It’s time to call out the broad church.
Of course, I revere former Prime Minister John Howard who coined the mantra.
But church has changed since he left in 2007.
How do you have a church, broad or otherwise, when too many of the parishioners think a woman can have a penis and an economy can be run on intermittent weather?
Angus Taylor, writing in the Weekend Australian, says Liberal values mean ‘family as the foundation of society’. That’s sounds like a pitch to mainstream Australia.
But can anyone in the Liberal Party define family?
The so-called moderates can’t even define a woman. The Liberals in Victoria are tearing themselves apart because Moira Deeming tried.
Sussan Ley released a video this month calling for mandatory sentencing regarding serious child abuse crimes after news broke about the alleged abuse of a five-year-old girl. The Liberal Party is so captured by Woke ideology that they missed a key point of the story – the biological man, the girl’s father, was being housed in a Victorian women’s prison.
Menzies would be rolling in his grave.
It’s all well and good for Angus Taylor to say Liberals need to fight for cheap and reliable energy. But the Liberals and the Nationals put Scott Morrison on the plane to Glasgow to sign our nation up to Net Zero by 2050, which I believe is the greatest act of economic vandalism ever perpetrated on the Australian people.
Labor is now pulling out all stops to reach the target set by the Liberals but no one who understands engineering or economics believes they will go within a bull’s roar, despite the electricity bill pressure they are inflicting on families and small business.
If Kim Beasley was the best Labor Prime Minister Australia never had, Tony Abbott was the best Liberal Prime Minister whose premiership was killed in the cradle by fellow Liberals in a sacrifice unbefitting of a church, broad or otherwise.
That moment marked the end of the broad church and what’s left badly needs a reformation.
Paying indulgences to LGBTIQA+ political activists and renewable energy lobbyists should be heretical in a conservative party.
How does Sussan Ley’s statement ‘of course I want to get to Net Zero as soon as possible’, playing unrepudiated on a loop in Advance ads, reconcile with Taylor’s vision for coal and gas to help get our prices and reliability back under control?
James Paterson, who like Taylor, also jumped into the ring this week in the fight for the soul of Menzies, helpfully said the Liberals needed to engage the left in the culture wars they continuously provoke.
Ley wrote in 2023 that Liberals should stay out of ‘single issue culture wars’.
She doesn’t define them but when Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was asked about abortion, the Liberal leadership clarified they had ‘no plans to change the settings’ on this issue.
‘It’s important to remember that access to abortion is a state issue, which is why you often see it debated at the state level, and we have no intention to change the settings from a federal health perspective. Obviously, individuals have their own views, and Jacinta is entitled, as a member of the National Party, to her own view, but the federal Liberals have no intention of changing the settings when it comes to this issue,’ said Sussan Ley.
One branch of the abortion conversation relates to babies born alive after an abortion. What do Liberal family values mean if a child who survives a botched abortion isn’t guaranteed palliative care under a Coalition government?
When Liberal National Party MPs lock in behind their Queensland State leader, David Cirsafulli’s, motion to ban discussion on abortion-to-birth practices for the entire four years of their government, this is not fighting the culture wars, as Paterson says Liberals should, it is capitulation to the left’s radicalism.
Whatever one’s views are on abortion, the LNP’s enthusiasm for the gag shows they don’t even care about free speech.
Ever since Tony Abbott was slain like Thomas Becket at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral, the Liberal’s ceased being a church, let alone broad.
Abbott’s successor Malcolm Turnbull says same-sex marriage was a major achievement of his prime ministership.
It’s well and good for James Paterson to say Liberals should not give up on the culture wars but Turnbull’s triumph shows it’s a little too late, isn’t it?
The one person now in the Liberal Party who has shown what it is to fight the culture wars is Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Price dragged Liberal leader Peter Dutton into the fight against the Voice to Parliament.
The rest is history.
The Liberals lose every culture war they don’t fight, which has been all of them except the Voice.
Now that Price and Andrew Hastie have put their heads above the parapet to fight the culture wars (Net Zero is above all a culture war), they are being derided as Trumpian, Farage-like popularists.
While Paterson and Taylor are friends of Hastie and Price, their interventions are being egged on as repudiations of them by the doyen of Australian political journalism.
Plenty of journalists dislike Trump and Farage, but it should not be assumed by them that is the path Hastie and Price are advocating.
As they have said, what is ‘far right’ about wanting to get immigration under control, make houses affordable for families, make things in Australia, get indoctrination out of the schools etc?
If these policies are ‘populist’, what’s wrong with doing what the voters want?
It is contempt for families hurt by the ‘small-l’ liberal policies of the globalist elites that is driving the fracture in the centre right.
Unless the so-called Liberal moderates give up their kow-towing to anti-family rainbow social policy, mass immigration and economy-destroying Net Zero ambitions, there is no future for the Liberal party.
No amount of broad church pragmatism can reconcile a vision of the family that upends what it means to be human.
Neither can it reconcile a competing vision of energy production that defies the laws of physics.
Churches require not just faith, but reason.
Lyle Shelton is National Director of the Family First Party and its lead candidate for the NSW Upper House.
