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One day in March 2015, I sat in a theater in New York City and took careful notes as a series of personages led by Hillary Clinton and Melinda Gates described the dazzling sunburst of liberation that was coming our way thanks to entrepreneurs, foundations and Silicon Valley. The presentation I remember most vividly was that of a famous TV actor who rhapsodized about the wonders of Twitter, Facebook and the rest: No matter which platform you prefer, she told us, social media has given us all an extraordinary new world, where anyone, no matter their gender, can share their story across communities, continents and computer screens. A whole new world without ceilings.

Six years later and liberals cant wait for that extraordinary new world to end. Today we know that social media is what gives you things like Donald Trumps lying tweets, the QAnon conspiracy theory and the Capitol riot of 6 January. Social media, we now know, is a volcano of misinformation, a non-stop wallow in hatred and lies, generated for fun and profit, and these days liberal politicians are openly pleading with social medias corporate masters to pleez clamp a ceiling on it, to stop people from sharing their false and dangerous stories.

A reality crisis is the startling name a New York Times story recently applied to this dismal situation. An information disorder is the more medical-sounding label that other authorities choose to give it. Either way, the diagnosis goes, we Americans are drowning in the semiotic swirl. We have come loose from the shared material world, lost ourselves in an endless maze of foreign disinformation and rightwing conspiracy theory.

In response, Joe Biden has called upon us as a nation to defend the truth and defeat the lies. A renowned CNN journalist advocates a harm reduction model to minimize information pollution and deliver the rational views that the public wants. A New York Times writer has suggested the president appoint a federal reality czar who would help the Silicon Valley platform monopolies mute the siren song of QAnon and thus usher us into a new age of sincerity.

These days Democratic politicians lean on anyone with power over platforms to shut down the propaganda of the right. Former Democratic officials pen op-eds calling on us to get over free speech. Journalists fantasize about how easily and painlessly Silicon Valley might monitor and root out objectionable speech. In a recent HBO documentary on the subject, journalist after journalist can be seen rationalizing that, because social media platforms are private companies, the first amendment doesnt apply to them and, I suppose, neither should the American tradition of free-ranging, anything-goes political speech.

In the absence of such censorship, we are told, the danger is stark. In a story about Steve Bannons ongoing Trumpist podcasts, for example, ProPublica informs us that extremism experts say the rhetoric still feeds into an alternative reality that breeds anger and cynicism, which may ultimately lead to violence.

In liberal circles these days there is a palpable horror of the uncurated world, of thought spaces flourishing outside the consensus, of unauthorized voices blabbing freely in some arena where there is no moderator to whom someone might be turned in. The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeiss famous formula, but an extremism expert shushing the world.

What an enormous task that shushing will be! American political culture is and always has been a matter of myth and idealism and selective memory. Selling, not studying, is our peculiar national talent. Hollywood, not historians, is who writes our sacred national epics. There were liars-for-hire in this country long before Roger Stone came along. Our politics has been a bath in bullshit since forever. People pitching the dumbest of ideas prosper fantastically in this country if their ideas happen to be what the ruling class would prefer to believe.

Debunking was how the literary left used to respond to Americas Niagara of nonsense. Criticism, analysis, mockery and protest: these were our weapons. We were rational-minded skeptics, and we had a grand old time deflating creationists, faith healers, puffed-up militarists and corporate liars of every description.

Censorship and blacklisting were, with important exceptions, the weapons of the puritanical right: those were their means of lashing out against rap music or suggestive plays or leftwingers who were gainfully employed.

What explains the clampdown mania among liberals? The most obvious answer is because they need an excuse. Consider the history: the right has enjoyed tremendous success over the last few decades, and it is true that conservatives capacity for hallucinatory fake-populist appeals has helped them to succeed. But that success has also happened because the Democrats, determined to make themselves the party of the affluent and the highly educated, have allowed the right to get away with it.

There have been countless times over the years where Democrats might have reappraised this dumb strategy and changed course. But again and again they chose not to, blaming their failure on everything but their glorious postindustrial vision. In 2016, for example, liberals chose to blame Russia for their loss rather than look in the mirror. On other occasions they assured one another that they had no problems with white blue-collar workers until it became undeniable that they did, whereupon liberals chose to blame such people for rejecting them.

