Cast a weary eye over what passes for today’s supposedly conservative politicians and you could be forgiven for thinking that the lot of them make Paul Keating or Bob Hawke look like conservative icons. Or that by some cosmic fluke all of these ‘Libs in name only’ were born with that very rare condition spina absentia – the complete and total lack of any backbone, giving rise to an inability to stand up for any principles whatsoever. On occasion this ailment can even progress to the stage where the sufferer holds no core principles at all, certainly no conservative ones. Sadly, the result might be that the victim does not believe in the presumption of innocence, say, and thereby feels inclined to comment willy-nilly at the first hint of a Twitter-induced bit of outrage. Or it might lead the patient to find big spending and big government much more appetising than small government and individual choice. Any commitment to free speech will likely go too. The sufferer probably won’t even be able to condemn those who impose the worst inroads on our civil liberties in over two hundred years. Heck, he might even congratulate them on a job well done and write them untold numbers of cheques to help them along. And as for fighting the culture wars and taking on wokesters and militant progressives in the universities, on the corporate boards and throughout the public service and public broadcaster, well, you can’t fight without a backbone can you?
Still,…
