Conservatives Can No Longer Afford to Be Quiet

Two school students holding placards as they march in Melbourne, Australia, on Sept. 20, 2019. Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

Commentary

While every presentation at the CPAC Conference, held in Sydney on Oct. 1 and 2, was worthy of acclaim, there was much focus over a panel session chaired by the executive director of the Menzies Research Centre (MRC), Nick Cater, and included former Liberal National party Senator, Amanda Stoker, former Howard government cabinet minister, Nick Minchin, and Liberal party vice-president, Teena McQueen.

Things got heated between the panel and the audience after Minchin in response to a question about change in the Liberal party, responded: “Well to be frank I don’t know that the Liberal Party needs a whole lot of changing.”

In between boos and yelling from the audience, Minchin added: “The Liberal party’s values are values you should all support. Go and read the platform of the party; read ‘We believe.’ We stand for small government, we stand for low taxation, we stand for federation, we stand for good government.”

It is unfortunate that this heckling occurred to one of the conservative figures in the party who fought alongside John Howard. Let’s not forget that Minchin was a leading advocate of the “no” case for a republic.

The problem here was not necessarily what Minchin said but what had happened to the Liberal party, which undermined his statement. Under the leadership of Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, the Liberals have abandoned the conservative values of the party that Minchin outlined—displaying what Nigel Farage described as “conservative cowardice.”

Nigel Farage speaks at CPAC in Dallas on Aug. 6, 2022. Bobby Sanchez for The Epoch Times

As a result, they have delivered government to the Australian Labor Party (ALP).

Indeed, at the last election, the Liberals preferenced the ALP ahead of the Liberal Democrats and One Nation, minor parties which philosophically are closer to the Liberals. In doing this, the ALP, with the Greens, now have control of the Senate.

This added to the feeling that conservatives were betrayed by the same “conservative cowardice” that saw the failure of the Morrison government to address the indoctrination of children through the Woke national curriculum and its embrace of the economic suicide note that is net-zero.

Coalition Needs to Actively Draw Voters Back

As Spectator Australia’s Editor-in-Chief Rowan Dean pointed out, conservatives were right to predict that Turnbull would be a disaster, that Morrison was insane to adopt net-zero, and that his response to COVID was wrong-headed both in principle and in practice.