I attended a really excellent talk last week on the virtues of Western culture. In the audience there were a number of people still connected to the Liberal party. Well-meaning? Yes. Just as depressed as the rest of us in the direction of the country? Yes.  Wanting things to turn around, and soon, for the sake of their kids? You bet. But there was a notable lack of what I would call ‘the grovelling apology for what this once-great party had helped do to the country’. I don’t mean in any way to suggest that the Libs and the Coalition when in office were as bad as Labor. Not even close. This Labor government is a disaster. It’s overseen negative per capita GDP statistics, the measure that matters. It shows a patent desire to genuflect to the Islamic voters on a host of fronts, some dangerous, all at the expense of Australia’s Jews. It has no concern at all, not one iota, for free speech in this country. The list goes on. Team Albo has Australia on a dire downward trajectory.

Yet that can all be true at the same time as it can be true that significant blame for the attacks on this country’s culture falls at the feet of the Libs and the Coalition more broadly. When I pressed this point I did get an admission or concession. ‘During the nine recent years of Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison governments it is true that the Coalition abandoned the field when it came to our culture and defending [what I would call Western civilisation and pride in this country].’

Now characterising this as ‘abandoning the field’ is about the kindest, most charitable way of putting it that remotely fits the evidence. Let me remind readers of some of the receipts here as regards complete Coalition gutlessness, nay cowardice, maybe even perfidy. I pick only a tiny sample of the myriad examples on offer.

Receipt One. Tony Abbott’s capitulation on even trying to repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. This is back in the news with the truly awful court decision against Pauline Hanson. If she can’t say what she did then we simply do not live in a free society. I don’t trust the judges on this.  Hanson may win at the High Court; she may not. But the proper remedy is to repeal this malign s.18C. By contrast, Trump in the US tries to deliver on all his promises. He does not abandon a core election promise because of the Rinos in the party. Doesn’t mean he can deliver on them all. But he patently tries.

Receipt Two. Remember in 2016 when the Australia Council for the Arts (‘ACA’) defunded Quadrant magazine, basically the only high-culture, arts publication that takes a conservative worldview and vigorously defends Western culture and civilisation? In 2016 the ACA cut all its taxpayer funding, claiming it was the result of a competitive peer-review process. I work in our universities. Peer review today involves overwhelmingly left-leaning people doing the reviewing. And what did the Coalition government do? Nothing. Zero. Want to know why people voted for Trump? Because he would have fired the minister and then moved to replace the bureaucrats on the ACA. But Turnbull had just recently defenestrated Abbott.  Mitch Fifield was the minister. Sure, you could say about this travesty that the Libs had ‘abandoned the field’ of arts funding to wall-to-wall lefty outlooks. Or you could be blunter. But my point is that a decade later when we’re lamenting how too few young people value the great highlights of Western culture you might want to take a bit of responsibility as a party. Maybe a grovelling apology might be warranted?

Or jump ahead a couple of years to the Peter Ridd saga. A provincial university fires a man whose claims about the Great Barrier Reef prove ultimately to be correct. But they went against the moral panic of the whole climate disaster-ism at the feet of which the then Coalition government was worshipping.  So, again, they did nothing. Sure, Ridd lost in what I think – and have outlined in print why I thought – was a terrible, unconvincing, misdirection-sort-of-decision by a five-judge High Court. And sure, a majority of the judges who decided that Ridd case had been appointed by the Libs, something also true in the even more egregious Love case.  (Yes, the Libs were useless at that key function too.) But court case aside, the Coalition government then funding this university would have been fully entitled to say this sort of speech-suppressing university heavy-handedness would not be tolerated. We’ve seen Trump play very tough with unis because he knows that the faculty votes left by huge ratios (36 to 1 of law school academics is one calculation from publicly available US voter donation data) and that the uni leaders are even more progressively left-leaning. Our Coalition government simply left Ridd hanging out to dry.

Are they unaware that the battle of ideas requires the young to hear their side’s ideas?  What do they reckon will happen long term if they never fight on these fronts? Every single one of the nine recent years of Coalition government saw things in our unis get worse for conservative students and faculty. Never once did these geniuses talk to conservatives in the system. Nope, they talked to the vice-chancellors. The people causing the problem. The people who overwhelmingly sat on their hands for weeks during the Palestinian encampments. The people who decided that two-thirds of our universities would officially come out for ‘yes’ on the Voice referendum, the rest being officially neutral but running information sessions where near-on all speakers supported the ‘yes’ case. Do these geniuses in the Coalition understand that everything is downstream of culture?

Look, I haven’t even bothered yet to point to the two plus years of lockdown thuggery overseen by a Coalition government. A brutally heavy-handed approach that every day is proving the dissenters were right to resist. Have you looked at the Fauci diaries? Did you see the latest data on per capita excess deaths since Covid? Sweden now has the lowest totals in the developed world, despite not being far away and isolated like us. Morrison’s self-justificatory BS about saving millions of lives is premised on the same laughably flawed models that were used to license the thuggish stupidity in the first place. How many long-time Liberal voters driven away by this illiberalism will come back? How many who lost their small businesses, whose children fell behind because schools were out or who couldn’t be with their dying Mom? I doubt claiming today you’re a more prudent fiscal manager will do it. (Leave aside the reckless, seemingly unconstrained spending and money printing of the Frydenberg-Morrison duo.)

My point is that if we are to believe that the Coalition parties have had a Damascene conversion on these matters, and on net zero, and have thankfully grown a backbone, then they will need to apologise for their past pusillanimity. And then make specific pledges of what they will do. Very specific ones, preferably accompanied with a promise to resign if they’re not met. That’s how you build back trust.

Then all right-leaning parties can get on with pointing out to voters how unbelievably bad Albo and Labor are. Because God help us if Labor wins the next election. Which they will if the Coalition abandons the cultural field again.