In a speech given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on December 8th, 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, he declared the day of that attack “A date which will live in infamy”.

This quote could easily be applied to the Federal Parliament of Australia after the events that occurred on the 29th of November 2024.  A day when our politicians removed basic fundamental rights of younger Australians while laying the groundwork for a future Digital ID for all Australians at a later date.

The disastrous state of Australian politics was on full display for the world to see.

It was a day when our politicians rammed through thirty-two legislative bills using a political method called a guillotine. This ensures the normal lengthy debate and scrutiny applied to such bills is impossible.  These bills included the one removing the social media freedoms of our youngest citizens which was allocated only sixty minutes for debate. Our narcissistic politicians spent more time extolling themselves with self-congratulating speeches about their own political careers and accomplishments, and they engaged in willful ignorance of the lobbying efforts of the people they were elected to represent.  A lobbying effort they called for from the Australian public who responded with fifteen thousand submissions, most of which will never be read.

Their disdain for us just went on and on and I could write an encyclopedic edition for all the failures of our political and bureaucratic elite across my lifetime. On Friday the 29th of November 2024, our political elite trashed our democracy, it was a day of infamy in Australian political history that should disgust us all.

Those same politicians have managed to take a great nation built by our forebears, a nation that is filled with natural resources that is the envy of the world and should make this country and its citizens abundantly rich, a nation that had been welcoming to people from across the globe and a wide variety of cultures. A nation built on Christian and Western values

Instead of continuing to build on this heritage that they had inherited, they have instead chosen to focus on woke issues of no substance, they have destroyed our economic and industrial base due to a con that no person with rational thought would believe in, and they have demonised our forebears by accusing them of all sorts of horrendous sins to justify an agenda of some that modern Australia was built on a racist past.

These are just three of the areas of political dogma and ideology that our politicians veer off into despite no mandate from the Australian public to do so. Once more, I could write several volumes on similar instances from our political class, but I don’t want to bore you as I would prefer to move on to solutions rather than the problems the nefarious deeds of our political and bureaucratic elite present us.

To see the obvious flaws within our political system requires a person to take a deeper look into it than what our legacy media will provide for us. To awaken to the depths of the deceit, corruption and malevolence that exist within our parliaments and bureaucracies you need to look elsewhere for other sources and when you do that, a disgust with it all quickly develops.

For me, my scepticism started to develop after no weapons of mass destruction were discovered in the Iraq war and from that point onwards it just increased. In 2015 it just imploded when Tony Abbott was brought down as our Prime Minister by Malcolm Turnbull and his acolytes. Through this as a member of the conservative Liberal base, I had my voting intention taken from me and the policy platform that I had supported was kidnapped by people I simply could never trust. The path that I had supported for this nation had been sabotaged and it has continued that way to this day.

I know many of us feel this way and our trust in both politicians and our very democracy has declined considerably.

The Liberal party that once had stood for nation-building, stronger families, the rights and liberties of individuals, the power of business, self-enterprise and entrepreneurship descended on a journey of decline into what some may describe as a form of modern capitalistic socialism. I simply call it bare-knuckled stupidity.

Like most former members of the Liberal base, I have been waiting for them to return to their traditional position on the political landscape, namely the common sense centre outlined above. Instead, we had to tolerate Turnbull and then Morrison as Prime Ministers and now we have had to witness our last hope in Peter Dutton mutate into a digital control freak. The may we hoped would lead the party back to its common sense Menzies roots has instead embraced totalitarian tendencies while ignoring basic Liberal concepts such as individual liberties, small government and a free exchange of speech and opinion.

Whatever you may have thought of Dutton, he has demonstrated in my opinion that with his full support of the Under 16 ban from social media that he is unfit to be the leader of this nation. Any person who favours oppression and control over freedom and liberty immediately disqualifies themselves as a candidate to be a leader of what is considered a Western Democratic nation.

I have now come to the point that the Liberal Party needs a revolution from within or we need a new conservative movement to evolve in this nation that will ultimately replace it as the centre-right party of choice for government.

In my decade-plus time as a conservative nomad, I have explored options outside of the Liberal Party. Initially, I searched for independents that reflected my views before landing upon the Liberal Democrats who have now evolved into the Libertarian Party. During the COVID-19 years, I even became a member.

Over time though, while I have continued to support the minor parties such as the Libertarians and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party with my vote, if I am being honest I have become just as disillusioned with them and their persistent strategy of fighting each other for preferential votes in the Senate. While I have amazing respect for certain individuals within, these minor parties have become like ambulance chasers pursuing votes of other right-of-centre political parties.

I have had several clashes over the past few years on social media with members of minor parties and in particular with Libertarians about their continued attacks on One Nation and especially Malcolm Roberts, who is one of the few good guys in our Federal parliament. It was an unedifying effort to recruit supporters and voters from Pauline Hanson’s locked-in base. This was magnified with the creation of Cliver Palmers United Australia Party and has now been reinforced further with Gerrad Rennick leaving the Liberal Party to form his own Peoples First Party.

We now have a plethora of centre-right parties all engaging in the same strategy of stealing each other’s preferential Senate votes and those of the LNP. What they are not focused on is gaining votes from the left-leaning section of the voting public that are not locked into socialism and are ripe to be recruited across from the dark side of the political spectrum as John Howard did with his “Battlers” strategy.

What is even worse fundamentally from my perspective, is that there is no ambition to win government, none at all. I have communicated with several minor party individuals, including candidates and current members of parliament, and they are all pursuing senate seats with the nirvana hope of somehow securing a balance of power situation. This has never happened, in fact, it has never come close to evolving.