And now we cluck over a lamentable information disorder. The Republicans didnt suffer the landslide defeat they deserved last November; the right is still as potent as ever; therefore Trumpist untruth is responsible for the malfunctioning public mind. Under no circumstances was it the result of the Democrats own lackluster performance, their refusal to reach out to the alienated millions with some kind of FDR-style vision of social solidarity.

Or perhaps this new taste for censorship is an indication of Democratic healthiness. This is a party that has courted professional-managerial elites for decades, and now they have succeeded in winning them over, along with most of the wealthy areas where such people live. Liberals scold and supervise like an offended ruling class because to a certain extent thats who they are. More and more, they represent the well-credentialed people who monitor us in the workplace, and more and more do they act like it.

What all this censorship talk really is, though, is a declaration of defeat defeat before the Biden administration has really begun. To give up on free speech is to despair of reason itself. (Misinformation, we read in the New York Times, is impervious to critical thinking.) The people simply cannot be persuaded; something more forceful is in order; they must be guided by we, the enlightened; and the first step in such a program is to shut off Americas many burbling fountains of bad takes.

Let me confess: every time I read one of these stories calling on us to get over free speech or calling on Mark Zuckerberg to press that big red mute button on our political opponents, I feel a wave of incredulity sweep over me. Liberals believe in liberty, I tell myself. This cant really be happening here in the USA.

But, folks, it is happening. And the folly of it all is beyond belief. To say that this will give the right an issue to campaign on is almost too obvious. To point out that it will play straight into the rights class-based grievance-fantasies requires only a little more sophistication. To say that it is a betrayal of everything we were taught liberalism stood for a betrayal that we will spend years living down may be too complex a thought for our punditburo to consider, but it is nevertheless true.

Read this article:
Liberals want to blame rightwing 'misinformation' for our problems. Get real - The Guardian

The West Australian Liberal Party lies in ruins.

For so long the dominant political force in this state, the Liberals have been sent a message by the electorate that is beyond brutal in its force.

The politics, the policies and the people. We've collected all our coverage on the election campaign here.

Their leader is gone, blue-ribbon territory all over Perth has fallen into Labor hands and the Liberals' Lower House ranks are now so minuscule that they could fit on a tandem bike, outnumbered by the Nationals.

And their stint in the political wilderness could last much longer than the four miserable years that now certainly await the Liberals, after an unmitigated disaster of an election night.

"This is ground zero for the Liberal party," Churchlands MP Sean L'Estrange told party supporters at a function that, somehow, could have been his political wake, with his seat now on a knife-edge.

"The nuclear bomb has gone off."

ABC News: Jessica Warriner

March 13 was never going to be about toppling Mark McGowan for the Liberals, once the Premier began enjoying rockstar popularity in the COVID era.

But as recently as when Zak Kirkup took on the leadership in late November, the hope in the Liberal partyroom was that they could save the furniture.

The WA election has been called for Labor.

Holding onto their 13 seats, maybe even gaining one or two more, was seen as the bar for Mr Kirkup.

Instead, the party has now fallen off a cliff and seems to have lost both its official party status and its role as the opposition.

"Very few people walk away from this catastrophe undamaged," was the stinging verdict from one MP.

Mr Kirkup losing his own seat is one of the telling signs he is the first WA opposition leader to do so, and the first major party leader in WA to suffer that fate in nearly 90 years.

ABC News: Eliza Laschon

But the fact it was one of the least-surprising things to happen on election night shows beyond doubt how badly the campaign went for the blue team.

The Liberal post-mortem will be stinging, with the finger pointing having begun long before polls closed.

One of the greatest causes of ire among Liberals both those who remain and the ones who will spend today cleaning out a career's worth of work in their offices was the party's green energy policy.

ABC News: Hugh Sando

Many Liberals were mystified by it when it was unveiled, believing it further alienated the party's base and torpedoed their hopes in Collie for years to come, while having no significant subset of voters that it could realistically win.

It scared voters on the right and while some on the left may have liked it, they still voted Labor or Green or so the thinking goes.

But beyond the policy arena, the actual campaign itself was a source of immense frustration for some Liberals.

