The Peter principle: start by saying no and don’t stop

Angus Hume writes: Peter Dutton fills the bill for the far right and extreme religious nut job elements of the Liberal mess (“The perennial problem of defining Peter Dutton”). How the Liberal Party might now survive is beyond me.

Barry Welch writes: In the lead-up to the 2019 election Peter Dutton’s wife told the Murdoch press: “He’s no monster.” But he is the abominable NOman. He said NO to action on climate change, NO to supporting Australian manufacturing, NO to lower power prices, NO to affordable housing.

Hugh Childers writes: For a while I had the double misfortune of having Peter Dutton as our federal member for Dickson and also as a relatively close neighbour in Camp Mountain in Queensland’s Samford Valley. While driving home just after the 2007 Ruddslide election, I saw Dutton driving back to his house towing a trailer with large election billboards, a characteristic snarl etched on his stone-like face. Fast-forward seven years to the Abbott-Hockey federal budget, and I wrote to Dutton with a detailed critique of the grotesque unfairness, social inequity and the many egregious breaches of promises it contained. His response was he was “disappointed” that a near neighbour would write him such a letter. Perhaps only Tories populate his biosphere.

Most residents in his home village rarely see him out and about. He makes few attempts to communicate with them except through letterbox flyers. And not long before the May 2022 election he failed to turn up at the Samford Community Hall for the meet-the-candidates event. 

A sinking ship

John Bushell writes: Nothing less than a major shift in direction could possibly steer the good ship Liberal away from the rocks it is in danger of foundering on (“The Liberal Party doesn’t have a clue how to win voters back”), a return to the ideas presented by Menzies in the 1940s. The Liberal Party should recognise the meaning of its name and get rid of the baggage hiding behind John Howard’s puerile broad church statement. Arch-conservatives and those who rail against secular governance hide behind the broad church fallacy. Menzies consciously avoided casting the party he created as conservative.

Steps to restructuring the Liberal Party could and should be the dissolution of the LNP in Queensland. That forced marriage of city and country conservatives is intrinsically flawed. Without the continual trumpet-blowing by the Murdoch media, the LNP would fold into insignificance because it has no moral reason for existence. Turn the Nationals loose — their only hope is to assume their former name of Country Party and ditch their ties to the fossil fuel oligarchy. Return to being agrarian socialists helping out the farmers — as it is, farmers are disillusioned with the Nationals but haven’t found anyone else to vote for.

The Liberals must encourage the conservatives and religious extremists to find a party elsewhere. While that baggage remains like a cancer within the body of the Liberal Party there will be no chance of winning votes from the majority of voters who populate the central area of the political spectrum and determine which party will win an election. The Liberals are appealing to the extremes of that spectrum and there are not many votes out there.

Stephen Bocking writes: It was quite coincidental that the Australian Grand Prix and the Aston byelection happened simultaneously, but by the end of the weekend there were many wrecks in both locations. In Albert Park the wrecks were multimillion-dollar racing cars. In the electorate of Aston, the wreck was the Liberal Party clown car. And within that wreck, the only fatality of the weekend may be the prime ministerial aspirations of Peter Dutton.  

While the Grand Prix teams picked up their wrecks and moved on to Azerbaijan, it seems nobody knows where to take the clown car. Undoubtedly the boffins and mechanics from within the Liberal Party will comb through the diagnostics to discover why it crashed and burnt. But I doubt they’ll see what’s staring them in the face: that the Liberal Party is no longer a “liberal” party. It’s a conservative party, always looking in the rear-view mirror — not watching where it’s going. It abandoned its liberal values long ago as it has progressively turned harder and harder to the right, like a car in need of a wheel alignment.

Will it recognise its problem? I doubt it. And even if it did, I doubt it will do anything to fix it. The one thing a conservative hates more than anything else is change, and a lane change is exactly what it requires.

Drew Jackson writes: The problem is the Liberals’ collective ignorance. They ignore scientific research, they ignore social justice, and they choose to ignore their economic record. Their performance in question time is inept, dull and an insult to the people who voted for them.  While ever the flotsam of the Morrison cabinet remains in Parliament there is little chance of rehabilitation. Scott Morrison has effectively killed the Liberal Party, and Barnaby Joyce is doing his best to destroy the Nationals. Even intervention from Rupert Murdoch, Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer, Andrew Bolt, Rowan Dean, Peta Credlin and Alan Jones won’t breathe life back into its rotting, putrid carcass.

Peter Ainsworth writes:  I used to be a Liberal stalwart and a defender of the party. I have never quite understood when it all started going wrong, but after reading your article it all makes sense. The Liberal Party seems to enjoy being in opposition because it doesn’t seem to grasp what every person in the street can see. It has trashed our reputation overseas and made a mockery of everything that we hold dear: honesty, respect and basic human rights. This is a case of the fish rotting from the head. I now loathe its members, and the Liberal Party disgusts me.