Published in the Spectator 6 October 2022

There often comes a time when a friend has to put his arm around a mate who is behaving badly and ask what’s going on. The Liberal Party and I had such a moment on Sunday during my speech at CPAC.

The Liberal Party seemed to consider CPAC as an opportunity to restore their conservative credentials and engage in a membership drive to the exclusion of other conservative parties, including One Nation.

The Liberals were staking their claim to an unearned (and undeserved) conservative voting ground. It was for this reason that I changed my speech on Sunday morning to start a conversation on what should be expected of a conservative politician.

CPAC was an amazing event, I congratulate the organisers for all their hard work.

While the speakers on the stage were excellent, what was even better was the full and frank conversation I had with attendees representing the full spectrum of conservative thought.

My speech condensed the advice I received from attendees into a six-minute critique of the Liberal Party.

On Saturday morning, the Outsiders panel with Spectator Australia editor Rowan Dean and fellow Sky News Australia co-hosts Rita Panahi and James Morrow declared Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Katherine Deves as Australia’s bravest women. I absolutely agree that Jacinta and Katherine are brave, intelligent, and strong women. Amazing women. Each is a credit to the conservative movement.

However, they are not Australia’s bravest women. That title has gone to Pauline Hanson for the last 25 years.

Pauline has fought the very battles frequently mentioned during CPAC – those battles to protect family, community, Christianity, Australia’s borders, the Indigenous industry, our flag, veterans, and way of life from predatory political ideologies.

It is ironic that the omnipresent party at CPAC was the same party that sent Pauline to jail to shut her up – the Liberal Party.

After being released and exonerated, Pauline put aside her time as Australia’s first political prisoner to lead One Nation in the fight for conservative values.

This should never be forgotten, especially with the release of a new national anti-corruption body lacking in checks and balances One Nation expected to be there.

In this last Parliament, Australia’s Covid response asked many questions of our elected leaders. Questions like:

What happened to my body my choice?

What happened to the vaccine approval process?

What happened to freedom of movement and freedom of association?

What happened to the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship?

What happened to free speech?

And how could a virus infect you in a small business, but not in a big business?

One Nation went to this last election defending conservative values and fighting for your freedom.

Senator Ralph Babet and the UAP were also there defending your freedom. The Liberal Democrats were there standing up against the genuinely evil Daniel Andrews regime in Victoria. Commentator and documentary filmmaker Topher Field was arrested for his courage and went on to produce the award-winning documentary Battleground Melbourne that I urge all Australians to watch.

What did the Liberal Party, which is now asking for your support, do in the last election? They chose to preference the Labor Party ahead of One Nation in many races, in the end delivering the Senate to the ALP.

And why was Peter Dutton and the Senior Liberal Party leadership absent from CPAC if conservatism is written large in the DNA of the Liberal Party?

Former Prime Ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott prepared messages, so why not members of the Liberal Party leadership who hold power? Why are they hiding from conservatives?

Attendees at CPAC want to see the Liberals rediscover their roots in true liberalism, although it would be unbelievable if the Liberals achieved that task in a single weekend. It could be argued that their performance over the weekend and subsequent defence of it has worsened their position within the conservative movement.

Many Liberal Party voters believe that the party quite simply sold Australia out.

‘You betrayed us!’ echoed from the crowd at one point, amid boos after some in the party misread the sentiment of the room. To those on stage who insisted that the behaviour of the Liberals was ‘not as bad as Labor’, we ask:

Who was it that locked Western Sydney residents into their homes and put troops on the streets to keep them there – that was the Liberal Berejiklian government.

Who closed their state off to the rest of Australia, imposed business closures, restricted movement, and forced medical mandates on their citizens – that was the Liberal Marshall government.

Who changed the rules to allow emergency health orders under the Biosecurity Act, and then tore up the vaccine approval rule book, while sharing the vaccine status of citizens with anyone who wanted to see it?

That was the Liberal Morrison government.

With the benefit of hindsight, we know the measures taken by the old parties, including the so-called conservative Liberal and National parties, were wrong and probably resulted in more loss of life than if the virus had been treated as a flu.

Australian Actuarial Data shows for the 3 months to March 2022 deaths from respiratory diseases, including Covid, the flu, and pneumonia were 7 per cent lower than the long-term average.

Put simply, Covid is now less deadly than the flu, based on overall deaths.

What that actuarial data also showed was that deaths from heart disease were up 10 per cent, Cerebrovascular disease was up 5 per cent, and Australia’s death rate overall is 13 per cent above the expected rate – all this despite respiratory deaths being 7 per cent down.

Why are deaths spiking?

There never was a firm or consensus medical basis for the measures that were taken by the Federal Liberal Party, and State Liberal Party governments in New South Wales and South Australia – but they did it anyway.

We must have a Royal Commission to get to the bottom of all of this.

If the Liberal Party want their supporters to ‘hold the line’, as we heard during CPAC, then they need to change their leadership, change their policies, apologise for their failures, and start over.

At CPAC, I also heard a speaker in favour of retaining the two-party system of government.

I do not agree.

It was not a two-party system that delivered conservatives a victory in Italy, that was a multi-party coalition.

It was not a two-party system that delivered conservatives to government in Sweden, that was a multi-party coalition.

While Brexit did deliver the first black eye to the globalists as another speaker mentioned, the conservatives did not do that. Nigel Farage did that, working outside of the establishment parties.

And it was not the Republicans that won the Presidency in 2016, it was Donald Trump.

It will not be the Republicans that regain Congress in a month, it will be Donald Trump and his Maga movement.

And they will retake Congress over the dead body of establishment republicans.

Can a unified conservative movement achieve more than a disunited movement?

Of course it can.

That is why all these decent, everyday Australians came to CPAC. They were there to make a difference.

We are people from all parties, united in the desire to defend conservative values. We can win this fight. Just as victory in two world wars was not any nation’s alone, rather, nations came together, allied in a single cause, to defend against evil and create a future that protects freedom, family, and abundance.

After a long period of peace and prosperity, those who seek to take everything and leave us with nothing are in the ascendency.

We have been at rest too long, my friends.

We are in a war against neo-paganism masquerading as Wokeism.

We do not need to be one party to triumph over evil, but we must be one community. We must be united, we must be resolute and most importantly, we must start today.

There is no need for a single conservative party, especially not one as arrogant and out of touch as the Liberal Party.

There is however a pressing need for conservative allies to unite, and fight side by side with a clarity of mind and purpose.

And so I implore all conservatives, now is the time, as Shakespeare said so eloquently, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.’