This is from Quadrant Magazine from March this year. But so full of hubris was Turnbull, knowing better than everyone else and the smartest guy in the room, that he took absolutely no notice.
“….Beware the sleeping giant! Beware the somnolent rage of conservative Australia! That’s what Malcolm Turnbull should be thinking about as he and his advisors consider their options for an early election and a double dissolution. At present they are watching the Coalition poll numbers plummet, to the point where their party is neck-and-neck with the ALP on a preferred-party basis. This is an astonishing result, given the deplorable status of Bill Shorten as preferred PM, the lack of any significantly popular high profile ALP figures, the ALP’s proven economic ineptitude, and the growing public awareness of the frightening control exercised over the ALP by the CFMEU and other rogue unions at both state and federal levels. Conservatives ‘Don’t Matter’. Really? In fact, the progressivist elite running this country into the ground, for which Turnbull serves as increasingly inept front man, may have overplayed its hand as it relentlessly pursues its reckless drive to transform Australia into a progressivist utopia.
Predictably, this progressivist capitulation and accompanying grandstanding is driving conservative and moderate voters away from the Liberal Party and the political centre. However, they are not shifting to the left as the progressivists would prefer, but to the right where they were supposed to have nowhere to go, as Turnbull and his advisors so arrogantly insisted when he seized power. These power brokers decided that the loss by a Turnbull-led Liberal Party of disgruntled conservatives outraged by its wanton progressivism will be outweighed by its appeal as a more moderate party to swinging voters. As Liberal pollster Mark Textor contemptuously observed about conservative voters:
“The qualitative evidence is they don’t matter,’’ Mr Textor said. “The sum of a more centrist approach outweighs any alleged marginal loss of so-called base voters. (emphasis added)