The languishing Liberals are still in a state of confusion.
About who they are, about what they are there for, about who they represent. Yes, we have had the outstanding “Dutts found his voice” effort on the Aboriginal question, the promotion (in every sense of the word) of the wonderful Jacinda Price, and the recovery of some Tony Abbott-style attack dog tactics over Lying Labor’s Brittany affair. But Dutton’s progress and the opportunity for a Labor kill might be outliers. The Liberal Party still doesn’t seem not even to be aware that the question is not “how do we get back into government?” But rather, “why are we here?”
In other words, we still have “the problem”. The Liberal problem? His name is Andrew Bragg.
But before we get to him, some context is needed. First, we had the replacement of the late, great Jim Molan for the Senate. Jim was solidly centre-right. So, the contest to replace him came down to, err, two “moderates”.
(Moderates we used to call “wets”, a perfectly apt descriptor they naturally sought to ditch. The Moderates love everything the progressive left does, only they occasionally praise capitalism more vigorously than the real left).
Next, we had the debate over who would conduct the “review” of the recent NSW Liberal defeat. They couldn’t even agree on which old Liberal stalwart to wheel out to dance around the real issues. Then there is the ongoing silence over the malignant shadow over the party of the lobbyist whose name no one (apparently, still) dares to speak. Finally, determining the extremely unimportant issue of the NSW Liberal Presidency has taken up considerable energy and time, only to be “resolved” in a factional agreement that threw up failed MP Jason Falinski as the likely third president in a year. Falinski is a political gnome of epic proportions and, inevitably, a factional appointment.
Just prior to losing his seat in 2022, Falinski said:
Any reasonable analysis of the past six years would show we won much more than we lost, but we obviously have not done a good enough job of communicating that with people …
“We” means “moderates”, not “Liberals”. The faction and its ideology trumps “the Party” and its core values. It was an attempt – that failed miserably – to ward off the Teals. Teal voters are “the people” referred to above.
Who cares about the electoral prospects of the failed Liberal Party, you might well think? None of this would matter, except that our country is being thrown to the wolves by the lunatic, demonic mob now occupying the Treasury benches in Canberra. Democracy and the prospects of the voiceless (the real voiceless) remain dire without an effective opposition to the suicidal direction of travel. The Liberal heads are still in the sand. But worse than this, there are active agents working to wreck the future of the Party. Let’s name them. Apart from Falinski, there is the aforementioned Bragg. His new girlfriend, former Member for Reid, Fiona Martin (each of them having dumped their spouses), and their great mate, Bridget Archer.
Methinks the media sniffs an emerging “power couple”.
Love is in the air as top Liberal senator and a high-profile politician get together after breaking up with their spouses - after he praised her as a 'super impressive' candidate.
What a puff piece. Bragg a top Liberal Senator? I think not. As for Martin, falsely described here as a “high profile politician”, has created havoc for Liberal Party unity and for what many still hope are Liberal core values.
In February [2022], Dr Martin defied the party by crossing the floor to strike down laws allowing religious schools to discriminate against or expel transgender and gay students.
Senator Bragg would have also voted against the bill had it reached the Senate, multiple media outlets reported.
This caused the Liberals to abandon an admittedly less-than-perfect three-year effort to introduce protections for religious schools from strategic attacks by the LGBT brigade, post the same sex marriage victory in 2017. So, not inconsequential. And let us ignore the old, self-serving canard that preserving religious freedom means bullying gays.
Next, we come to Archer, a candidate for the Guinness Book of Records’ entry for the most times a politician has crossed the floor (27 times since 2019, to be exact). It is a wonder that she knows where her seat in the Senate actually is. Archer wants a “revolution” in the Liberal Party. She wants to “pick a fight with her own side”. According to Michelle Grattan, she wants “root and branch reform”.
What, like in New South Wales?
[She] argues the strength of the Liberal Party historically has been for members to be able to sometimes disagree and to do so respectfully.
She clearly has a sense of humour, if not of history. So, it is ok to stack branches to get rid of conservatives, is it? Like they tried in South Australia. It is ok to block the candidacy of true independent thinkers like Noel McCoy in New South Wales, because he dared to challenge the idiot, malign lockdowns. Archer claims the Liberal Party is currently “unelectable”. If correct – and it may well be – it is because it has governed badly, broken promises, done things that it never said it would, embraced policies from the other side, ignored its own members, effectively disenfranchising them, forgotten the large silent minority who have abandoned both major parties, embraced pork barrelling as a quasi-religion, handed over decision-making to unelected bureaucrats, and, over the last three years, smashed our freedom and rights into tiny pieces. She claims a desire to talk to “middle Australia”. She wouldn’t know where to find them. She is politically tone deaf.
