The focus on the political direction of the Coalition in opposition has centred on whether it would learn the lesson of its defeat and loss of seats to independents and shift in a more moderate direction — a difficult task given its moderate ranks have been severely reduced.
If yesterday is anything to go by, the Coalition is shifting to the right — not only ideologically, but culturally and tactically.
Take the confected outrage around the purported mockery of Queensland LNP member Michelle Landry by the prime minister in question time yesterday.
Whether it began as an effort to distract from the fact that Albanese humiliated Peter Dutton because Dutton didn’t know the basic geography of his own state, or had been planned for a while and was merely dependent on anything that could be made to resemble a provocation, Coalition women manufactured an offence when literally none existed, staged a media event, claimed they were the victims of bullying and demanded an apology.
To call this a stunt — as former Liberal MP Julia Banks, who knows a thing or six about being bullied, did — is to be generous.
At the heart of it is an insistence that something that simply did not happen happened — despite the clear evidence of broadcast proceedings. There’s not even slight room for doubt or uncertainty. It’s the kind of thing Scott Morrison used to routinely do, denying he’d ever said something you could find footage and transcripts of him saying, or insisting Labor had done something that it never had.
And worse is the attempt to co-opt victim status, to seize grievance, to exploit the very real issues of workplace culture, treatment of women in parliament and bullying, for crass political advantage.
Most of the MPs involved in the stunt sat silent while Scott Morrison denounced Christine Holgate in parliament, while he lied to parliament about the investigation of the Brittany Higgins matter, while Morrison’s PMO smeared Higgins’ partner, while a Coalition minister described Higgins as a “lying cow”, while Alan Tudge was allowed to hide out from the 2022 election and then return as a frontbencher, while Morrison declared there was nothing to see here about historical sexual assault allegations against a minister.
To see them parade as outraged victims of bullying now is sickening stuff.
But this is what the hard right is increasingly doing. It is portraying itself as the victim — of persecution by liberal elites, of suppression of free speech, of efforts to undermine their way of life.
Envious of how groups who have traditionally been the victims of real discrimination and persecution have brought that mistreatment to the centre of public debate, the hard right wants a piece of that — awarding itself equal status as another persecuted minority. And it doesn’t need any evidence to back up its performative outrage.
It’s straight from the playbook of a Republican Party that even without Trump has weaponised white grievance and manufactured an entire political narrative out of the myth of persecution.
Peter Dutton confirmed this Republican-like shift in his budget reply. On climate, Dutton is hardening the Coalition’s opposition to real climate action and wants to expand coal and gas.
We need “coal, gas, hydro, hydrogen, nuclear or batteries as an energy source or to store power when renewables aren’t feeding the system. But Labor is going to phase out coal and gas before the new technology has been developed and rolled out,” he claimed. He also accused the government of “ripping up funding” for gas exploration and cancelling gas infrastructure projects, as well as “handing over funding to environmental activists who want to overturn gas project approvals”.
Literally none of these things have happened. The current government is indistinguishable from its predecessor in its enthusiasm for fossil fuels. Like Michelle Landry, Dutton is inventing offence for something that simply didn’t happen.
Dutton’s enthusiasm for nuclear power is like his enthusiasm for carbon capture and storage. It’s the polite form of climate denialism.
It’s no longer quite the done thing to openly reject climate science or claim the whole thing is a hoax if you’re a senior figure in the Coalition. But you can signal that you reject it by talking about the myth of carbon capture, or spruiking the equally mythical “small modular reactors” that are “just around the corner” to provide cheap reliable energy — we just have to keep burning coal and gas while we wait.
If the Coalition is heading in the Republican direction, there are some things that never change in the Liberal Party. Dutton is retaining Scott Morrison’s appalling policy to transfer superannuation from first home buyers to baby boomer homeowners by allowing people to raid their super for first home purchases — undermining industry super funds along the way.
It’s a policy that denies basic economic reality. Like the Coalition denies basic climate science. Like it denies what you can literally see from Question Time. Is this the future of the Coalition — persistent denial of reality?
