Loyalty and Honour
No sooner had George Christensen announced that he had joined One Nation and was, indeed, standing for the Senate, than the Christensen hit squad launched a fresh jeremiad against the former Liberal and National Party Member for Dawson. He is a much-hated figure. He stands up for the little guy, the capital D Deplorable, and this irritates the pants of the Insiders’ Club. The Lib-Lab duopoly and the assorted left-of-centre parties and their preferred media organs. Think Crikey, the New Daily and The Guardian. Marxists in short pants, many of them. And, God help us, he is a Christian. A marked man, including for many in the “modern” Liberal Party. (These folks may just find themselves the focus of attention for powerful forces like the Australian Christian Lobby in the coming campaign). The usual epithets emerged, on cue. Rogue. Controversial. Maverick. And the rest. Michelle Grattan calls him a “pest” (for the Coalition).
Here is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s own headline:
George Christensen to get $100k payout after defecting to One Nation and an unwinnable Senate spot.
The issue is framed, the narrative set. He won’t win a seat, and his motives are venal. It neatly parks the real import of his recent stands and the values he represents – about as far from those of the ABC and its Covid-climate-woke cohort as you could possibly get.
The usual leftist suspects were quickly joined in this endeavour by one Matt Canavan, LNP Senator and himself no stranger to controversy and the occasional floor-crossing. “Deserter” was the charge. Coward. Shirker. Really? Canavan then, risibly, described minor parties – who many, many Australians will surely vote for in a few weeks’ time – as “echo chambers”. That’s right. You read that correctly. A member of the Lib-Lab duopoly described principled minor parties as echo chambers. They do imbibe the Kool-Aid come election time, n’est pas? Classic wagon circling behaviour (as I have argued elsewhere).
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/04/circling-the-liberal-wagons-again/
Just to remind ourselves, here is the sequence of Christensen’s actions. He served out his term as the LNP member for Dawson, elected under the LNP banner and (weirdly, perhaps) loyal to the end, despite his party’s total abandonment of anything approaching principle and good governance. Readers here will be familiar with the long catalogue of atrocities committed by these second-rate charlatans. Yet George stuck with them, on a matter of principle scarcely to be found in the city of Walter Burley Griffin. In his valedictory speech, he spoke frankly yet with restraint. He did the honourable thing, having been elected as a Member of the LNP. Then he resigned from the LNP, as well he might. Then he said he wasn’t going to be voting for the LNP, possibly ever again. Another tick. Then he announced he had joined One Nation. And then he announced he was standing for the Senate. At every stage, he gave cogent, indeed compelling, reasons for his actions.
I don’t see a “deserter” here. I see someone who recognises that he was surrounded in Canberra in the Party room by, well, deserters. Canavan himself has done good things, has principles and an independent mind. Qualities in very short supply among his peers, who are almost universally careerists with a globalist, overclass-driven world view. To the extent that they even have a discernable world view. Almost to a man and woman, they have forgotten where they came from. They fawn over the values and agendas of the elites with whom they move, endlessly and effortlessly. There isn’t a “safe”, woke position that they don’t suck up to. Hence, whatever his own merits, Canavan has no right to call his former colleague a deserter in view of the recent trajectory of his Party.
Michelle Grattan could not resist dredging up what she sees as the ugly Christensen past:
Christensen, 43, member for the north Queensland seat of Dawson since 2010, has been extended an extraordinary degree of tolerance by his colleagues over the years. His party has treated him with kid gloves, despite some outrageous behaviour.
So indeed did his electorate. Regardless of his spending nearly 300 days in the Philippines between April 2014 and June 2018 – which earned him the title “the member for Manila” – the Dawson locals gave him a positive swing of more than 11% in 2019.
Outrageous behaviour? Standing up for the people against the elites, refusing to play Canberra party games, voting in the House on principle, not power politics? Really, Michelle. When doing what he did is regarded as outrageous, what hope have the people really got in the face of the powerbrokers in Moscow on the Molonglo? Treated with kid gloves? I don’t regard joining a parliamentary motion condemning him as kid glove treatment. That was one of the Coalition’s greatest ever disgraces, one of its lowest acts, and there have been plenty. I am just glad Grattan remembered the 11 per cent swing which helped secure Scotty’s “miracle win”. Did they ever thank him for that? And George claims he was lied to by Coalition colleagues about policy. That lot honourable and Christensen dishonourable? No, the media types are willfully wrong about this one. Unsurprisingly.
But hadn’t George just announced that he had retired from politics in Canberra? Yes, he had. He said that Pauline Hanson had asked him to run, and he agreed to. Was it all staged to gain some pecuniary advantage? He says not (though this is, reportedly, disputed by “government sources”). And he has far more cred than any of his critics. My own response is, if true, who cares? For anyone in the mainstream parties and their mates in the corporate media to stand on principle in relation to these matters is laughable. The major parties are now almost totally populated by petty grifters. Far more importantly than the hypocrisy of Canavan’s Party in this is that we are facing an incredible crisis in Australia, and Christensen and Hanson are two of the very, very few politicians who get that. Craig Kelly and his crusading billionaire overlord get it too. So do the Liberal Democrats, and other freedom lovers of less prominent influence. Just as importantly, George is one of the very few who continue to fight for outsiders’ rights in relation to the unconscionable vaccine mandates, and who will never, ever let the Governments of Australia forget their Covid crimes. The Canavan class shows no such interest in such matters but rather seeks to use the election to paper over the crimes committed in the name of public health and “safety”. Shame on all of them.
The butt-covering class is out and about, and after George. They do not like being called out.
