We don’t believe you. We don’t trust you. We’ll take our country back.
By Gary Scarrabelotti
I am peering into my coffee waiting for lunch and meditating on recent breakfast conversations with two friends. Let’s call them Primus and Secundus.
it was a cold Canberra morning, below 9°C. Primus opened with exasperation, a hint of anger even:
“I still subscribe to The Australian, but I’ve stopped reading Paul Kelly!”
He didn’t elaborate fully. Primus was holding back. But the drift of our table talk, and recollections of our past conversations, confirmed my sense of what he meant.
Wisdom
That veritable dean of the commentariat, Paul Kelly, had laid it down, across many an article, that it was unwise for the Coalition parties to disturb the populace over whether global climate change was a thing and whether “Net Zero” was the way to deal with it.
These, supposedly, were settled convictions, so widespread among voters, that Libs and Nats would challenge them at their peril. For which reason, it was wise of former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and much to the advantage of the Coalition, to have taken debate over such matters off the table.
It goes without saying that, under this Scott Morrison-Paul Kelly Self-denying Ordinance, the Coalition could criticise on practical grounds the measures taken to implement climate and energy policies – their cost or reliability, for instance. Calling into question, however, the underlying dogmas of climate correctness and energy purism could no longer be tolerated.
It boils down to this: fall into line, accept “The Science”, or be branded mad.
Primus was sorely troubled by all that. He could not accept that a limit, conceived for mercenary political reasons, should be put to contesting widely believed, élite-approved doctrines loaded with peril — for economic and cultural freedom, as he argued — in a society said to be “free” and “democratic.” For Primus, that was stupefying.
Some days later, another café, and it’s a tad warmer. I sat down with Secundus.
Fatal flaw
“Do you read The Australian these days,” he asked.
Well, actually, I ‘d stopped my sub during the Covid convulsions. A one-time, glued-on reader was I. But no more. What did it for me, finally, were the hero journos of the centre right and their chicken-hearted investigation into the great (and still enduring) questions thrust upon them and us by the mass panic.
“However,” I said to myself, “I won’t make a meal of it today,” so I simply answered, “No.”
“Well, have look at today’s piece by Paul Kelly.”
He was talking about this: “The Libs need to stand up now or risk losing more ground’ (The Weekend Australian, 9 – 10 August 2025.)
The article opened with advice from former PMs Howard and Abbott and former Federal Treasurer Costello. This was followed by a possible political program digested, Kelly wrote, from unnamed “Liberals, advisers and independent analysts.”
“These Liberals,” Secundus said, leaning back rightward on the bench with a chuckle, “they don’t get it. They want things — smaller government, lower taxes, more competition, more freedom – that cut the ground from under their conservatism.”
How do people save money, buy a home, found a family – and focus on it – in a society driven by liberal economic principles and overlaid with mass immigration? This was the question left hanging in the air as we wrapped up brunch. I sighed inwardly.
“Guess I’d better buy a copy and read the thing.”
Disconnect
Which I did. And blow me down, what did I find there amid Kelly’s sagacious lines? The very thing that had set my other friend, Primus, against their author – and doubtless too against the Liberal Party in its present shape:
“ … the need to appeal to a voting constituency that believes in climate action …
“Presumably the Liberals will avoid the folly of fighting against net-zero symbolism.”
Oh, sure, there was real policy grit in Kelly’s columns. Nine points in all. Each one sound enough in itself, but together they added up to a mechanism engineered in cold, calculated detachment from the flesh and blood pulse of ordinary Australian people. I won’t go into details. If you’re really interested, you can dig out the piece and read for yourselves.
What’s important, I think, is how the article closed out – and in this, to his credit, Kelly managed to capture, in words provided by another, the spirit of that ‘foreign country’ in which the Liberals seek to recruit political support.
“People feel the country is changing before their eyes, they see a culture they don’t recognise …”
It was John Roskam of the Institute for Public Affairs who explained the remoteness, especially of the Liberal Party, from the real Australia:
“I don’t think the political class, Labor or Coalition, grasps the extent of the concern in the community about the future.
“People feel the country is changing before their eyes, they see a culture they don’t recognise […]
“Yet the Liberals don’t have the language to deal with the gravity of these sentiments […]
“ [… ] Too many people feel that the Liberals stand for nothing or, if they stand for anything, it is to oppose.”
That’s a blistering judgement, all the more sharp given how Kelly began with wise and rallying words from his selected Liberal elders about the adamant verities for which, by repute, that party stands.
