And Off To Liberal La-La Land!

Oh ho! Game on! As previously noted here on Let’s Ask Elroy! ™, The Liberal Party of Australia (Our Right ruling pro-corporate elite), have swung into an ersatz election campaign where the blood is flowing freely; unfortunately for them the wounds that are a-gushing out the red corpsuckles are largely the result of the Liberals’ being kneecapped by their own WMD, but never mind – they have more important things to worry about.

The news for Liberals has only worsened since Elroy last gloated on the subject. The conflict-of-interest that wearied the Minister for Aging got very old very quickly for Prime Minister ‘Honest’ John Howard, and so Honest John indulged in a little involuntary euthanasia, but that did not staunch the flood of vital fluids the Libs are experiencing.

The poor old Libs just don’t seem to get it. The electorate is not entirely stupid, they know what is right and wrong, and they see Honest John’s elastic parliamentary ethics standards as further evidence of the Liberals’ blind hubris. The polls have the Australian Labor Party attaching 3,000,000 weather balloons to their electoral banana lounge while the Libs scrape gum off the tarmac with their teeth, and things just keep getting worse.

The LPA is out of office in all six states and two territories. Yesterday they lost the New South Wales state election to an ALP government who are next to useless because somehow the LPA manage to portray themselves as worse. That makes twenty-four state election losses on the trot since 1997, and there is no indication that they are going to get their state houses in order anytime soon. Indeed, the NSW branch seems to have be invaded by fundamentalist Christian body snatchers and other extreme right-wing nutbags, but unlike our pan-pacific pals the USA, the Australian voter views this kind of infiltration with great suspicion.

In another blow for the Libs this week, Kevin ‘That Nice man Mr.’ Rudd, leader of the ALP, has announced a decision to spend some dosh on a broadband roll out to make Australia’s broadband faster than that of Slovenia, but the knee-jerk reaction by the Libs has seen them on the losing end of that debate. Broadband 40 times faster? Everyone likes that – business, mums and dads, the kids – but the` LPA are left yelling ‘We need that money to fund civil service superannuation in 2020!” which is not the sexiest of looks, and boom! Suddenly the Liberals are no longer the party of capital investment.

Business and the middle-class (or more importantly those that aspire to be middle-class) are supposed to be the Libs mainstay – lose them and out go the lights – but they are starting to think, ‘Well, with all this cash that’s supposedly pouring from the China, why not buy something new?’ All those years of Treasurer Peter Costello comparing the national economy to a shopping list have backfired for the Libs, as the great unwashed now think ‘So if I need a fridge, and I can afford the fridge, I will buy the fridge’.

Actually. now they think “If I want a fridge, but can’t afford a fridge, I’m going to buy the fridge anyway", so if the money is in the bank, "I'm quids in – gimme a fucking fridge" is not that great a stretch. The population at large have never been encouraged to save; on the contrary, in order to maintain Honest John’s illusion of a happenin’ economy they been encouraged to borrow and spend like a dotcom in 1999, so their overall reaction to splashing out on shiny new broadband is ‘Cool!’.

So the Libs reign of error is soon to be over; the punters are in the mood for a bit of nation building and they are never going to vote for a PM that has professed his intention to quit after the fireworks, no matter what. Furthermore, the workplace relations laws that the LPA were never going to enact have been the last straw, education is a shambles, health is worse and, quite frankly, the people know that the Libs are only trying to hang onto Federal power because its all they have left.

So who will lead the Liberal Party into the wilderness? Costello, boy-wonder heir apparent? Nope. His time passed. He had an opportunity to stab Honest John in the back and squibbed it; forever tainted by the electoral demolition heading the Liberals’ way in 2007, he will be a victim of the bloodbath that occurs when the lid of the party room pressure cooker blows off after Honest John loses his seat of Bennelong.

Abbot will be gone for the same reason, so who? Julie Bishop? Brendan Nelson? In the short term it doesn’t really matter; Elroy thinks Honest John has a small dog that could do the job while the Libs rip each other apart, crawl to casualty and spend some years in rehab because when they go trotting off to Liberal la-la land they won’t be back for a while.

However, when they do return to power, which they will, some day, sadly, Elroy knows who will be at the helm. It is debatable whether they will even still be called the Liberal Party of Australia, so savage will be the pogrom of purge and self-flagellation, but the identity of their leader is in no doubt. The man Honest John keeps closer than his bestest friend, the man that tried to buy the Presidency, the man that bought a seat in Parliament and the man that will buy to the keys to Kirribilli, the bankers’ buddy, the corporate confidante, ladies and gentlemen…presenting the first Prime Minister for the Australian Republican Party…I give you Mr. Malcolm Turnbull and may God, whatever it is, have mercy on our wretched souls.

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It seems that the Liberals have just found bigger, brighter, quicker, cheaper, faster Broadband policy down the back off the couch! Stay tuned for more!