The latest split in Australia’s conservative Coalition is yet another signal the old, established rules no longer apply.
No longer in Australia, just as they no longer apply in an ever more fractious and chaotic world.
The Old Order is breaking down and the New Order, under the quasi-leadership of the United States mogul king, appears to be causing chaos to divide and conquer.
A new and more stable structure will evolve over time after this current chapter of rending, destruction and bloodshed comes to a close. Will any good come of it? It remains to be seen.
The Ley line: Coalition split foreshadows the end of the Liberal Party
The Coalition split today, coming on a Day of National Mourning, will cause no great mourning for either side of politics, or the nation generally, in fact.
Because it is a long-established fact that the only political parties the Liberals and Nationals hate more than Labor are each other. To cause it an uneasy alliance is like calling Sussan Ley an ineffective Leader.
Stepping over the Ley line
Because accidental Liberal Party Leader Sussan Ley, who hastened the split by sacking three National Party MPs from cabinet on Wednesday night, is not merely ineffective. Uneasily assuming the mantle of leadership after extreme right-wing ghoul Peter Dutton scared voters away from the Liberal Party in panic and dread at the last Federal Election, Ley has carried on his work in her own particular way.
The way is to be wooden in posture, robotic in presentation, off-key in messaging and generally pursuing every political policy that seems most impractical or unpopular with voters.
In fact, when it comes to votes, Ley seems to be like Kryptonite to the Liberals, Australia’s most super-successful political party since Federation. The latest Newspoll numbers show the Liberals' primary vote support now down to a record low 21%, below One Nation at 22%. Under Ley, after the Coalition split, the Liberal Party is now, on those numbers, not even the leading Australian conservative force.
Pauline panic
Panic over One Nation’s sudden surge in support came in the frothy wake of former Nationals leader and famous raconteur Barnaby Joyce’s recent defection to that populous, anti-immigrant, Pauline Hanson-led Party.
Those factors were likely the main drivers behind the move by National Leader David Litteproud to tear up the Coalition partnership today. Far more than Sussan Ley in attempting to bully the National into voting Labor’s hasty and poorly considered response to the tragic recent ISIS-led international terrorist attack at Bondi.
Though this legislation’s headline legislation, an attempt to placate the powerful Zionist lobby’s demands, effectively outlaws anti-Israel protests against that nation’s prolific human rights abuses and war crimes against the people within its subject nation, Palestine.
Coalition immolation
Sadly, it seems the three Nationals ministers who crossed the floor and triggered the Coalition split did so not to protest against this obvious attack on the people's democratic right to protest, but rather to object to a further tightening of gun laws. A further restriction on the ability of people, such as the Bondi shooters, to obtain the weapons used to kill 15 innocent people at a public event.
The package of legislation, including the gun laws, ultimately passed in Parliament late Wednesday night, without the need for the votes of the three Nat rebels. Ironically, it was on the one piece in a controversial package of legislation designed to aid social cohesion. And perhaps the only bill in the package to which almost no decent, law-abiding Australian outside of the National Party’s rural pig-shooting base is likely to have the slightest objection.
It is a sign of Ley’s profound political naivete, rather than simply chastising the errant National MPs for exercising their democratic constitutional mandate to represent their electors, she sacked them from their portfolios and caused chaos. A more astute leader would have anticipated this would trigger the split that the Nationals were no doubt desperate to emerge.
On the other hand, the split was going to happen anyway. In the opinion of this publication, the Coalition is finished. This outdated post-WW2 alliance of conservative parties, set up by Menzies around the same time as Israel, at the behest of big business and with the express intention of keeping Labor from power, is in its death throes.
This has less to do with the spectacular maladministration of Ley, or even the woebegone succession of woeful Liberal leaders over the last two decades, but rather because the world has changed since 1945. What happens in Australia, or an incompetent leader or two, are trifling matters in comparison to the tectonic forces reshaping our world.
We are in similar times to those that led to the two World Wars. Pressure-cooker environments of massive global instability and a host of bad actors acting not for the common good but for personal gain.
Old World Order out
For instance, World War I was the final showdown between several old empires that had run out of lands to sequester. A New World Order, created by the Balfour Agreement (1917) and the Versailles Treaty (1919), which combined to casually and cursorily rewrite national borders and distributed the spoils of war.
World War II was the sequel of the first, as a beaten-down Germany resurging from a crippling Depression and still suffering the impost of swingeing reparations to the victorious nation, sought to regain lost pride and the lebensraum (living space) to which a devious demagogue persuaded they had been unfairly denied.
Right now, the massive growth in world population and increasing inequality and living standards between Western nations and the developing world have led to a massive flood of immigration from those nations. The reaction to this outpouring in the West has been the resurgence of extreme right-wing political parties using populist anti-immigrant rhetoric. It has led to Britain abandoning Europe in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
It has been capitalised upon by Trump, who has mischievously used this rhetoric to capture the support of an impoverished working poor, struggling through the ill-effects of late-stage crony capitalism and industrial decline. He has been illicitly supported by a former superpower, Russia, smarting from the loss of its Empire and led by another devious dictator, eager to retain lost glories, and is at war with Ukraine.
Trump's agent, whether wittingly or not, has threatened traditional American allies such as Canada and Denmark with U.S. military might to acquire their land. To Putin’s undoubted delight, the military alliance of the Western powers, NATO, is now on the brink of collapse.
So... now what?
Here in Australia, the rise of One Nation and the collapse of the Liberal Party can be equated to the collapse of the Conservative Party in Britain, which has now been superseded by Nigel Farage’s populist, anti-immigrant, far-right-wing UK First party. For those who think Pauline Hanson's increasingly more mainstream and better-organised party can not do the same thing to the Liberal Party here in Australia, think again.
The Old Order is dead and the Liberal Party may soon be, too. What comes in its place, who knows? But in the short term, the New Order is not likely to be as much fun as that band Albo apparently likes*.
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* No not New Order, Joy Division. New Order was created out of the sad breakup of the preceding Joy Division...
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