They’re Not Paying for More of This

The way to a politician’s head is through his pocket. If the shocking collapse of their voter base at last weekend’s election doesn’t get the message through to the coalition, maybe their donors walking away will. If traditional centre-right voters are sick of seeing their party turn into a quivering mess of spineless, ‘moderate’, wannabe-green lettuce leaves, party donors are even more fed up with bankrolling it.

Top Liberal Party donors are pulling their financial support for the party, blaming the combination of a disorganised election campaign and Peter Dutton’s Labor-lite policy platform, saying without early wholesale changes they won’t be giving in three years’ time.

Good luck with that. We’ve already seen how hard the Victorian branch of the Liberal party is determined not to be told, even after the absolute debacle of John Pesutto’s leadership. Indeed, the ‘moderates’ running the Victorian branch are so arrogantly determined to keep on failing that they’re actually suing a policy fund for not bailing Pesutto out of his self-inflicted defo loss against conservative Moira Deeming.

Their federal donors are trying to finally hammer the message home in the only way a politician knows: money.

Amid private and public bloodletting in Liberal Party ranks, billionaire Robert Millner, chairman of investment house Washington H Soul Pattinson, said he would not be donating again until there was major change. Soul Patts has in the past donated more than $1m to the federal Liberal Party.

“It’s been a disaster. I will be ­seriously thinking about whether I ever donate again,” he said.

The money guys are pointing out exactly what I have: the campaign was the worst we’ve ever seen.

I don’t know where they go to from now. It was a very poor campaign. There were too many mixed messages. They didn’t convince voters that (Labor’s) spending billions on renewables is a bad idea. The Libs have to change their way of thinking and get more of the swing voters.

They’re also trying to drive home the other obvious point: conservatives only win when they have the guts to actually be conservative. Tony Abbott didn’t nearly knock Labor into one-term status, then go on to a landslide win, by being a pale, blue-green imitation of Labor.

Stockbroker Angus Aitken – one of the largest Liberal donors – said leaders simply lacked courage for bolder policies that would have had more impact. Mr Aitken donated $250,000 to the federal Liberal Party this year and has donated hundreds of thousands over previous years.

“I have zero interest in donating further to the Liberals. They need a wholesale clear out and to work out what they want to stand for, instead of these me-too style quasi-Labor policies,” he said.

“To not do well against those poor outcomes Labor has generated is astounding but the lack of policies from the Liberal Party was completely hopeless.

A good start would be to stop listening to Millennial staffers who think scrolling their Instagram feed is ‘research’. Never forget that Brittany Higgins was a Liberal party staffer.

Wet-behind-the-ears staffers can wave their social media accounts around all they like, the numbers don’t lie. The coalition did best when it stood up to the elite orthodoxies, as it did with the Voice referendum. Not coincidentally, there were strong swings against Labor in the seats that most strongly voted against the referendum.

Multiple major employers and senior business people tried to help and the advice and offers to help were rebuffed as the internal staffers clearly thought they knew better than people that employ tens of thousands of Australians.

Ludicrously, at the same time they were falling over themselves to imitate Labor’s endless handouts, the coalition was trying to run on their traditional image of ‘better economic managers’. Voters saw right through the charade: this was not the party of John Howard and Peter Costello.

If it was, they might start winning again.

The bottom line is, you can’t be all things to everyone. You can’t pander to the inner-city bourgeoisie and doctor’s wives, who have the luxury of fretting over climate change, and the Struggle Street mortgage holders who are being belted by interest rates, grocery prices and energy bills. You have to pick a side, you idiots – and it’s not the side that’s already wedded itself to green virtue-signalling. The latte lefties in the fashionable suburbs aren’t going to bother voting for a pale imitation of Labor and the Greens when they can vote for the real thing.

Jason Titman, the chief executive of crypto company Swyftx which donated tens of thousands of dollars to both parties pushing for better regulations and resistance to Labor’s unrealised capital gains tax, said the coalition had tried to please everyone and ended-up pleasing no one.

“A lot of their policies were similar to what was being offered by Labor. I believe an important area for them to campaign on over the next three years is to make voters aware that Labor’s proposal of taxing unrealised capital gains is counter-productive to growing the Australian economy and it will have a negative impact on productivity growth, the health of investment in Australia and the wealth of millions of Australians,” Mr Titman said.

That’s one minor consolation, at least: the schadenfreude of watching as Labor’s taxing of unrealised capital gains gouges the wealthy, tilty-headed ninnies clutching their pearls over ‘climate change’. Once it hits their hip pockets, they’ll dump Labor faster than a Ponsonby manbun trading in his Tesla.

Small amusements such as those might see us through the next three years.