Eight years ago, George Brandis used his farewell speech to Parliament to point the bone at Tony Abbott, warning that the political right-wing was infected by his “belligerent, intolerant populism“.
Tony Abbott remains widely despised: His attack-dog tactics destroyed the Rudd/Gillard Labor Government and presaged an era where George Brandis’ fatalism became fact.
But it was his betrayal of Malcolm Turnbull that began the conservative rot.
It was Tony Abbott and the so-called ‘the council of elders’ who nominated Sussan Ley for the poisoned chalice of Opposition Leader.
Sipping timidly, when Ley burbled some nonsense about forming a “sensible centre”no doubt the elders had champagne snorting out their noses in merriment.
Tony Abbott brought her to the edge of the glass cliff, and he’s now pushing her over. Abbott’s right-wing fury is behind the internal party putsch, and within days we’ll hopefully learn the dark lord’s master plan.
Who does he really want to lead the party to the next election?
Will it be the savior, or just another sacrifice?
Methinks sacrifice.
Because a recent poll by the Australian Financial Review shows that the Coalition primary vote is haemorrhaging votes to One Nation, with nobody in the ranks who can staunch the bleeding.
It’s why Andrew Hastie’s backstepping was greeted with comments like this:
Lest we forget, Pauline Hanson is a former Liberal Party member.
Her preselection was disendorsed — too late — gifting her a seat in Queensland’s senate that eventually begat One Nation. Notwithstanding recent public smooching, she’s no friend of Tony Abbott either, who recognised the threat she posed to the Coalition base and tried to stab her.
This peril had long echoed in PM John Howard’s spineless reluctance to censure Hanson for the racist pigdog she is.
Instead, he began the now-entrenched tradition of dog-whistle politics that fixed populism at the heart of conservative politicking. But it was Howard’s butlers who refined the recipe, adding belligerence (Abbott), intolerance (Morrison), and racism (Dutton) to tempt the tastebuds of those who lap up this sort of shit.
Last in this conga-line of suckholes, it was Spud’s ugly potato-head on the stake when Howard’s “broad church” burned to the ground in 2025, and his lanky body under the bus when the Coalition concluded their autopsy in 2026.
But, you know, stiff shit. FAFO is a bitch.
Staggering out of the ashes were 21 members of the hard-right, four centrists, and 16 moderates. What does it tell us that most of those who survived were from the hard-right? Only that they were not hard-right enough, apparently, for the jaded voters.
So when the leadership of this charred political rump fell to a Liberal Party moderate, my spidey-senses began to tingle. “Hey, didn’t they do something similar to PM Malcolm Turnbull, before all that stab-stab-stabbing began?” I remembered.
Ginning-up the PR machine to make Sussan Ley the whipping-girl for conservative failure is cruel. But politics is heartless, and Ley would’ve seen it coming. Perhaps as the wind whips through her hair on thew way down she’ll think: “First female leader of the Opposition. At least I’ll go down in history for something.”
Because she’s definitely not the first to fall at the hands of the dark lord of conservative Australian politics, nor will she be the last.
Because, try as I might, when I ask my crystal ball who is most likely to reunify the predominantly conservatives now? It’s not Angus Taylor, or Andrew Hastie, or even Pauline Hanson.
It’s this Lord of the Sith himself.
