Merve Bendle in Quadrant doesn’t miss in his assessment of the Liberals and the endorsed candidate in Mackellar (and the reason I’m running) Jason Falinski
“….Nothing has made this progressivist onslaught on the political system more obvious than recent Liberal Party preselections, especially in New South Wales. For example, Turnbull strongly supported Jason Falinski, the moderate (i.e., progressivist) faction candidate selected to replace the conservative Bronwyn Bishop in the safe northern beaches seat of Mackellar. Falinski is a long-term Liberal Party apparatchik who worked for Turnbull in 2004 and helped him wrest preselection from a sitting Liberal MP in Wentworth.
Predictably, Falinski is a long-time champion of progressivist causes, including SSM, open borders, the Muslim insurgency, and climate change hysteria. He views the latter issue as quite totemic and claims he was compelled to act by a visit to China where he experienced its high levels of smog, apparently unaware that particulant pollution has virtually nothing to do with the CO2 emissions allegedly driving global warming.
As the Daily Telegraph reported, Falinski’s “views [are] right out of left field”. He has criticized the Howard government for being “too right wing”, former US president George W. Bush for not sufficiently emphasizing climate change, and declared that a massive influx of illegal refugees would improve Australia’s economy. Indeed,
“Mr Falinski wrote multiple columns for the left-wing Saturday Paper criticising the Howard administration’s approach to asylum seekers as ‘inhumane’ and declared voters had turned away from the Liberal Party ‘because of its populist right-wing stance’.”
The grass roots conservative reaction to Falinski’s pre-selection has been visceral. As one blogger claimed:
“The Libs have gone rogue. Gone right off the reservation. The Daily Telegraph‘s Samantha Maiden said on Sunday night on Chris Kenny’s Viewpoint program that (paraphrasing) ‘…Falsinki was the closest thing the Liberals have to a communist…’”
As the Daily Telegraph editorialized, “Falinski [is] not in Bishop’s mould”; rather, he has “more in common with those on the Left who cheered Bishop’s removal….”