Well, bugger me: there’s signs of life in even the wettest Liberal party state branches. In a stunning blow to the ‘moderates’ who’ve been dragging the party into the toxic blue-green sludge of irrelevance for years, the South Australian Liberals have formally dumped allegiance to the ‘Net Zero’ madness. Naturally, the soggy, spineless ‘moderates’ are shaking their jelly-like fists in impotent fury.
There’s still a long way to go, though, to rebuild the party’s appeal to the centre-right base it’s so relentlessly alienated for years.
The motion means there are now effectively three climate positions on offer from the Liberals in SA – the federal party reviewing net zero, the SA parliamentary party supporting net zero, the SA Liberal division opposing net zero.
Under the stewardship of rising star Alex Antic, conservatives have retaken control of the SA state branch. There’s still a leftover rump of ‘moderates’ in parliament, which will take at least another electoral cycle of preselections and elections to clear out. But SA, at least, is on the road back.
To fire up the moderates even further, Senator Antic tweeted a video of President Donald Trump on Monday, jokingly captioned: “President Trump when asked about the SA Liberal Party rejecting Net Zero on the weekend.”
In the video, Mr Trump says: “We’re going to win so much you may even get tired of winning! You might say Mr President, please, no more winning!”
The result caught the wet ‘moderates’ on the hop. Many had scheduled radio interviews to attack the motion to no longer recognise the net zero target. Interviews they had to pull out of at the last minute, when it became clear they were at odds with their own rank and file.
Senator Antic told the Australian he was buoyed by the result at state council, saying it should help force a rethink of the nation’s commitment to net zero.
“Australia’s energy policy has got to be more sophisticated than simply adopting a slogan concocted by globalist bureaucrats more than a decade ago,” he said. “Net zero is a threat to our economy, our security and to our country, and I was very heartened by the decision by the South Australian Liberal Party membership to call for it to be scrapped.”
As their electricity bills keep soaring, and blackouts keep proliferating, this is exactly what a great many Australians doing it tough in the suburbs want to hear. Even if the ‘moderates’ are determined to stick their fingers in their ears and chant ‘la, la, la, la’.
Upper house MLC Michelle Lensink, who served as human services minister in the Marshall government, made her disapproval clear in a memo she sent to the SA Liberal partyroom’s app […]
“Let’s break this down. Some people within the Liberal Party decided that it would be a good idea to pass policy motions, among other things, opposing net zero, after:
“One, we have just suffered a massive election loss in which the entire federal policy platform clearly didn’t resonate with voters.
A policy platform, sooky-la-la Lensink apparently needs reminded, that included backing the ‘Net Zero’ lunacy. She followed up that little sulk with this spectacular exercise in un-self-awareness:
Ms Lensink then unloaded on the right’s behaviour now it has control of the party. “I have formed the view that there are elements in our party who are so ideological, that they refuse to see that their rigid adherence to their views at all costs is part of the problem.
Does that include rigid adherence to the dangerous nonsense of ‘Net Zero’? Or is it only ‘ideological’ when it’s someone else’s ideology? How’s running along behind the green-left, chirping, ‘Us, too!’ working out for you?
For the first time in more than a century, the SA Liberals lost not one but two seats to Labor at by-elections last year. It was the first time since the 1910s that a SA government had won a seat from an opposition at a by-election.
That’s under the ‘moderates’ rule – but, sure, the problem is everybody else.
There were other motions the conservatives intended to put that would have banned transgender sex education in schools and abolished the SA voice to parliament, but they were not successful.
There’s still a way to go, clearly, before the SA Liberals are electable again. Still, baby steps.