Just look at his to-do list (for the Government) spelled out in his last parliamentary speech. Get rid of the vaccine mandates. And net zero lunacy. Woke education. Religious discrimination. Digital currency and digital identity. Restore the crushed rights of the individual. And the crushed freedom, for God’s sake. The Government that Christensen is departing has to make up its mind. The things on George’s list are either top priorities for his former colleagues – our liberal representatives – or they are simply issues on which the modern Liberals will roll over, with a smile and a wink and a wave to the elites. Christensen’s decision to leave the Party forthwith (upon resigning as Member for Dawson) suggests where he believes the Government will land in relation to pursuing his wish-list of priorities.
What about his standing for the “unwinnable” One Nation third position on the Queensland Senate ticket?
George will bring extra votes to One Nation. He will bring focus, stature and substance. For those of us outside the mainstream, he has cred and he is a trooper. He will, almost certainly, lift the One Nation vote in Queensland and possibly elsewhere in this election. He may convince those flirting with Clive Palmer and the admirable Craig Kelly to stick with One Nation, and persuade deserting Liberals and Nationals to go to One Nation. For, despite the welcome splash of bright yellow all over the country, in the latest Roy Morgan poll, Clive’s United Australia Party remains at a grim 1.5 per cent, with One Nation over 5 per cent. He will offer guidance to the many unmoored and disillusioned as to where to place their vote. Many will vote for him over the number two on the ticket. George Christensen makes the front pages, as few others on the “fringes” do.
As Terry Barnes of The Spectator Australia noted:
George Christiansen must have felt the pull of Lyle Shelton’s lament here [at The Spectator’s Flat White] for his political passing. Suddenly, he’s back – switching to One Nation and contesting a Queensland Senate seat. He is unlikely to win, but Christensen’s presence on Pauline Hanson’s ticket will boost her chances of knocking off the LNP’s Amanda Stoker, and the Liberal Democrats’ Campbell Newman, for the sixth and final Queensland Senate seat.
(This latter point by Barnes, in itself, is an appalling potential outcome of Campbell Newman’s return to politics. For all his admirable defence of freedoms and rights in the age of Covid, the practical outcome of his Newman’s re-emergence would be, if he is successful, the demise of perhaps Australia’s greatest freedom-fighter of the past quarter of a century. And Stoker has been a major disappointment, as they invariably are when they catch the whiff of ministerial leather).
The alt-right needs figures of experience and profile to ignite the palpable anger felt by those betrayed by the Canavan corporate political class. Any argument that people like Matt Canavan might have for staying in the LNP is, surely, gone. The only question is where to place the white-hot-angry protest vote.
Christensen’s act is one of consolidation. He is focusing the minds of the undecided voters, and unifying a disparate bunch of political ne’er-do-wells into a more coherent whole. It is something that the other minors haven’t done.
His farewell address in the Senate was a masterclass in articulating the protest of the outsider, the deplorable, against the embedded Canberra world view. His messages were crystal clear, spoken in non-cliched English and resonant with ordinary people whose lives, families, incomes and businesses have been all but destroyed by the Lib-Lab cartel who currently govern the place.
Roy Morgan polls suggest that around a third of the electorate is intending to vote for a minor party or independent. Both the Liberals and the Labor party are primary vote cellar-dwellers. We hate them! Don’t the good burghers of the major parties smell a rat? Do they not get that George and his new, switched-on colleagues might just be onto something?
George Christensen saw earlier than many the shift in political alignments now underway. The old left-right divisions are so much the day before yesterday. His former colleagues, loyal to the Party with a big P, are now hopelessly out-of-date. He recognizes the anger out there, and the sources of that anger, but he also sees where his skill-set and knowledge can be used, still.
Not all of the media hooked into Christensen. Here is Alexandra Marshall at Rebel News:
It turns out that ex-Liberal MP George Christensen’s scathing valedictory speech might actually have been a campaign pitch for the federal election.
She also quotes George sympathetically:
“The more I queried into One Nation’s policies and looked at their constitution, their core beliefs, the things that Pauline has been campaigning on recently, just about everything aligned with my views,” said Christensen.
“Bizarrely the question didn’t really float into my mind as to why I am doing this, the question that floated into my mind was, why hadn’t I done this a long time ago?”
Indeed. Marshall also notes the nightmare that Christensen’s move is for the Coalition, already bleeding masses of voters – and, thanks to ScoMo – polling booth workers from a very, very cranky party base.
She also makes the salient point that many people wanted George to stay on in politics and, no doubt, these entreaties have only increased since he quit Parliament:
Since announcing his intention to quit politics, Christensen said that he received an ‘enormous amount’ of community support asking that he find a way to stay in politics and fight the conservative line.
https://www.rebelnews.com/christensen_joins_one_nation_after_retirement_backflip
So, yes, a change of mind, but one made on the back of, no doubt, a flood of urgings to stay on.
That it is left to the alt-media to tell the truth about Australian politics, and to locate and report on the actual issues, should by no means surprise readers here.
Loyalty and honour? George’s first loyalty is, and has always been, to his voters. The punters who have been let down, or worse, have been destroyed, by those in whom they placed their faith and confidence. They include those for whom vaccine mandates and lockdowns have proven a gross act of betrayal, the folks who have lost their jobs in the cause of facile vaccine ideology, the small businesses now strangely absent from the boarded-up suburban malls and main streets in the “miracle” economy that does not exist, except in the eyes and minds of cosseted bureaucrats in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. To a man, I suspect, these bureaucrats and their ilk utterly despise George Christensen. They despise us all. They do not get George, because they no longer get we-the-people.
No, George Christensen has been honourable. And loyal to those who matter and whose opinions he ultimately values. Those who dismiss him as a “deserter” are off-point, and worse. And some will likely pay for their misplaced loyalty to legacy politics.
Paul Collits
14 April 2022