This year’s election results should come as a surprise to no one, and although it goes without saying that Labor are just as destructive through their mass immigration policy as the Liberals are, the latter don’t get quite as much criticism as they should from the Australian right-wing.
Just like in the UK where the Labour party smashed the Conservatives, it could very well be the case that the Liberals will struggle to win another election – and we shouldn’t want them to.
With that in mind, let’s have a look at the role the Liberal Party has played in the suppression of Australia’s potential. When people say to put the Liberals last, this is why.
“Pig Iron Bob” (1938)
First, let’s go back to the late 1930s, where at the time future prime minister Robert Menzies was Minister for Trade and Customs, before starting the Liberal Party.
During his time in this position, he made the questionable decision to keep exporting pig iron, an intermediate product used in the production of steel, to Imperial Japan. Japan would then use said pig iron and turn it into ammunition, which would later be used in their war efforts against Australian soldiers. This decision was made despite his support for the White Australia Policy, one of the many examples of contradictory and short-sighted stances of Liberal Party prime ministers. This caused the 1938 Dalfram dispute where wharfies protested loading pig iron onto the steamship SS Dalfram destined for Japan, later being overruled. This event caused national outrage and gave Menzies the nickname “Pig Iron Bob”.
Multiculturalism and the end of the White Australia Policy (1960s-70s)
Let’s not forget that although the Whitlam Labor government officially and legally ended the White Australia Policy in the early 1970s and enacted the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975, Whitlam was following on from a process that began under the Holt and Gorton Liberal governments in the prior decade. The move to multiculturalism as a national policy was then done under a Fraser Liberal government. To put it simply, Whitlam took the legal approach against racial discrimination and Fraser built the infrastructure to expand and institutionalise multiculturalism and increased the levels of non-White immigration and the Vietnamese refugee intake. This would be later exacerbated in the 1990s where Prime Minister John Howard would more than double the average yearly intake of immigrants and expand temporary visa programs. These moves by both parties, but mainly the Liberal, in making those initial and lasting changes, fundamentally changed the demographics of Australia.
Gun control and the restriction of our freedoms (1996)
After the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, Howard enacted restrictive gun control laws. From 1838 to 2023 (a 185-year period) there were 33 mass shooting events, with 266 deaths and 139 injured victims. Of those 33 mass shootings, 12 involved a shooter who didn’t know their victims, causing 120 deaths and 76 injuries. The Port Arthur massacre accounts for 35 of those 120 deaths and 24 injured victims. All other mass shooting events either don’t have enough information to confirm the relationships between the shooter and victims or were family or domestic violence-related, which account for a significant portion of the remaining deaths. With or without guns, it is likely those unfortunate events may still have happened but with different weapons involved. Nonetheless, this decision by Howard infringed on our freedoms and way of life.
Failure to capitalise on the mining boom (2000s)
A frequently asked energy policy question is why Australia doesn’t tax its natural resources industry and multinationals like Norway does. But an often-forgotten part of this discussion is how Howard failed to capitalise on the mining boom. Driven by Chinese demand, Australia experienced a massive mining boom beginning in the mid-2000s, which continues to some extent to the present day. In 2004, Australia’s metal ore and mineral quarterly exports sat at just under $5 billion and is roughly $35 billion today. But instead of futureproofing the wealth of Australia through diversifying the economy for life after the mining boom, establishing a sovereign wealth fund or investing in infrastructure, education or innovation, it was instead used for middle-class tax cuts and handouts. In 2021, Australia ranked 93rd out of 133 countries on the Economic Complexity Index, behind the likes of Uganda. What a waste.
The NBN debacle (2010s)
Our Internet speeds are shameful and the Liberal Party is to blame. Under Prime Minister Tony Abbott, future Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was Communications Minister. Instead of enacting the full fibre optic rollout plan Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had for the National Broadband Network, which is faster and cheaper to maintain but more expensive to install and aimed to replace the copper wiring and telephone exchange infrastructure owned by Telstra, they decided to go with a cheaper mixed technology approach.
The result was spending billions of dollars on outdated technology which now requires future upgrades and is still the approach today. The initial roll-out under Rudd wasn’t without its challenges, which are expected in any nation-building project, but its plan was to have 93% of households have fibre-to-the-premises connections by 2021, which offers much faster speeds than fibre-to-the-node using copper wiring.
We currently have roughly 4.4 million out of 12.5 million households that can upgrade or have already opted-in to full fibre to the premises but have spent more money on this project for fewer results than was originally planned. It is also important to point out that, although our Internet wouldn’t be on the same level as that of Singapore for example due to our larger geographic size, our Internet is still more expensive than most other developed nations have with faster speeds. Our mobile internet speeds are even ranked 52 spots higher than our fixed broadband speeds are. On a global scale, we rank 82nd out of 154 countries for home broadband speeds, behind many poorer South American and Asian countries.
Homosexual ‘marriage’ (2017)
Although Anthony Albanese was the first sitting Prime Minister to march in a mardi gras, Turnbull ran on making so-called gay marriage legal in Australia during his 2016 federal election campaign and supported the idea during his time in office through a plebiscite. This plebiscite ended up costing an estimated $525 million instead of the $160 million initial estimate.
That bushfire holiday (2020)
This one hurts too much to look back on that it’s even laughable that a prime minister could act this way, but we all remember that during the Black Summer bushfires of 2020 where Liberal Party PM Scott Morrison took a secret holiday to Hawaii while the country he was in charge of burnt to a crisp. This indifference no doubt played its role in the public’s disgust and subsequent turning away from the Liberals, which was coupled with budget cuts for bushfire prevention by the NSW Liberal government, and a general lack of readiness in the face of a major natural disaster.
Do they actually support free speech? No.
The Liberal Party likes to promote themselves as the party of free speech, but their track record is full of contradictions. Both major parties will happily side with the Jewish community and multiculturalism at the expense of your right to speak your mind freely, because to them, criticising multiculturalism is hateful. This public image was shattered when not only did they refuse to repeal hate speech laws in NSW, but even supported strengthening such laws. In 2021 under Morrison, the party even adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism aimed to address anti-Semitism online and on university campuses – two important places we should be allowed to speak our minds. A party that doesn’t hold an absolute stance on the issue doesn’t actually support freedom of speech.
Today and beyond
This takes us to this year’s election cycle, with Peter Dutton losing to Albanese and failing to retain his seat of Dickson.
It’s no wonder he didn’t get elected, given his constant backflipping on his stances and not really having a worldview that informs his politics. I won’t dwell on this year’s election, given there have already been some great pieces written on this site covering it, but fundamentally we must remember this election as one that wasn’t a Labor party victory, but rather a rejection of the Liberals.
If and when the Liberal Party disbands, and I hope it does, we must remember it as being one of the most self-destructive forces Australia has seen, one that opposes every value we right-wingers and nationalists hold. They are the party of questionable and short-sighted decisions who wants this country to be brown, disarmed, poor, without futureproofed infrastructure, gay, prone to natural disasters and without free speech.
I am hopeful for the future of the Australian right-wing, as given the trajectory the Liberals are on, there will be a power vacuum that will open in their absence. We just need to ensure that gap is filled with nationalists.
Header image: Scott Morrison holidays in Hawaii during the 2019 bushfires (Instagram).
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