What has happened to the Liberal Party is what happens when you’re not paying attention to what’s going on.
The passive and in some cases, active smoking by the Liberals of soft, left of centre ideology spells the end of the road for the centre right, conservative party of Menzies and Howard because when the events of the last ten days are played out, the like minded Labor lite, Turnbull acolytes will still be there.
The traditional Liberal Party with its lurch to the left under Turnbull is now unrecognisable, leaving Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives with its unambiguous, unequivocal, branding as the only game in town.
You can only get away with the John Howard broad church idea for so long because sooner or later, as Richo says, “the mob will eventually work you out,” and they have. You actually have to come down on one side of an issue or another. The all accommodating broad church concept worked for quite a while but it was always a temporary fix to a difficult question. It was short term and shorthand for not really standing for anything much at all.
As with the inhalation of cigarette smoke over decades, the Liberal Party is now dealing with the consequences of it’s recklessness and foolhardiness as they succumb to the insidious metastasising cancer of branch stacking and number crunching.
At the end of the day the Liberals are just another of Antonio Gramci’s institutions to be successfully hijacked, recast and marched through.