The strange death of the Turnbull government

The bizarre thing is that it seems that no one other than half of the Liberal politicians in Canberra, and the LNP organisation in Queensland, thinks well of Peter Dutton.

I mean, can't they read preferred leader polls?   And lots of people say that for every seat in Queensland that Dutton may hypothetically save, there'll probably be a seat in Victoria or elsewhere that he'll lose.  As I noted yesterday, there's not even obvious support for him in the bitter, aged white male world of Catallaxy.  For many of them, he's not even conservative enough!

And then there's the doubt over whether he is entitled to be in Parliament at all.  What nutty challenger tries to take over leadership when there is that cloud over their head?

Finally, there's the matter of the Coalition polling actually having risen to 51/49 in the last couple of Newspolls.  I couldn't see why this had happened, and it worried me that it put Turnbull in range of another scrappy win at the next election.   So, obviously, what does the party do?  Tear itself apart.

My big hope, that this would cause a proper split in the Party to rid it of climate change denialism once and for all, is seemingly not going to happen.   Turnbull seems to love the top job too much to tell a chuck of his parliamentary supporters to leave the party - but there's no doubt that a new conservative party would form some sort of coalition with the Liberal/Nationals rather than support Labor, which is not going to give up support for higher reduced emissions targets.

Anyway, one of the best discussions I have read about this means for the future of the Liberals is from Ben Eltham, and appears in New Matilda.  A few key bits:

As Tim Colebatch noted this week in Inside Story, the struggle for the future of the party is existential, even ontological. Colebatch notes that “in most of Australia, the Liberals’ shrinking party branches increasingly comprise a narrow base of cultural protesters rather than the broad base of mainstream Australians they had when national development was the issue.”

As I pointed out in an article about the rise of Australian far right, modern conservative thinking has moved rapidly in recent years. Amongst the contemporary conservative base, the onrush of tribalism has resulted in the abandonment of enlightenment values like scientific knowledge, liberal pluralism, or academic expertise. 

As a result, movement conservatives quite literally live in a different reality to moderates and progressives, a world where conspiracy theories flourish, climate change is a myth, and western civilisation is under threat from immigrants, feminists and university lecturers. 

In the longer term, genuine questions must be asked about the future of the conservative project. Can the Liberal Party continue in its current form? Will conservatives succeed in taking over the party machinery and melding it into a much more muscular, far-right apparatus – just as movement conservatives have done in the United States? Or will the party split apart?

In mainstream Australia, the endless culture war has so far been going very badly, as the marriage plebiscite showed. But the culture war within the Liberal Party has been another matter altogether: in the party machinery, the far right is winning.

As out of touch as the conservatives are with mainstream Australia, they are extremely in touch with the active and increasingly radical right. Indeed, it could be argued that this weeks’ events represent the logical conclusion of the radicalisation of the Liberal right.

t’s no coincidence that energy policy proved the spark that ignited the current Liberal conflagration. The passage of virulent climate denialism from fringe right-wing conspiracy theory to the centre of current Liberal policy shows just how radicalised the right of the party has become. Similar trends are apparent on issues like immigration. Such is the drift that a section of the party is more than willing to sabotage a sitting Liberal prime minister in order to secure political and ideological hegemony. 
 
Such actions do not augur well for a sensible and balanced politics in this country. In fact, they suggest precisely the opposite: the rise of a powerful and dangerous far right movement, well on the way to taking over one of the two major parties in Australia’s democracy.

 Actually, I don't agree with that last paragraph - I think the nutty Right of Australia is just having a temporary confidence boost by the Trump ascendancy, but that is going to crash in a screaming wreck very shortly.  Besides, my feeling is that wingnuttery is not as big in Australia as it is in the States, and is artificially boosted in prominence and influence by the Murdoch media.