Archer reckons:
“We’ve got to have a revolution”: Tasmanian Liberal MP Bridget Archer thinks the federal Liberals are unelectable in their current form and wants to “take the party back”.
https://twitter.com/GoodWeekendMag/status/1662187138782248964
Perhaps she hasn’t caught up with the fact that the Liberal Party has already had its revolution. Another puff piece that is a gift to the leftist media. They love communists in the Liberal Party. They see her a “a jewel in the Liberal Party crown”. It gets the Moderates’ names in the paper. Win-win. Bridget Archer has claimed (hilariously) that Menzies would approve of her approach and actions. Well, Menzies couldn’t even bring himself to vote for his former Party within five years of his retirement, such was his perception of their drift leftwards. He literally wouldn’t recognise the current lot. He simply wouldn’t be able to comprehend how someone like Archer found her way into the joint. To process her rise to public office.
But is it Andrew Bragg who is the emerging leader of the wet pack, and the biggest threat to an authentic Liberal revival. Eventually, we have to ask, is Bragg a plant? Is Archer? Are all of the moderates plants? The obvious question is, if it quacks like a duck … Let us look, firstly, at Bragg and the May 2022 election aftermath, and see the evidence emerge.
Liberals must shun ‘conspiracy theorists’ of climate wars, moderate Andrew Bragg says.
With some conservatives declaring that the Liberal party needs to shift to the right in the wake of Saturday’s electoral defeat, the remaining moderates, including Bragg, are rallying to ensure the new opposition leadership doesn’t write off inner-city professionals and lurch into populism.
Conspiracy theorists? Who are they? Tony Abbott? Professor Ian Plimer? Anyone who has seen through the climate lies? Write off inner city professionals? “Lurch” into “populism”? Like listening to normal, non-Guardian-reading centrist voters from club sensible. Like doing what the few remaining Liberal Party members select them to do. No, Bragg misreads the politics and ideologically belongs across the aisle. Huffing and puffing about climate rectitude allows Bragg to virtue signal, the wets’ pastime of choice. Inner city professionals do note vote Liberal, and never will. They abhor the Liberal Party. And their core values are not those of the Menzian Liberal Party or of middle Australia. So determined is Bragg to get the “conspiracy theory” charge in there that he fails even to understand climate science 101. He simply spouts the same old moderate tosh more recently given an outing by Michael Photios after the Party’s ignominious defeat in Macquarie Street this March just past.
Prior to his entry into politics, of course, Bragg was a paid-up member of the BlackRock investment management class. The private equity industrial complex. And he brought to the Liberal Party the entire stock of PGGWC (progressive, globalist, green, woke, Covid) class, unreconstructed, ideological baggage.
Bragg stated:
“I think climate change, for example, has been too often captured in a culture war when it’s really about capturing a huge economic opportunity for our country. So I’ll be guided by what the foreign investors are saying about the need for us to send the right signals rather than any sort of conspiracy theorists.”
He said the party needed to embrace the transition to low-emissions energy. “We need to see this as an economic challenge and a huge economic opportunity for our country, especially for the regions where a lot of these new jobs will be – and we just need to get on with the job.”
So, a climate nutter of the Chris Bowen kind, who believes in the fantasy of global warming and climate “emergency”, like Matt Kean, and is willing to destroy our national landscape so that his old mates in the equity investment industry can grow even richer while impoverishing the rest of us. I am still failing to see how destroying our economy, causing blackouts and brownouts, sending the cost of power through the roof, and shutting down regional jobs, will “capture” an economic opportunity. Guided by foreign investors? So, he is no doubt fully on board with the whole ESG movement of global corporatism. The elites who place their own ideological purity, gaia worship and personal enrichment ahead of the lives of ordinary folk. Why should anyone give a damn about foreign investors?
Ditch the culture wars. As if these were some ephemeral affair of little import to the lives of normal people.
What else has Bragg done and said?
He worked for years for the Financial Services Council, whose attitude to climate change policy is summed up as:
The FSC and its members support the emissions reduction target of 43 per cent by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050 and believe this is a positive step in ensuring stable policy settings are put in place to transition Australia to a lower emissions economy.
For them, the 2022 lunatic climate bill was “a welcome first step”. Perhaps Bragg’s statement to The Guardian was simply lifted from an old FSC press release.
He is a friend of Malcolm Turnbull’s. He was leader of the Liberals-for-the-Yes case to inflict homosexual marriage upon us. He said:
Great institutions evolve and marriage is no different.
https://www.andrewbragg.com/post/marriage-campaign-lessons
No, mate. Marriage has been trashed, re-defined. It didn’t “evolve”. He regularly appears, with other “modern” Liberals like Dave Sharma, at the Mardi Gras, decked out in his rainbow Liberal tee. He leads the Liberal friends of LGBTIQ with, well, pride.
He once volunteered (naturally) to step aside from a pre-selection contest “so they could select a woman”. Supports quotas for women in politics. Supports the Uluru “statement from the heart”. Wrote a book on the Liberal case for national reconciliation. In other words, he has never, ever found a woke issue he didn’t love. If he played cricket, Pat Cummins would probably have him in the Australian team. His nickname should be Davos Bragg.