Some MPs felt Mr Kirkup's conceding defeat with 16 days to go consigned the Liberals to irrelevance and turned off voters, who perceived they had given up.

It has many Liberals questioning whether the move to a first-term opposition leader so close to an election was a mistake.

"The energy policy was a debacle," a shellshocked former Liberal leader Mike Nahan said on the ABC's election night panel.

"And I think in the end you will see his statement that 'we have lost', that we had no chance of winning, just was not right."

Furthermore, the party was so cash-strapped that it was outspent dramatically by Labor. Attack ads targeting Mr Kirkup appeared relentlessly with little response.

ABC News: Tabarak Al Jrood

And Labor used 'dirt files' to great success, forcing the Liberals to defend questionable views espoused by numerous candidates while the Opposition made no in-roads in that space.

But, as much as the now-former MPs who will today start dusting off their resumes if they hadn't already were immensely frustrated by the way the party handled the past five weeks, the problems run much deeper than that.

And they started long before Mr Kirkup was even a parliamentarian.

ABC News: Hugh Sando

Many Liberals believe the current dearth of political talent in their ranks can be attributed in part to the failure to attract and nurture those with ability during the years of the Barnett government.

The question of who the next Liberal premier would be has been a source of fear for conservatives since Christian Porter and Troy Buswell left state politics, not a newfound phenomenon.

The politics, the policies and the people. We've collected all our coverage on the election campaign here.

Then there is the issue of preselection.

The Liberals battled candidate controversies on multiple fronts from one claiming the allegations against Mr Porter were part of some conspiracy related to the state election, to another suggesting a link between 5G and COVID-19.

And those were just the tip of the iceberg.

A significant number of Liberals believe potential quality candidates are choosing not to seek state preselection because there is no realistic chance of success unless they attach themselves to a key party powerbroker.

ABC News: Andrew O'Connor

Winning Liberal preselection in the metropolitan area, without tying yourself to either Nick Goiran or Peter Collier, is pretty unrealistic these days.

Expect to see old Liberal hands demanding urgent party reform in the aftermath of this annihilation, with calls for plebiscite-style preselections and other changes to curtail the influence of powerbrokers.

Most immediately, though, the Liberals need to work out how such a paltry team can hold a politically-dominant Labor government to account while seemingly not even being the official opposition.

Simple tasks like allocating policy portfolios and filling committees will be made extraordinarily difficult by there being so few MPs.

Some MPs believe the Liberals will have no choice but to have coalition discussions with the Nationals, with their only chance of properly holding Labor to account being to work together.

At this stage, it might be David Honey and Libby Mettam flipping a coin to decide who becomes leader although for now, the Liberals have a glimmer of hope that Mr L'Estrange or maybe Bill Marmion could hold on.

ABC News: Gian De Poloni

Whoever gets the job will face the challenge of a lifetime, with the Liberals needing to climb Mount Everest and then some just to make the 2025 election even close to competitive.

As for the departing leader, he will cop plenty of blame from some Liberals for a campaign more than one labelled a "shit show".

But most Liberals admit that the problems run much deeper and will not be easily fixed.

Picking up the pieces from an election night calamity will be a long process as the tiny number of Liberals to survive this bloodbath try to work out how to rebuild a shattered party.

See the original post here:
The WA election has left the Liberals decimated and in the wilderness, facing a long road back - ABC News

Liberal MP Nicolle Flint has conceded her own party could "absolutely" have done more to provide her with support during the "vicious" 2019 election campaign.

Ms Flint, who is the member for the electorate of Boothby in Adelaide's inner-south, recently revealed her intention toquitfederal politics, saying she would not contest the seat at the next election.

The conservative faction MP yesterdaybroke down in tears in Parliament while describing the harassment and stalking she hadendured during her time in politics.

Among the incidents was an act of vandalism before the 2019 election, in which her campaign office was defaced with the word "skank" and other abusive and sexist graffiti.

Supplied

Speaking on ABC Radio Adelaide this morning, Ms Flint repeated her criticisms of political opponents, including Labor, unions, and activist groups including GetUp.

"There is a lot of work we need to do across the board to support women in politics," she said.

"My issues have been the treatment that I received last election through the activities of GetUp, Labor and the unions."

GetUp today vehemently rejected any suggestion it was to blame for the abusive attacks on her office,saying the "harassment experienced by Nicolle Flint" was"abhorrent".

"We conducted a thorough investigation that confirmed that our staff or members were not involved in any of the alleged behaviour levelled against us in this long-running effort to smear our reputation," the organisation today said.

We campaigned in the seat of Boothby and other key seats with hard-right Liberal MPs, but it is simply wrong to characterise our campaign as harassment or misogyny."

When asked by ABC Radio Adelaide host David Bevan, "What about the women in your South Australian branch did they come out and help you?", Ms Flint conceded the SA Liberalsalso had room for improvement.

"David, can I say about the 2019 campaign, no-one was expecting the vicious nature of the campaign, not me, not anybody," Ms Flint responded.

"Could the South Australian division have done more? Absolutely."

Ms Flint said she did receive support from Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.

AAP: David Mariuz

Ms Flint recently clashed with South AustralianHuman Services Minister Michelle Lensink, a fellow Liberal, over abortion reform.

Her electorate is held by the Liberals on a margin of just 1.4 per cent, andMs Flint said she would not be reconsidering her move to quit Parliament.

"I won't change my mind, I've made my decision to step down, but what I will be doing is working as closely as I can with the Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins. I'll be an active part of the review [into the culture of Parliament House]," she said.

"I would love to sit down with some of the senior Labor women and chat to them about how we can all take the aggression out of politics.

"We just need to stop this behaviour from ever happening again. We need to keep people safe, and that's precisely what I said to the Parliament last night, and I'm delighted that people are listening."

The ABC has contacted the SA Liberal branch for comment.

See the article here:
Nicolle Flint admits SA Liberals could have done more to support her during 2019 election - ABC News

My grandmother was effectively a single parent by 1930 after my granddad emigrated to New York in early 1929 when the bottom fell out of the cattle trade in County Down. She and the kids were to follow, but her long illness meant they couldnt.

After Id become a parent myself, my mum told me that every time a plate cracked granny would put it away in the kitchen press. Then when the kids got out of hand, shed go to the cupboard, take out the old plate, and smash it on the ground.

It commanded an immediate silence, and restored order. The sepia images that survive, show from thesmiles on her kids faces that they prospered despite such moments of percussive clarity. It may even have helped them to a better life.

Last Sunday, it was Eoghan Harriss turn to crack some Delft. His uncommonly direct column (even for him) calling for the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to resign after recent revelations had an almost immediate effect.

Rusbridger now knows (if he didnt before) the Irish politics he once dabbled is a real bear-pit. If English politics is about materialism and class, ours is about culture and, until quite recently, it involved a quite lot of death, injury and mayhem.

Where you stand on that revolutionary bloodshed and later civil infractions of the legal and social codes still matters. Yet his resignation as chair of the southern governments Future of Media Commission was both sudden and unexpected.

His fellow commissioner Conor Brady put up the thinest possible defence on his behalf, but it did little other than reanimate Rusbridgers callous insouciance over Roy Greenslades cold partisan attack (now removed) on Mairia Cahill:

Greenslade did not try to deny Cahill had been raped by an IRA member.

The principal point in his blog was that the BBCs Spotlight programme lacked balance in that it did not take account of the fact that Cahill was a leading member of a dissident republican organisation with an anti-Sinn Fein agenda.

This meant vital information was denied to viewers, he claimed. Of course the innuendo, citing unnamed critics of the programme, was that her complaint was motivated by politics.

Note the repetition of that familiar old line, the anti Sinn Fin agenda and fair gaming of Cahillby Greenslades parti prix pen. Its routinely thrown at anyone who questions that partys right to do whatever it thinks is in its own interests.

Before I come to why he had to go, let me sayRusbridger had great convening power. I doubt anyone else would have brought in someone like Simon Kuper and his fearless and penetrating insight on the medias systemic failure on populism.

I never worked at the Guardian as such but from 2006 I was regularly commissioned by the late Georgina Henry, deputised by Rusbridger to run the papers Comment is Free digital platform to write online. It was fun and it took me places.

For instance to the Editors summer party on Londons South Bank in 2006. Being early I met and chatted with Ken Livingstone about a year or so before losing the Mayoralty of London to the man who is now the British Prime Minister.

He was, he argued to a small crowd of us, a policy man, and thought his Tory rival in 2008 would cowpe under pressure of his command of the detail. Turns out that this was a complacent view of the oncoming reality truck that was Boris Johnson.

And complacency is the word. In his book (H/T Tim) Evil Geniuses, Kurt Andersen tells how US liberals, who enjoyed hegemony back in the 60s and 70s, first indulged new extreme market ideologies. Then adopted those values as their own.

He connects thesesoixante-huitards with a new capital class that subsequently freed itself from any obligation to wider society or set its vastly privatised wealth to work. This accommodation with monied individualism was both easy and pain free.

Andersen recalls a moment from 1975 when journalists crossed the picket line of striking printers at The Washington Post, including Bob Woodward, from the start. It was the beginning of the end for the Pressmen, the US print workers union.

Forty years on watching journalists get washed away and drowned by the latest wave of technology induced change Andersen notes that if hed been one of those print workers hed have felt some schadenfreude.

Its odd to watch liberals co-opt themselves into defending ideologies that, on the face of it, are inimical to their professed values. With Greenslade (for many years Fleet Streets own watchdog) that means acceptingsome very odd behaviours:

In 1989 Roy Greenslade made a series of hoax phone calls to his own newspaper, writes Marcus Leroux . Putting on an Irish accent, he pretended to be the friend of an airline pilot who overheard SAS soldiers chatting about an operation in Gibraltar Nick Davies reported in the 2008 book Flat Earth News.

The Newsletter reported Kathryn Johnstons response to hearing a recording of the original conversation between Davies and Greenslade

As a self-appointed media scruineer it doesnt sit very well to hear him laughing and joking about making a fake phone call to pass on information which he says came from republican contacts and using a fake Irish accent to a colleague in the Sunday Times. It is deeply unethical.

It doesnt end there. The Mail reportsthat Greenslade accused Kathryns late husband and former colleague Liam Clarke of

colluding with the security forces to publish false stories about the IRAs commitment to a ceasefire. It was a malicious attack, based on no more than tittle-tattle, yet the damage was real, Mr Clarke later complained.

The allegations were wild, wrong and, for me, dangerous. For a journalist living and working in Northern Ireland to be accused of collusion with the security forces is life-threatening. Once a lie has been printed, it is repeated with regularity. Greenslade was unrepentant.

Journalists were not targeted during the conflict, though several were civilian casualties in the IRAs indiscriminate bombing campaign. The one obvious exception, Martin OHagan was killed by loyalists during the so call peace process.

But anyone who has read Malachi ODohertys Telling Year will know that journalists on the ground, were under constant pressure from one group or the other to turn their copy one way or the other. Murder was the backdrop rather than a threat.

In Rusbridgers final apologiathe Guardian editor recounts a bizarre conversation in 1999 between himself, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and a retired British spook James who told the two leading members of the Provisional movement

their silence on decommissioning the IRAs weapons was seriously damaging their credibility and was leaving Tony Blair and Bill Clinton looking increasingly exposed.

Rusbridger unquestioningly recalls the response from McGuinness If Gerry were to make a speech about decommissioning, said McGuinness, some young lad would come and shoot him tomorrow.

Months later the official deadline in the Belfast Agreement for IRA decommissioning passed in May 2000. As wenow know Adams was merely using that collapsed deadline as a bargaining chip for indemnity for IRA men.

You might think Rusbridger would have been aware of this when he committed those thoughts to paper but his willingness to accept the SF leaders at their word (or their, ahem,partial disclosure) is a too common feature within liberal media.

On both islands. Harris condemned the piece as both arrogant and self-absorbed. And further stated that

in a piece of 23 paragraphs, Mira Cahills name wasnt mentioned until the 21st paragraph.

He also tried the ploy of wrapping himself in the peace process this despite Mira Cahills ordeal having taken place well after the Good Friday Agreement. [Emphasis added]

He makes a further point too about the silencing of a woman who has not only undergone the original rape, but during this (post conflict) same time period that Rusbridger references was being actively re-traumatised by the IRA themselves.

Its not as though we dont have a problem getting rape prosecutions to where they need to be on these islands. In Northern Ireland the number of crown court cases for rape fell by about a quarter from 2017-18 to 2018-19.

And whilst the figure in the south increased by 35% last year

Chief executive of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Noeline Blackwell, welcomed the increase, but she said the number of rape prosecutions is still far too low and represents only a fraction of those reported to garda.

The support service estimates around 14 per cent of rape cases reported to garda are sent forward for trial, while it believes 90 per cent of rape victims do not report such crimes at all.

Some complain about the Cahill case as though it were just an inconvenience to the new politics-as-usual. But she only came forward (and later waived her right to anonymity) after Gerry Adams niece sought her own fathers prosecution.

Having heard Harris plate smash, Rusbridger has done the decent thing and walked. Ireland needs its media and in particular, its liberal wing. But that wing must reassess the gap between the values it professes and those it acts upon.

And to begin to consider the likely outcome of the stories they choose to print.

Photo by moritz320 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty

Read more here:
Ireland's liberal media must reassess the gap between the values it professes and those it acts upon - Slugger O'Toole

A WA Liberal MP has launched a scathing attack on his own party's performance, saying it failed to be a "credible opposition" over the past four years and calling its central election energy proposal "the stupidest policy" ever released by the party.

Upper House Member for the South West, Steven Thomas, who is on track to secure his seat for another term, unleashed a barrage of criticism against his party on ABC Radio Perth.

"When COVID came along Mark McGowan did a pretty good job with it and he's been rewarded for that," Mr Thomas told the ABC's Nadia Mitsopoulos.

"But at the other end of the argument, from a Liberal perspective, we lost our credibility.

"We didn't campaign hard enough for four years, we lost our connections to the community.

The politics, the policies and the people. We've collected all our coverage on the election campaign here.

"I think a lot of our people somehow thought that everybody made a mistake in 2017 and it was going to come flooding back to the Liberal Party, but what we needed to maintain all through the last four years, and particularly the last four months, was our credibility that we could be a credible opposition.

"And we failed to do that."

The WA Liberals suffered a thumping defeat at Saturday's election, with WA Labor on track to claim a majority in both houses of WA's Parliament.

Mr Thomas rejected the suggestion the former Liberal leader Zak Kirkup, who lost his seat of Dawesville on Saturday, had been "thrown to the wolves".

Mr Thomas claimed there was a group of around six people who were "supposed" to make decisions about the campaign, policies and costings.

"But in the end it was a very small, select group around Zak (Kirkup) who made those decisions and I think he stands by his decisions," Mr Thomas said.

"He was the maker of his own demise in my view, because that little leadership team were the people who decided to put out that energy policy, who decided to admit defeat weeks out.

"Those decisions damaged everybody. While I wish him the best I think he is as responsible as everybody else."

ABC News: Andrew O'Connor

The WA Liberals yesterday said it would take steps to begin "a comprehensive review of the election, from 2017 through to and including the formal campaign period."

"The circumstances of this election and the events leading up to it made for the most difficult campaign in our party's history," a party statement said.

"History and timing were not on our side."

Mr Thomas said he had contributed to previous party reviews but they had "contained things that the leadership and the people in control of the Liberal Party didn't like, so none of it ever saw the light of day."

"If you are going to have another review, it actually has to result in change," Mr Thomas said.

"It has to look at going back to empowering those local branches, and not allowing them to be dominated by any one particular group.

"And it's not just the conservative Christian Lobby who seem to have an excessive amount of power in Perth, there are other groups as well that form around factions.

"It is time for the Liberal Party to take the power back from those groups."

Mr Thomas said the party needed to change "the selection process, the control process for the Liberal Party", suggesting plebiscite preselection to give the entire party a chance to contribute.

Mr Thomas said he had heard frequently from within his party over the past four years that "it would never get worse than 2017".

"The reality is it got significantly worse," Mr Thomas said.

Did you know we offer a local version of the ABC News homepage? Watch below to see how you can set yours, and get more WA stories.

(Hint: You'll have to go back to the home page to do this)

"For the two and a half years, I don't think any policy was developed. Nobody heard from the Liberal Party about issues.

