Weaponising fear is an age-old tradition for the Liberal Party

Fear-driven politics aimed at ageing voters has long been the strategy of Australia's Liberal Party, writes Ben Laycock.

OUR POPULATION IS getting older.

This is an existential problem for a political party that relies on the elderly for political survival, like the Liberal Party, for example.

Old people generally don’t live as long as young people. All too soon, they become too old to vote, having ceased to exist. Then they must be replaced by a fresh batch of newly old people.

We tend to suffer from increasing anxiety as we age. It behoves the Liberal party to add substance to this vague and nebulous anxiety. Potential recruits must be inculcated into the lexicon of fears.

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Robert Menzies (or "Pig Iron Bob" as my dad used to call him) began his tenure as Australia’s longest-serving Prime Minister in 1949, just after that awful war. A war won decisively by the Soviet Union, with a little help from their friends/enemies. Communism was taking the world by storm. Well, not if Bob was going to have anything to do with it.

The astute Mr Menzies instituted a deep and abiding fear of Communism – 'Reds under the beds'. It worked a treat. His campaign split the Labor Party asunder and kept the Liberals in power for 23 years. The reign was only broken by former Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1972.

By then, the fear of Australia becoming a Communist dictatorship was wearing a bit thin. The Libs couldn’t even maintain a fear of the yellow hordes sweeping down from the North (via Vietnam, of course).

It was time to generate a whole new set of freshly minted fears: Fear of "women’s lib", fear of promiscuity (after the pill became freely available), fear of "the permissive society", fear of those weird psychedelic drugs the young people were taking, fear of young people themselves, who were not doing what they were told.

Not forgetting of course, the perennial fears that feed the anxiety of the elderly, fears nurtured and maintained to this day: Fear of drugs, fear of strangers from far off lands, fear of Aborigines, fear of "sexual deviants", fear of crime, fear of children who commit crime, fear of children who might commit a crime, fear of children who look like they might commit a crime.

Fear, it’s a winner — just ask Opposition Leader Peter Dutton… or Pig Iron Bob.

"Pig iron" was the nickname for iron ore way back when Menzies was selling shit loads of the stuff to the Japanese, of all people, almost right up until the moment war began. The crafty Japanese turned our pig iron into ships and planes designed especially for surprise visits to Australia — unannounced, uninvited, unwelcome visits. They returned much of our pig iron in the form of bombs.

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After languishing at the bottom of Darwin Harbour for many years, making excellent fish habitat, the Japanese kindly offered to remove all those rusty old ships and planes. They were becoming a hazard for the giant cargo vessels delivering goods to the now-thriving metropolis of Darwin, including quite a lot of stuff from Japan, like Toyotas.

Ironically enough, some of those Toyotas were made from the very pig iron we sent them so long ago. No doubt, after the Toyotas have become rusting hulks on the side of the road for a few years, our Japanese friends will kindly offer to take them back and turn them into something useful again, as is their want. Let’s hope they don’t come back in the form of bombs.

As luck would have it, we have found yet another thriving market for our iron ore — China.

Have a guess what China is making with it.