Pauline’s One Nation party has been established since 1997, and the Libertarian Party, formerly the Liberal Democrats, were established in 2001. That is more than enough time to have a significant impact on our political landscape. Contrast this to the Teals who bizarrely still campaign as independents. Love them or hate them they had an immediate impact in the 2019 election and now have six lower house seats and one Senate seat in our Federal Parliament after the 2022 election.

The difference is that the Teals have been laser-focused on the lower house and not the Senate. They have targeted previously safe Liberal seats which the minor centre-right parties have ignored as they were considered too difficult to win and were better off focusing on Senate seats. Senate seats can be notoriously more difficult though to win due to the complicated nature of the preferential voting system that is in place in the Senate.

In the Senate, you are relying on preferential flows to gain a Senate seat, in the lower house you can be more specific by targeting marginal seats, or seats at risk to a new look and platform. Whether you love them or hate that’s what the Teals have done and they have done it brilliantly.

The minor centre-right political parties are consumed with the strategy of gaining seats in the Senate through preferential voting and assuring potential voters that their vote still counts.

If you try and confirm this by researching the system we use to elect senators then there is a good chance that you will instead end up in a strapped jacket as opposed to gaining a comprehensive understanding of it all.

It’s complicated and most Australian voters understandably aren’t interested in understanding it.

What is indisputable though, is that the centre-right parties will have far more candidates for Senate positions than the left-of-centre parties and that left-of-centre voters are far more committed to their parties above the line how-to-vote cards. When you combine this with the fact that most Australians, left or right, vote above the line, then the strategy of using preferential voting to secure a balance of power situation for the centre-right in the Senate is doomed to fail.

Even if the odd individual is successful and gains a senate seat, unless they actually can form alliances with other Senators, whether they are independents or from other parties, you will be electing them to be highly paid spectators for three or six years, which are the terms Senators are elected for, another key difference to the lower house.

So the election and composition of our Senate is both complex and confusing with no guarantees. The chance of failure is magnified if your voting block is diluted, yet this continues to happen with the centre-right voting block. It is almost certain to happen yet again next year due to Peter Duttons and the LNP’s stupidity on this youth ban.

No matter how many charts or videos with marbles you see on social media, none of the above changes and those charts and videos focus almost exclusively on the voting intentions centre-right of politics while at the same time ignoring the left-of-centre voting block which is rock solid with their Party’s preference vote requirement, guaranteeing preferential flows to their prefered candidates and away from minor parties on the right.

So what to do if you want real change?

To me, it is actually very straightforward. The strategy cannot be simply about winning seats in the Senate, it has to be about winning government. With that strategy, Senate seats will flow on the back of an increased awareness and party profile through a lower house campaign.

There is an old saying about acting with great ambition.

“If you aim for the moon you will hit a bird, if you aim for the bird you will hit a rock.”

The centre-right has been hitting a rock for some time now through their stubborn embrace of a failed preferential voting strategy. It’s sadly set to continue in next year’s election and beyond unless we change course.

There are only two ways to achieve this, both disappointingly are too late for the upcoming election but possible thereafter.

The first, if possible, is to flood the branches of the Liberal Party through people power to bring it back to its traditional position on the political scale. A position that embraces the Menzies heritage with a common sense approach to government.

The second is to start and build a conservative grassroots political movement that can be at first an influence on our right-of-centre political parties. In particular to look to have them come together and present a united front. Despite this being  what seems to be a common sense approach and an ambition that Menzies achieved to form the Liberal Party to begin with. It has proven to be a difficult mission to accomplish in these modern times.

 Failing in that endeavour we simply have to look to form our conservative political party and movement to rival that of Donald Trumps MAGA movement.

Whatever the path we choose we need to give rise to a political party/movement that has only one objective only and that is to WIN government. No matter what can be achieved electorally in the Senate, the only chamber that can introduce and change laws is the lower chamber of our national parliament. The rest of it is window dressing along with plenty of bells, whistles and theatre in the Senate as they look to rubber stamp and amend whatever legislative bills come their way. It is these sad events that we witnessed last week.

So from small things, big things come.

So instead of whining in a bubble on social media, I have decided to get out into the real world as well and have started with the goal of organising monthly meetings across Melbourne, initially in the Eastern and South Eastern suburbs, at different venues such pubs, clubs and hotels. The intention is to hold them monthly.

The purpose of these meetings is to bring those who embrace or are interested/curious about conservative values and beliefs together so that we can discuss politics, policies, values and what it is actually to be a conservative and what distinguishes us from other ideologies.

An example of this will be within our discussions will be the subject of how to introduce a Bill of Rights into the Constitution so politicians cannot impact on them again as they have done so this past week.

All of this will be done at venues where we can have some food, enjoy a drink and mingle socially. In doing so, we also will support those small business warriors within our hospitality industry who did it so tough throughout COVID-19.

We will also be looking to put together a podcast from these events so we have a record of them, can share them online and build and promote further interest in our cause. These events will be open to everybody, but you will need to book your spots to attend.

We already have our first event locked in. It will be held at a great local pub, The Hobsons in Sandringham on Thursday, January 23rd commencing at 7:00 pm. The address is 19-21 Melrose St, Sandringham. Their website is https://www.thehobsons.com.au/

So if you want to help bring about a MAGA-type movement in this country with the ambition of winning government so we can change the nation’s direction, then here is your chance, especially if you live in Melbourne.

If we can establish this in the socialist capital of Australia, it will then be possible everywhere. So get off your keyboards, come along and see us in person, enjoy a meal and a beer and talk with like-minded people about how we can change this nation for the better.

Hobsons are providing the below Parma and pot deal which makes for a good night. To book your spot, send me an email to bob_mann@theconservative.com.au and we will lock your spot in.