Victorian Liberal senator James Paterson has, figuratively speaking, taken his Liberal colleagues by the scruffs of their necks and given them a good shake. His blunt message is, get out of your funk and cooperate in rebuilding the house.
In his Tuesday Tom Hughes Oration, Paterson did put it more politely, but he still didn’t mince words. “We must call time on the apology tour.”
“[We must] resolve our internal differences about our direction amicably”, he said (stressing both the importance and the difficulty of this), and “develop a coherent and compelling alternative policy agenda”.
