred years. During all of that time did either of the two Liberal MPs who sold themselves to their preselectors as the great free speech warriors – I refer to former IPA employees Tim Wilson and James Paterson – resign from the ministry or take any principled pro-speech stand at all?  To ask is to answer.

Is that it? No. Peter Dutton was almost as tone-deaf on free speech as ScoMo. Indeed, Dutton had virtually zero interest in anything free speech-related. Well, anything, that is, that involved safeguarding speech and expanding its protected ambit. Mr Dutton seemingly had no problem whatsoever with supporting further inroads into restrictions on our right of free speech. None at all. Which brings me back to Turnbull’s choice to be our e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant. As opposition leader, Dutton supported Ms Grant and the legislation that gives her massive speech-limiting powers. Let me be frank, it is core values and bravery that matter in politicians. If you can find palatable doses of both in any of our current Liberal party politicians tell me whom you have in mind. Because I don’t think you can cash that cheque more than one or twice.

But as for that legislation, the wonderful organisation that is the Australian Free Speech Union (and all readers should consider joining, it needs our support) is currently involved in a number of so-called ‘cyberabuse’ fights with the e-Safety Commissioner and Commission. (Again, a party that supports this rubbish and cannot instinctively see the huge, longer-term dangers such legislation carries with it – just look at what’s happening in Britain – well, that is not a political party that deserves our support. Period.) Anyway, the Free Speech Union is notching up some wins, including in the Celine Baumgarten case. Moreover, in a recent speech in Washington, DC our Dutton-supported e-Safety Commissioner claimed that the Australian Free Speech Union was a ‘front group’ for Elon Musk (I wish) while coming very close to implying it supported ‘rogue porn’ sites. Why? Apparently this was due to the FSU making a tool that enabled people to send Ms Grant’s office a Freedom of Information request to find out if it is spying on them. Seems a straightforward request, no? Turns out the Grant outfit is collecting thousands of pages on some people. Ms Grant did not like these requests. (Peter Dutton, what about you and the shadow cabinet that supported this monstrosity?  Any views?)

Anyway, the Free Speech Union and its leadership cheekily thought it might be interesting to test out this whole Liberal party-supported cyberabuse scheme as a complainant. Given what Ms Grant said about the FSU and Mr Musk’s social media site X in Washington, DC, didn’t that trigger the ridiculously over-broad s.7 of the Online Safety Act 2021? (I can’t say it enough, this monstrosity is Liberal party legislation, so note that the path to hell in Britain was paved by 14 years of Conservative party governments, and ponder the analogy to here.) Weren’t the e-Safety Commissioner’s Washington DC comments, to quote the legislation, ‘intended to have an effect of causing serious harm to a particular Australian adult’, one that ‘an ordinary reasonable person… would regard… as being… menacing, harassing or offensive’? I mean it’s disjunctive not conjunctive, an ‘or’ not an ‘and’ in the statute. Would you be offended by the sort of comments Ms Grant hurled at the FSU, its leadership and Mr Musk? (As an aside, I don’t say that ‘being offended’ is a test any sort of person with a functioning brain should ever make relevant, but the Libs are what they are.)

Anyway, the Commissioner’s office said that her allegations did not amount to cyberabuse. The FSU asked for written reasons to appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal. Ms Grant claimed she didn’t have to give reasons because her Commission had decided it wasn’t cyberabuse. That’s convenient, n’est-ce pas? The FSU applied to the Tribunal to compel her to give a statement of reasons. The FSU won. And eventually those reasons were released just last week. They are perfunctory and predictable.

If this sort of speech-emasculating scheme really is supported by the Liberal party of Australia then that political party is some ways down the road of being as lost, broken and devoid of principles as Britain’s Conservative party.