People say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If that is true, Australian Conservatives should be very flattered indeed.
Despite beginning with a standing start in February this year, it’s increasingly clear our principles are shining through and we are leading the policy agenda for the two major parties.
This past week alone has seen two glaring examples.
Firstly, Federal Labor took a page from the Australian Conservatives policy playbook and announced it as its own. The mouthpiece was Jason Clare on ABC radio which summarised his contribution thus:
Labor is announcing plans for … a 10-year review of all (free trade) agreements, to ensure they live up to the public’s expectations.
Here is the Australian Conservatives policy from our website:
We will revisit all free trade agreements every ten years to ensure they are aligned with our national interest.
Naturally we are happy to have injected a dose of common sense into the policy agenda for Labor but wonder why it took them over a century to reach a reasonable conclusion. We have been only operating for nine months!
We consider Labor’s copy-and-paste of our policy significant but can only describe as shameless the South Australian Liberals re-badging our Save Australia Day campaign.
Regular readers would know that we have been running an ongoing campaign to defend Australia Day from left-leaning councils running their divisive PC agenda over our national day of celebration.
In recent months we have run petitions, moved a motion in the parliament, taken on childhood-rejected Greens in Parliament on the issue and conducted an extensive social media campaign. Clearly it caught someone else’s attention because last week a carbon copy campaign was adopted by the South Australian Liberals.
Once again, I suppose we should be flattered but after sixteen years in opposition one would have expected them to have a few ideas of their own. Unfortunately for our State that doesn’t seem to be the case.
A couple of weeks ago they also adopted Australian Conservatives MLC Rob Brokenshire’s idea for a royalty for regions program – an idea they refused to support when Mr Brokenshire put it to a vote some years ago. This follows their week-long dithering and conflicting statements before deciding to follow our opposition to a state-based bank tax.
We are even slowly, agonisingly prising the Turnbull Coalition’s fingers off the Paris climate agreement. We will keep at it. Next week the globalists and green zealots will gather in Bonn for more economy-destroying folly, but a survey this week showed Australian Conservatives have been right all along because affordable and reliable energy is more important to Australians than stemming so-called global warming.
With all these sudden aberrant fits of conservatism from the major parties, I suppose we should be flattered.
Unfortunately flattery won’t get the country anywhere. We actually need politicians with the courage to instinctively and swiftly do and say what needs to be done and said, rather than play follow the real leader.
True leadership is sadly lacking at State and Federal level in both the major parties. They have delivered record debt, economic uncertainty and undermined our sense of national identity through their indulgence of identity politics. Even the ACCC has called out the economic folly of the NBN this week. It is time to bring an end to 10 chaotic years of ‘business as usual’.
Australian Conservatives will continue to show principled leadership on behalf of the country. If you’d like to join us and shape a better way please do so today.
Whether you become a member, an activist or a candidate, it would be good to have you with us.
Cory Bernardi is the author of seven books and has been a member of the Australian rowing team, a publican, an investment portfolio manager and spent nearly 14 years as an Australian Senator.
