Last weekend, while Scott Morrison ranted, the Liberal Party dissolved into the morning mist, according to Bob Ellis.
I WAS RIGHT, of course. Labor will now win in a landslide, and the Liberal Party dwindle. And it may not gain power, federally, again. And I always knew this, but I did not realise Rudd, rather than Carr or Shorten or Plibersek or Clare or Beazley or Gillard, would be the leader when it happened.
I knew it would happen on policy, and so it has occurred. I was the only commentator to think this, out of hundreds. I was the only backroomer, out of thousands. Why Labor people gave up the struggle, like Faulkner and Melham and Ferguson and five hundred sombre young people of my acquaintance, is a mystery to me.
It’s worthwhile saying what happened in the last five days. Morrison showed he was mad. He would rather drown children than save them. He would rather shoot refugees than hear their case, and he said so.
This utterance ruined the Liberal Party, maybe forever. It showed that on this, their core issue, they didn’t know what they were doing. Morrison was not sacked — nor was Julie Bishop, who contradicted him.
And a great sea-change occurred. Let me explain the reasoning of this.
I used to say that all couples ‒ and all married couples ‒ play, as long they are together, a single game. It’s ‘who’s the doctor and who’s the patient?’ Sometimes the woman is, and sometimes the man. Sometimes the relationship survives the changeover, sometimes not. Sometimes the changeover occurs many times.
This is easy enough to understand.
And Labor and Liberal have been playing this game too. And, for a long time, the Abbott Liberals were winning.
Labor was a neurotic mess and the Liberals ‒ the doctor ‒ would kindly assist them into the wilderness where they would heal them, hopefully, of their grievous wounds. They did, directly, with Thomson and Slipper. Poor men, they might self-harm. Maybe they should resign.
And now, after Morrison’s Tampa rant – hold off the heathen at gunpoint and if the low-bred Batavians won’t have them, then let there be war on their infidel country – it is clear that the Liberals are the patient, verging on madness, and Rudd and Carr and Clare and Burke ‒ who look like casualty surgeons ‒ will assist them, after sedation, into their necessary convalescence.
It is a game the Liberals now have lost, and Morrison was the trigger. They look crazy now, and everything they do – refusing the debate, demanding an election, now, now – which in other contexts would have seemed but a tactic, makes them look crazier still.
They are the patient, now, and Labor is the doctor, and they have lost the great game. And they have lost the future.
And the vote, as I have said, will be Labor on 56.8 per cent two party preferred. And this means a loss of twenty-three seats, including most of Queensland, and an upshot of Labor 100, Coalition 43, Green 1, Palmer 2, Katter 2 and Wilkie 1.
It’s partly because the ‘core’ Liberal vote is over seventy and dying every day. One died while you were reading this. And among the others, there is no sentimental need for the Liberal Party, as there is for Labor, and National, and Family First, and DLP, and Green.
And the Liberal Party can vanish like morning mist.
And, last weekend, while Morrison ranted, it began to.
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