The Ghosts of 2010 and the Freedom Wish List
Three things have emerged from the first days of the 2022 election campaign.
One, this election is even worse than normal in providing a platform for discussion of the issues that matter to disgruntled voters. Witness the massive concentration in week one on “gaffes”. The two major parties are more determined than ever that difficult issues, like the heinous crimes of the Covid State, are kept off the front pages. As always, the corporate media are leading the charge in this endeavour. Albo’s gaffes! Who really cares?
Two, the simmering anger in the electorate at the performance of the major parties has translated into real support for the minor parties. Nearly a third of the electorate doesn’t want ScoMo OR Albo. Probably half of these are coming from what we might previously have thought of as the “left”. The government-isn’t-doing-enough brigade who love the masks and associated virus clamp-downs, demand more action on “climate” and relish the woke times with which we are saddled. The other half want a different kind of change. Let us call them the truth-tellers and the freedom-fighters. Truck convoy supporters. Deplorables. Conspiracy theorists. Anti-vaxxers. Outsiders. People like us. Assume this group makes up a sixth of the electorate, desirous of punishing ScoMo for his many crimes against freedom and rights and for his sins of omission, and fearful of turbo-charged wokedom and socialism from the other lot.
Three, it is becoming obvious that neither of the major parties is fit to govern. It is patently clear that their priorities are not the people’s. Given our compulsory voting, compulsory preferential system, we face the triennial dilemma. “Better the devil you know” and “the other mob would be even worse” are the limp arguments for sticking with utterly flawed incumbents are way past their use-by dates.
Where else is there to look?
The freedom fighters and truth tellers are out in force. There are bright yellow signs everywhere. When they aren’t sniping at one another – reports suggest, disappointingly, that Pauline has been sledging Craig Kelly and Clive Palmer in behaviour redolent of the overclass Liberal and Labour parties – there is real collaboration occurring on the ground, and this should be worrying the legacy parties. The minor parties, especially One Nation, the United Australia Party, the Australian Federation Party, Australia One, the Liberal Democrats and parties associated with the family, need to stop niggling one another over who gets to be the leader of the freedom pack, and start thinking and acting strategically.
The electorate of Page provides a model of working together, with locals in the Change4Page group showing the necessary smarts and leadership. There is sharing of resources and reaching out to the like-minded who wish to see all of our rights restored and the guilty parties punished for their Covid fascism.
With electioneering now well and truly under way, and the evidence emerging of massive voter dissatisfaction with the parties of the Covid State, the freedom parties, the thoughts of the excluded classes might well be turning to what a good election outcome might look like.
This election result might come to be known as Part II of 2010. The freedom lovers will certainly be hoping so.
Back in the pre-Covid electoral times, when the Liberal Party appeared to be the party of what might be termed “good individualism”, there was an election in 2010. A first term Government was all but defeated by a stunning opposition campaign led by the last good Liberal Party leader. The result, as we know, was one of the nation’s very few hung parliaments, with government itself and a swag of policies dictated by two Labor-leaning “rural independents”. Their names were Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, former Coalition members both, disgruntled by their lack of preferment and career progress in the major parties, and wedded to a “get stuff for my electorate” approach to representative democracy. Aka blackmail, or as the Americans call it, log-rolling. You support me on x and I will support you on y and z. Indeed, I will guarantee you get to occupy the Treasury benches and the perks of power.
The egregious twosome eschewed any quaint Burkean notion that parliament is for leaving one’s electorate baggage at the door and debating the big issues of the day, driven by right reason and high principle, and favoured instead a base, brutalist “get-everything-I-can-for-my-electorate” approach. In doing so, they traduced decency in parliamentary politics and trashed democratic tradition. They provided even further impetus to the rorts culture that gave us Bridget McKenzie and Gladys herself, and which now is driving calls for a Commonwealth integrity commission. They helped to deliver the surreal political culture we now have, which says that big government is there to give us what we want by way of goodies, and that government can solve all of our problems, including stopping the seas from rising and eliminating viruses.
These are the appalling legacies of 2010. What if there is another hung parliament? What should the one sixth of the electorate who desire the “old normal” wish for? What should our orange-and-yellow-coloured representatives ask for? A starting point would be to interrogate George Christensen’s valedictory speech, in which he helpfully specified agenda items for a principled right-of-centre government (one very, very unlike the one we have had since late 2015). Indeed, it could be and should form the core the agenda of ANY future government, enforced through blackmail by freedom-loving minor parties.
The following action items could be the top ten in any charter of re-instated rights and old-norms:
· Kill the National Cabinet forthwith, and undertake never to resurrect it again;
· Ensure that our recently (and very, very quietly) re-opened international borders to Australian citizens irrespective of vaccine status, and the re-instated pre-Covid rules guaranteeing the free passage of our citizens into and out of Australia are never closed again;
· In order to restore the lost integrity of our Federation, in the event of any future interstate border closures, promise to commence or join a High Court challenge to have them overturned;
· Scrap all vaccine mandates for Commonwealth workers;
· Compensate any Commonwealth workers affected by vaccine mandates;
· Apply pressure to any State premiers from your own side of politics who are still enforcing, or allowing the private sector or Government agencies to enforce, vaccine mandates to end them forthwith;
· Threaten to de-fund any State that persists with vaccine mandates, border closures and lockdowns;
· Tell the truth about the efficacy of masks, social distancing, lockdowns, isolation, the vaccine and explain why you earlier inflicted them on us in the light of the now-settled science;
· Come clean on all the policy blunders of the Covid era and issue an abject apology for them;
· Appoint a royal commission to investigate the efficacy and the morality of all government and third-party response to Covid from March 2020, with the terms of reference specifically to include injuries and deaths suffered following taking the vaccines, and with the Commission chair and senior members to be approved by the parties holding the balance of power.
No doubt, there could be much more included. Killing off all proposals for bio-digital passports and anything with “zero” in the title (zero Covid, net zero emissions) would be in the wish-lists of many in the freedom-loving class. Yes, the above charter is only a start. But such a start would commence the process of government re-engaging with those whom it deceived, bullied, gaslit and impoverished, restoring the social contract based upon the consent of the governed, showing remorse for its Covid State sins, and indicating to the world that we got it grievously wrong and made ourselves a global Covid pariah.
If they don’t play ball on this, tell them you will help the other side to form a government. This is how effective liberalism might work in the age of the Covid State. It is worth a try. Turn the whole country into a single marginal electorate, then use the balance of power in the House of Representatives to extract core commitments from the legacy parties that they have been strangely reluctant to give us up until now.
Back in the real world of election campaigns, meanwhile, we fret about leaders’ gaffes, dollar-laden election bribes and social media posts about the rights of the transgendered to play women’s sport. Business as usual, then. We can do much better than this. Messages can and must be sent to the cosseted overclass from the electoral boondocks. There is no time like the present.
Paul Collits
23 April 2022