Violet Lites and Silent Types

PLURES efficimur, quotiens metimur a vobis: semen est sanguis Christianorum. I doubt Tertullian would approve of that more contemporary adage – mouthed or written over the past five weeks by Liberal Party chauvinists: ‘Labor would be worse.’ The Carthaginian polemicist famously declared in Apologeticus that killing Christians only causes them to flourish because their blood is seed. Reap ’em and weep is not far from an accurate translation. He wouldn’t see the long-term fruit to be had, much less the honour to be garnered, in abandoning principle just to register another win built on capitulation. Exit Trent Zimmerman, Katie Allen and Dave Sharma. Enter Miranda Devine and those who still think they know better.

“Glib one-liners just don’t cut it,” Devine wrote in April, contra Albanese. “It’s the economy, stupid, and never more than today.” As a general rule, it’s a good idea to put a few hundred words between censuring a man for triteness and being trite yourself. Neither the contest between Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese or the future welfare of the nation are wholly or even preponderantly about the economy. If they were, the Prime Minister’s Keynesian panic and his bankrolling of the states’ pandemic terrorism wouldn’t make a strong case for re-election anyway. While it’s true that, unlike Teals, Violets of the Devine school – blue Liberals infused with a ruddy materialism – are loyalists, they are no less damaging to the party for being persona grata.

Devine isn’t the only ‘Labor would be worse’ Cassandra. Several other ‘conservative’ commentators rounded on those contemplating a punitive switch to the rebel right. That their warnings are now clichés – “vote Liberal with one hand… hold your nose with the other,” “don’t waste your vote in a fit of pique” – proves how long-suffering are the “quiet Australians” triennially drafted to adorn this Potemkin-Menzian facade.

The LNP’s policy of using its base to get elected and treating it with contempt verging on loathing thereafter has been going on for years. Three big things brought the balsa wood rort crashing down on Saturday. Speaking personally, I know the exact date I chose not to vote for the government: 17 November, 2021. On that Wednesday, Attorney-General Michaelia Cash announced the scrapping of the “Folau clause” and the conscientious objection provisions for medicos from its Religious Discrimination Bill. There would be no protection for an employee who objected to the left’s pious reverence for gayness, nor for a doctor refusing to refer-on a suicidal patient to a regime-friendly confrère. This shameful surrender was of zero interest to Devine. Instead of railing against it, she attacked the Australian Christian Lobby whose leader, Martin Iles – having decided homicide and prohibiting the Bible were not trivialities of a grin and bear it kind – said the ACL would campaign against the MPs responsible. Devine slammed Iles and friends as “vandals” and the “dormant old faction of conservatives.” Last week she praised Violet bulldozer Paul Murray for doing more than anybody to remind voters that… Labor would be worse.

I had already decided not to barrack for the government a month earlier. On 21 October – assisted by News Corp, with whom the base-nudging move was in some measure strategised – Mr Morrison made known the Coalition was officially converted to the climate change religion. In the unlikely event they held office for another 30 years, the Liberal and National Parties intended to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. They would restrict mining, fossil fuel-thirsty industries and gaseous agriculture. Modernity, in other words. The parties of Bob Menzies and Earl Page declared war on hi-viz kulaks but with none of Stalin’s sincerity. This wasn’t about CO 2, of course. It was about winning the inner city seats they ended up losing anyway. The question is not whether Labor would be worse but how much worse it becomes in increments because ‘moderate’ Liberals allow it to roam free in an ecosystem bereft of predatory muscle.

The last of the big three reasons for walking away was the government’s frosty indifference during the covid hysteria of 2020-21 to the nazification of what it was solemnly sworn to safeguard: one of the world’s oldest democracies. The crimes committed against Australians by the states included: house arrest, Chinese surveillance, extreme police violence, renditioning, the doctoring of hospital statistics, deliberate medical lies, wilful exaggeration intended to alarm, an assumption of control – bordering on compulsory acquisition – of all private property, the prohibition of work, education and leisure, the closing of courts and parliaments, the suspension of free speech and assembly, the mandatory violation of bodies, the psychological torture of the dying, the vaxx-molestation of non-endangered children and the derailment of their social development. The only thing the Morrison cabinet did about the atrocities was pay for them. Unlike, say, the vindicated Ron DeSantis, the PM couldn’t see the upside in championing reason, decency, truth and the rule of law for the entire population. Had he seen it, he still might have lost office but would have bequeathed a harvest for the annals to his successor and the Liberal Party.