The Liberal Party is Dead
buckle up for the New Mutants
*BONG BONG BONG*
The bell rings out across the village square. The townsfolk step out of their homes, huts, and hovels, and gather there, muttering. A portly man, clearly from The Capital, stands on the oft-used gallows pole and unfolds a scroll: “HARK, GOODLY PEAT PEDDLERS! AN ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE PANEL OF SAGES!” *clears throat* “THE LIBERAL PARTY…IS SLAIN!”
A murmur runs through the townsfolk that soon turns to exuberant cheering, whooping, and rutting in the mud. Two local real estate agents shake hands, fill their pockets with rocks, and walk into the nearby lake. The innkeeper curses himself for spending so much coin on his new signage: THE NUCLEAR ARMS is now a deeply stupid name. The local Teal candidate winks at the gangrenous pauper, says “well, looks like my job here is done,” before transforming into an e-scooter and flying off into the setting sun.
Tomorrow is tomorrow’s concern. Tonight, the mead will flow freely. For tonight, the free folk are truly, for the first time in their lives, free.
*BONG*
I hope you enjoyed that extract from working class polymath Van Badham’s upcoming fantasy novel, THE BLADE OF THE BRANCH STACKER - BOOK 1: Humphrey’s Red Wedding, which is dropping via Black Inc. this August. I made a cool $35 selling her what remains of my Vyvanse on Saturday night, and she knocked this 891 page gem out in under 19 hours. Not a bad innings, considering her disadvantages.
And hell, even I can forgive Van her giddiness. What we don’t share in taste (I like things that are good/smart), we do share in enemies, for I, too, was raised to hate The Liberal Party the way the IDF’s child soldiers are raised to hate, well, children. Despite the fact that an Albanese government excites me about as much as another ABC quiz show, I love watching LNP goon-gooners suck shit and die — especially Peter Dutton, who is, perhaps impossibly, one of the worst to ever do it (I fear ScoMo will never be pipped).
Now is the time of retrials and recriminations. What remains of the Liberal party’s elite are gathering in the den where they drain street urchins of their bone marrow, throwing bird innards against the wall in hopes that the patterns will reveal to them an answer to those inscrutable riddles “were we too woke?” and “should we let women talk?” and “which flags piss me off, specifically?”
Every level-headed political commentator is arriving at a polite version of a point YNR made over a month ago: Peter Dutton is a hugely off-putting fucking freak, and folks hate that. Yes, it’s very easy to blame this very strange man for running a very bad campaign that made very normal people go “huh?” and “what the fuck are you on about?” and “you’re going to sack 45,000 people…really?” over and over and over again, day in and day out, for every week of what was an excruciatingly limpdick and embarrassing campaign for all involved – including the Prime Minister.
As Paul Kelly and the other nonce-loving (hey remember Cardinal Pell and Alan Jones?) neo-Nazi port and fart huffers at the Murdoch-Moloch Empire yet again come to terms with the fact that they are deeply out of touch hysterics who most people would cross the street to avoid, I expect we will not see a sudden pivot to self-awareness from any of them, or their fluffers. Australia’s conservative media (that’s 90% of it) has become a megalithic safe space/goon cave for about 50 or so unserious cretins and grifters who are about as smart as they aren’t degenerate, and Dutton’s insistence on only blasting loads in the padded cells of their losertorium left him vulnerable to the most basic of questions from journalists and punters alike, namely: “hey man, what the fuck’s wrong with you?” A question he could never, ever, answer.
The joke is, quite hilariously, that this is a question that the Liberal Party et al is incapable of answering. Their vibes are beyond rancid, and, as their equivocating and panicky counter-attacks proved when pressed as to why they suck so much on election night, they can not face the beast they’ve become in the mirror lest it reach out and throttle them — something they don’t want, certain members’ kinks aside.
The easy answers are they got too cooked with the quasi-fascism and ‘culture war’ malarky, turning themselves into a party of 4chan incel youtuber types who seem like they’d send questionable DMs to their young fanbase. This is being treated in the media as a recent pivot, which is wrong. For decades now, The Liberal Party has consistently catered to this particular type of loser, who has arrived in many forms over the years (call back radio crank-yanker, letter-to-the-editor silicon sex-doll enthusiast, wildly homophobic deeply closeted gay man who dogs in the late night screenings of Shrek 2 etc). This has been their base for a long time. This is who they are, and perhaps who they always have been.
What we are being made to witness now is not a Mishima-style bungled seppuku-post-failed-fascist-coup-attempt, but rather the inevitable population collapse that comes after decades of ideological/literal inbreeding — the sort of inbreeding which was baked into the party’s DNA by Menzies himself.
The problem rich boy clubs everywhere have faced since time immemorial is that there’s always gonna be more of them than there is of us. Now, sure, you can let in the odd embittered closet-queen, the occasional Valium-dependant harpy, and every now and again, a mean spirited Taiwanese dentist type etc., but ultimately, what you’re left with is an exclusive paddle-pool for the in-crowd’s in-crowd, where the Good Ol’ Boys gather to settle grudges they’ve held since their Grammar school first put them in kilts.
The Liberal Party is, by design, as diverse as a Johannesburg country club. This is its appeal, though mainly for a certain strain of acolyte and aspirant that themselves are as appealing as Clive Palmer’s neck wattle. If you’ve ever had the ill-luck to run into a student politician, you’ll know that the LNP courts a cross between American Psycho-coded date rapists and the wheelie-bag bow-tie contingent (these often get bullied out of the party and go on to work at one of our sterling national newspapers, where they get to tell the LNP what to do). A major issue here is that the young ‘talent’ that makes up the party’s future are the sorts of people who’ve been raised to believe they are innately more intelligent and likeable than just about everyone else on Earth, while in reality being as smart and charismatic as a school-shooter who trips on their untied shoelaces and only succeeds in blowing their right ear off.
Because our private schools solely produce people as servile as they are sinister, this new wave of failure is determinedly bound around the Liberal Party’s very essence. It is intractable. The societal stratification that they themselves created is now a noose around their neck, as they shuffle through a series of Al Jolson style schtick and riffs to delay the hangman’s inevitable pull of the drop lever. It’d be a sorry sight, if they weren’t the most detestable cunts going.
This Hapsburgian collapse can not be rewound. And like the Hapsburgs, they are only going to get more and more munted, until their jaw lines run parallel to their molars. Poor John Howard is looking out a hall of corpses like OzPol’s Walder Fray — the last of his mutoid sons, slain — poisoned by his own blood.
The last few days, I’ve watched a series of sensible centrists and commentariat-types wonder aloud as to whether the LNP has finally learned its lesson — as if this defeat will ‘snap them out of it’ and lead them back to the (black) light. What they forget is you are dealing with people who’ve only ever asked “have we learned our lesson?” to maids, waiters, and gimps — never ever themselves. If they learn anything, it’ll stem from the confirmation of what they’ve always suspected: The Australian people are useless and stupid bullies, who need to be whipped into shape.
Besides, it’s the wrong question to be asking — like pondering if your dead grand-uncle is going to finally take up line dancing. The Liberal Party is officially over. What emerges over the next decade, be it under the same name or another, will be wholly new and grotesque beyond even the sharpest political analyst’s comprehension: a fasci-Brundle Fly of indeterminate provenience, recognisable only to those of us who have always seen these creeps and monsters as creeps and monsters.
To quote George Christensen’s “assistant”: strap in, and buckle up — things are about to get real weird.