And sure enough …
Elected to the Australian Senate in 2019 representing the State of New South Wales, Andrew Bragg is one of the most high-profile Australians with ties to the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Bragg was tapped on the shoulder to be part of the Young Global Leaders class of 2021.
He attended the WEF ‘school’ while being a Senator with the Liberal Party of Australia, a position he still holds.
One of Klaus’s Kids. I am guessing that Andrew would have sailed through the entrance exam.
To the present …
This week Bragg, from (of course) the New South Wales Division of the Liberals, decided he would endorse a Channel Ten demand for a police investigation of the Brittany Higgins leaks. Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian has exposed the behind-the-scenes goings on of Team Higgins (Lisa Wilkinson and Higgins’ leftie boyfriend, David Sharaz, principally) prior to her going public with now decidedly shaky accusations of rape against Bruce Lehrmann.
A gift for the leftist media, The Age, The Monthly, The Guardian, The New Daily and The Saturday Paper. It has allowed the issue to be shifted away from the core significance of the revelations.
Albrechten’s journalism has been a masterclass. We get to see behind the curtain. The outsider class doesn’t often get a win like this. We should all be in her debt, and that of her colleagues working on this case. In a different way, their contribution to justice has been every bit as important as that of Hedley Thomas, who dedicated a large chunk of his career to putting a murderer (Chris Dawson) behind bars.
They have exposed Team Higgins in all its glory. And what a seedy, tawdry lot they have been shown to be. Giggling, hypocritical racists. Cynical hatcheteers seeking to destroy opponents’ lives, without giving a toss. Strategic me-tooists plotting a course towards personal enrichment (book deals, ludicrous government payouts) and fame (media appearances, fronting public protests), while creating a new phenomenon. The celebrity victim. Aided and abetted by low rent Labor politicians who, with rat cunning, sniffed a political opportunity. Labor politicians sadly now destroying the country. All, it might be suggested, based on a porky. I wonder if Team Higgins has ever heard of Carl Beech and what happened to him for, to put it very euphemistically, wasting the UK Met’s police time over false allegations of sex abuse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Midland
The latest Channel Ten play is a classic “look over there” strategy. Rail against the leak, so as to distract attention from the utterly damning revelations from the leak. Pretend that this will “deter” actual rape victims from coming forward. From going to the police.
The problem for Ten and Team Brittany is that none of us can un-see that which we have seen. And heard. And been sickened by. They have all been revealed to be despicable chancers (and that is being kind). The affair has consumed pants-on-fire Labor, especially Katy Gallagher and Anthony “Ho Chi Min” Albanese.
Into the fray rides Bragg.
“I think this whole thing has been a tawdry affair and it is hugely regrettable how it’s played out publicly.
“I don’t know how these messages have been put into the public domain. I expect that there will be a proper investigation into that. Because I mean, why would anyone come forward with allegations of assault if this is the result?”
Asked if he believed police should investigate, Bragg replied: “Well, there needs to be an inquiry to how this has happened. I mean, this can’t happen again. This is supposed to be a country which values the rule of law and proper process.”
Yes, Andrew, it has been tawdry, but not for the reasons you seem to be focused on. Rule of law? Que? I am not sure why anyone would think that this affair would deter victims. “If this is the result”? No, Andrew, no one “makes” a rape victim (complainant) say her (or his) name, reveal her (or his) identity, let alone do book deals, appear on national television, front huge public demonstrations. Saying that it would, as Bragg, Archer, Zali Steggall (of course) and assorted Labor me-tooists have done, is a distraction and a lie. Another lie. And ideologically self-serving.
Three points. One, Bragg has kicked an own goal as a Liberal. An epic political blunder. Labor is on the run. They have been proven to be liars in the service of ideology and political gain. Caught with their pants down. Two, Bragg is playing to the me-too establishment in a pathetic attempt at virtue signalling. The real threat to genuine accusations of rape being believed is the glorification of those whose accusations are shown to be false. End of. Three, Bragg is playing leftist-Liberal politics as a sacrifice to those to whom he offers fealty, and who will never vote for his Party.
And this guy and his mates are the future of the Liberal Party? If so, it has no future. Certainly not as a broad church with conservative entry points and the possibility of non-factional conversations. Whether or it ever wins more elections, it will never win back the hearts and minds of the true inheritors of the Menzies tradition.
No doubt, Archer, Bragg and the rest will all be raising a glass to Sir Robert and to Brittany at the annual Black Hand dinner at the Cinnabar Chinese Restaurant in Kingston (Canberra) Friday night (16 June). Hosted by Michael Photios and Simon Birmingham. Nothing to Bragg about, here.
Paul Collits
16 June 2023
I found it difficult not to launch something at my TV when Bragg called for an investigation into Higgins rubbish. The Liberals are dead to me. I’m a certified political orphan…
What grubby lives these people live. Bragg, Martin, Archer are such gifts to the Labor party. Anything g to stop Gallagher from stepping down. Dutton’s action shows up Albanese and his inability to show any integrity.