Costello: “higher productivity”, “small government”, “lower expenditure”, “lower taxation”, “personal liberty”.
Howard: “American alliance”, “family life“, “individual liberty versus collectivism”.
Abbott: “The best way to unite the Liberal Party is to attack the Labor Party.”
I have to say, this is not the way to talk to a people switched off from the Coalition’s cocktail message of economic individualism and faux conservatism.
Catch phrases like these don’t resonate with people who see their towns and suburbs being rapidly repopulated by aliens to whom no invitations had been issued.
Words of this kind don’t wash with mums and dads whose kids are being dumbed down at school and indoctrinated with theories from “the dark side” about gender fluidity and environmental doom.
And don’t spruik “family” to solo lads and lasses for whom a house deposit, all too commonly, is out of reach.
Sure, families struggling to meet their power bills might well give a cheer (or two) for Abbott’s pragmatic energy policy: “… no coal-fired power station to close without a reliable alternative …” I certainly would. But remember, while kicking Labor heads may impress the ‘party animals’, it doesn’t cut much ice with non-party punters.
Above all, how galling Howard’s appeal to “individual liberty” on behalf of a party which, under Scott Morrison’s leadership, led, sanctioned, debt-funded, and enabled Australia’s world-beating tyranny of Covid days.
Back then, Howard was the hard ball Covid warrior yelling from the sidelines. He reckoned bosses were well within their rights to sack workers who were vaccine shy.
To give them, however, their due, both Costello and Abbott did have reservations about Covid overreach by State and Federal governments. Abbott even went so far as to suggest that the vax campaign might have compromised the right of individuals to make their own health decisions. But there was no ‘being there’ when we needed them. Neither then nor afterwards, did either Costello or Abbott provide sustained public leadership in defence of “personal liberty” as it came under assault from their own true-blue tribe. That was left to voices crying in the wilderness, like – to name but one unsung hero — that prophet in the park, Brady Gunn, about whom I wrote here.
Political creatures
Liberals would do better, then, to drop this “freedom” and “liberty” palaver. It’s unbecoming to keep saying stuff when your heart’s not in it. For all this invoking the autonomous individual as the highest end of Liberal striving, don’t expect a Liberal (Senator Antic aside) to stand resolute against the near and present menace of Labor’s vengeful purpose – after its defeat over the “Voice” — to herd social media debate into a Green-Left-Woke corral.
Our ruling class is relativist in moral code, cosmopolitan in culture, globalist in economics and colonial in foreign and defence policy.”
Now, I hope friends Primus and Secundus will forgive me if my summary of our conversations is too concise and unnuanced. But I got the impression that they reckoned there were few real conservatives left in the Liberal party. I think the case is worse than that. Beside a lack of conservatives, there are too few liberals left in Liberal Party.
The Menzian “broad tent” liberal-conservative party no longer exists. What defines it now? Of whom is it the political vehicle? Of well-healed, leafy suburban agents of big smoke board rooms? There’s a lot of that. Of capitalist entrepreneurs? There’s too few of the genuine article. Of small business owners? Who cares about them! Of corporatists? There are many. Liberals today are much like their opposite numbers on the Labor team with whom, in fact, they form a single class, albeit its snooty wing.
What holds this Lib-Lab crasstocracy together is relativism in moral code, cosmopolitanism in culture, globalism in economics and colonialism in foreign and defence policy.
Meanwhile, as sentiments begin to boil among our native born against mass immigration, out of reach house prices, soaring rents and failing, ideologically infected schools, voices of horror were heard from our Federal Parliament deploring this week the prospect that on August 31 people might march in protest at their country being turned into a multicultural performance space.
To wrap up, he’s my stab at a political program offered for the taking by any political party or rising movement.
1. Freeze immigration.
2. Formulate selective immigration principles to be activated when immigration is unfrozen.
3. End, in whatever form, all government support for, and encouragement of, multiculturalism.
4. Promote integration.
5. Abolish foreign ownership of freehold and leasehold property in Australia.
6. Education funding to follow parental choice of schools.
7. In the schools themselves, focus on reading (wide reading), writing, clear speech, dress and deportment. Self-respect, dignity in manners: these are more important than STEM.
8. End “Net Zero” and commit to providing secure, round the clock power, for households and industry by the most cost-efficient technologies available.
9. If necessary to achieve Point 8, renationalise power production and the energy grid.
There’s a lot more that we could add. Paul Kelly’s Liberal protogram can serve as a useful quarry. For now, however, let’s keep it simple.
We don’t believe you. We don’t trust you. We’ll take our country back.