THE Liberals are so panicked about losing Malcolm Turnbull’s former seat on Saturday that they’ve made their weakness embarrassingly clear. The party no longer knows what it stands for and faces utter destruction.
Internal polling reportedly shows the Liberals will lose this weekend’s by-election in Wentworth — a result that would cost the government its one-seat majority and destroy the honeymoon of new Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
That polling claims Left-wing independent Kerryn Phelps will smash the Liberals’ Dave Sharma by 55 per cent to 45, after preferences.
That seems an exaggeration, but the Liberals will be humiliated even if they lose Wentworth by a whisker, given Turnbull last won it by a margin of 17.8 per cent.
To lose now by any margin would prove the Liberals have campaigned hopelessly since dumping Turnbull as prime minister two months ago.
Blame that in part on Turnbull and his furious family. Turnbull, sulking in New York, refuses to even send a tweet to help Sharma win; his daughter attacked the Liberals for lacking “strong female role models” and his son urged Wentworth voters to punish the Liberals for not doing more about global warming.
But in the end the Liberals would have only themselves to blame and not just for being so ideologically clueless as to have made Turnbull, a man of the Left, the leader of a party of the Right.
Yes, Morrison has done a great job at selling himself since replacing Turnbull, but he hasn’t yet sold his party. The Liberals still lag Labor in every poll.
Read the article by Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun.