You have to admire the commitment to delusion. Newly appointed Greens Leader, David Shoebridge, fronted the cameras and declared his party to be the ‘replacement’ for Labor. (We’ll call it political shrinkflation: twice the cost, a third of the credibility.)
It’s an ‘extraordinary moment for politics’, he insisted, despite lacking any corresponding polls.
‘This is the moment for the Greens to fill the vacuum that has been left by the Labor Party rushing to the right.
‘We know that One Nation didn’t create itself. It’s the classic post-turtle. Sits on a post. You know it didn’t get there by itself. You wonder what it’s doing there. Labor has created the circumstances for One Nation and Labor is not the answer.’
Shoebridge’s confused political philosophy provided an express class in half-arsed philosophy. This is the mark of someone briefed on an idea but failed to make it much further than Hillary Clinton’s turtle talk.
Far be it from me to criticise Shoebridge for importing Texan political imagery, but he’s forgotten where the post is, so to speak.
‘I see lots of big old turtles sitting on lots of fenceposts. I think we need to find out how those old turtles got on those fenceposts,’ Clinton said, speaking of the Lewinsky scandal. She was complaining about his accusers and critics, people waiting to nudge her husband, Bill Clinton, out of the presidency. It was, in my opinion, an attempt to weave conspiracy where there was, instead, valid criticism. Reducing the voices concerned about one of the biggest scandals of the US Presidency to fence-sitting turtles. We know how this story ends. The turtles had a point about the stains on Bill Clinton’s … reputation.
In the real world, turtles find themselves on fence posts because farmers put them there to keep them out of harm’s way. Sometimes, snapping turtles are put on posts to kill them with exposure.
For Shoebridge, I’d wager the Leader of the Greens is at a total loss to explain why One Nation is rising in the polls, which is a democratic fence post.
The Greens aren’t particularly skilled at empathy for their political rivals, probably because they keep pointing at them and shouting, racist! fascist! Hitler!
It’s no wonder Shoebridge imagines some conspiratorial hand reaching down and plopping One Nation on a fence post. He’s painted the villain as Labor, even though Albanese is just as confused as he is.
Labor has not, as Shoebridge claims, moved to the right. It moved to the left, embracing increased socialism, the rise of the big state, censorial policies, higher taxes, and the scary creep of unreal nonsense which disguises radical activism as science.
The movement of Labor sculpted the LNP, triggering an era of copy-cat policy behaviour which led, eventually, to accusations of a Uniparty.
For fear of being criticised by an increasingly powerful ABC and collection of radical MSM publications, all of which were empowered by a Marx-ified university sector and greedy corporate landscape (which viewed activism as a marketing project), the LNP cut off its own balls and rebranded itself as a moderate, starch-suited, upper class version of Labor. Which everyone hated.
Stuffy, greying rooms full of pompous declarations about investment portfolios built off the back of mass migration and globalism pushed the middle and working classes away. It disgusted regional Nationals voters, who saw their farms being sold off for green energy deals while Indigenous land rights activism was empowered, in many cases directly by the Liberal Party, leading to some of the most shameful land lockout decisions ever made.
There are many crimes against conservatism to list, but the point is it resulted in the creation of an LNP further left than Labor of the 80s.
This opened a massive space on the right. A vacated landscape of Australians without representation. Without a voice. This isn’t the imagined oppression of the Woke class who protest during school hours and return to the comfort of a cafe for lunch. Conservatives have financial, social, cultural, and community problems created by the abandonment of the LNP.
As the blue waters of liberalism retreated, One Nation was left, as a turtle (if you will), sitting on the polling fence post.
One Nation were not placed there, they were marooned. They have been swimming around the political waters for over 30 years. And now everyone is looking at them.
To be clear, the Greens are not the answer to knocking the One Nation turtle off the post. They represent the drought of collectivism. A driver of political climate change forcing the water to recede and the mud of Australia to crack and salinify.
The natural solution is for the LNP to recover their conservative ideology and start acting as a true opposition to Labor.
In some ways, under the direction of Angus Taylor, they are trying to do so.
Here is the problem, which appears to be poorly understood by commentators of a Moderate predilection.
Angus Taylor isn’t getting very far with One Nation-lite policies. The polls are barely shifting. The momentum behind One Nation is still gathering. We are reading, everywhere, that the Liberals are making a mistake ‘going to the right’ and they need to ‘come back to the centre’. Setting aside the error in establishing the ‘centre’ somewhere under Labor’s right elbow, the policies themselves are not the problem.
The problem is trust.
You can read it for yourself in the comments beneath the press releases. ‘It’s good but we don’t trust you. Why didn’t you do this before? You’re just copying Pauline. If you didn’t do it last time, why would you do it now?’
Indeed, part of the reason One Nation is sitting on a fence post is because of declining trust. Trust in politics. Trust in the media. Trust in institutions. Trust in the social contract.
That cannot be easily repaired. Especially not without an extensive apology and explanation from the conservatives who conspired with Labor to create the current political ecosystem. That cannot happen, because the conservative flank of the LNP is clinging on to power. It is not a dominant force, it is on a test-run that feels as if it might expire and flip leaders at any moment. Voters sense this. They worry they might put Taylor in the Lodge and wake up with Jane Hume. That concern underwrites policy promises.
Even if Pauline Hanson were to step down tomorrow, there is no suggestion that other elected members of her party would change direction. It is a coherent movement, whether you like it or despise it. That is where its armoured turtle shell comes from.
What would LNP migration policy be today if One Nation didn’t exist?
If you know the answer to this question, you know more than David Shoebridge about the turtle on the post.
Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.
