It seems everybody hates Tony Abbott these days... well, almost everybody. Mike Seccombe makes the case in the Saturday Paper for the Institute of Public Affairs being Abbott's only friend, with some quotes from the IPA's John Roskam. Yet Seccombe's argument falls down at the first hurdle, as he has to acknowledge that Abbott has not been doing the IPA's bidding on (to them) key policies like repeal of s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
The repeal of section 18C of the RDA became number four on the IPA’s policy wish list, and before you knew it, Attorney-General George Brandis had personally drafted changes to protect, as he memorably put it, the right to be a bigot. Alas, the public debate has run overwhelmingly against them. Roskam fears “we’ll lose that one”.Similarly, Quadrant calls Abbott and Brandis cowards and quislings for failing to stand up for the rights of old white guys like Andrew Bolt to be racist. The paleoconservatives at the Sydney Traditionalist Forum, who at least are open and honest about their nationalist strain of white power politics, characterise this as "establicons" turning away from the Coalition.
Meanwhile, the Ayn Rand acolytes of the libertarian movement are in even more disarray. David Leyonhjelm got smashed from pillar to post on a recent proposal to sell Australian citizenship for $50,000 a pop by the Establicons, with the Randsformers powerless to defend the silliness of the LDP's egghead Pollyannaism. Open the front door, says David? Shut the front door, say the Cat's resident tories.
So, libertarians hate him for failing to defend freedom or lower taxes, while conservatives hate him for reindexing pensions and disrespecting diggers... is there anyone left on Tony Abbott's side? One has to turn to the News Limited papers to find them - some of whom are connected to the IPA, to be sure. Murdoch's continued support is not about ideology, though, but about media ownership laws. As Jason Clare said yesterday:
“Media reform is a well-trodden minefield and Malcolm Turnbull is welcome to it.”Turnbull can't even have lunch without causing a national incident, so if Murdoch thinks the Liberals are going to be able to finesse a bill through the Senate past Clive Palmer to enable him to take over the Ten Network for which he has been angling for years, he's going to be sorely disappointed.
Andrew Bolt appears to understand politics as well as the idiots at Catallaxy!
ReplyDeletewhat a goose
It could be the government is paying too much attention to the IPA and fellow travellers . Given there is no intellect at the IPA it would explain why the Government has no idea of what it is doing!
ReplyDeleteThat's the thing though, at the moment the government is slaying a lot of cows that the IPA thinks are sacred. The IPA are the useful idiots whom Abbott disobeys to prove that he is a centrist.
ReplyDeleteI've had a look at the "SydneyTrads" page but cannot find anything that suggests "their nationalist strain of white power politics."
ReplyDeleteReally, KM? You can't hear the dog whistle when they say they "acknowledge the uniqueness of Occidental civilisation"? They pine for the good old days of Empire when old white men ruled the world, and the rest were chattel.
ReplyDeleteThe comment being made in the article above was that they are "nationalist" and allegedly racist. I don't see how acknowledging the uniqueness of the West is a form of "supremacy" or as you hyperbolically put it "pining for the good old days of Empire when old white men ruled the world and the rest were chattel." (!)
ReplyDeleteEmpire loyalism, if you had any idea of Australian political history, was actually the opposite of nationalism - the nationalists were the republicans and many among the Catholic, Irish, Labor movement. They hated the Empire. Those who want to remove the Union Jack from the flag and redefine Australia as "a part of Asia" are their linear ideological descendants today - only these modern frootloops acquired a strain of self-hate from cultural-Marxism when it became abundantly obvious that Marxism-proper was an intellectually bankrupt ideological cul-de-sac.
Anyway, it seems to me that you have a chip on your shoulder. How exactly is that SydneyTrad's problem? From what I can see on their website, they appear to be traditionalists who foster a sense of traditional Western identity. In light of the fact that this is no different from minorities who claim the same thing in relation to their identity, how is their position morally reprehensible?