"All of those things meant that people thought the Liberal Party wasn't present and wasn't in the debate."

Mr Thomas then drilled down on the election campaign, saying while some strong Liberal policies, including payroll tax reform, had been developed, they were largely undersold.

Instead, Mr Thomas said the party focused on a "couple of policies and decisions" he labelled "terrible" and made the Liberal "situation far worse", zooming in on its central renewable energy proposal.

"That energy policy was the stupidest policy I have ever seen the Liberal Party release," Mr Thomas said.

"It makes the Alexander Downer, 'The Things That Batter' domestic violence policy, look sensible by comparison."

Mr Thomas was referring to Mr Downer's comments as the leader of the federal opposition in 1996, when introducing a set of policies dubbed "The things that matter", he segued into the party's domestic violence policies by saying, "from the things that matter to the things that batter".

Mr Thomas said the politics of the Liberals' energy policy and what it aimed to achieved made it "foolish".

Read the ABC's election expert Antony Green's analysis of the WA election.

"The expectations that thousands of Greens supporters would suddenly jump onto the Liberal Party bus because of this greener-than-green policy was foolish politics," Mr Thomas said.

"But it also shredded our already damaged credibility because it was utterly undeliverable.

"You could not do it even if you wanted to."

Mr Thomas called himself the "greenest" member of the Liberal Party but said he thought the policy was "undeliverable".

"You couldn't have shut down the Collie Power Station by 2025 even if you wanted to, you couldn't deliver renewable energy down that pathway and get it to Albany safely without droppage," Mr Thomas said.

"If you decided to do it, it would cost billions.

"That energy policy, in my view, is the reason why our costings were such a debacle, because you could not afford to have that policy costed."

Outgoing Liberal MP Alyssa Hayden, who lost her seat of Darling Range, took aim at the party's former leader Liza Harvey and the role her leadership played in the party's thumping defeat.

Ms Harvey, who lost her seat of Scarborough at the weekend's poll, led the Liberal Party during the COVID-19 pandemic and came under intense scrutiny over her original call for interstate borders to open.

She stood aside months out from the election to effectively give the party a clean slate, and Zak Kirkup took over the reigns.

"If we'd swapped over to Zak a year out from the election, I think we would have been in a better position," Ms Hayden said.

"I don't think Liza did us any favours, certainly got us no runs on the board and we went backwards."

ABC News: Jacob Kagi

Ms Hayden said Ms Harvey's border comments hurt the party "immensely" and that there had been "no consultation in the party room" over the position.

She claimed under Ms Harvey's leadership, she and other Liberal MPs, "were frozen out".

"Silly things, like we were gagged in Question Time, we were not allowed to interject it just killed our morale and we were no longer a team," she said.

Ms Hayden said comparatively, former leader Mike Nahan and Mr Kirkup were both very inclusive.

Ms Hayden said in hindsight neither the Liberal's green energy policy, nor Mr Kirkup's decision to concede defeat weeks out from the poll, were the right moves but that Mr Kirkup had "done an amazing job".

"I had people stopping me congratulating me on changing leader.

"Zak ran an amazing Opposition line, he did an extremely good job in a very short timeframe with no resources."

One of what could be only two re-elected Lower House Liberal MPs, Libby Mettam, who is the acting party leader, said her colleague had made some valid points.

ABC News: Gian De Poloni

"The WA Liberal Party do need to take responsibility, not just for the fifteen weeks of the election campaign, which obviously could have been better," Ms Mettam said.

"But also the last four years where we had that time to really build and be in a better, more resilient position through this pandemic election."

Ms Mettam said being an effective Opposition would be "an enormous challenge" but it was not an insurmountable task.

"We do need to reconnect with our base, and do that very quickly, we do need to re-energise the party," Ms Mettam said.

"There is a public interest in ensuring that we have an effective working Opposition and we quite clearly need to do more to ensure that we meet that objective, numbers aside."

Ms Mettam laughed off a suggestion that "you could flip a coin" to determine the next Liberal Party leader, but said it would be determined with her party colleagues at a later time.

Excerpt from:
Liberal MP Steven Thomas lets fly at own party in wake of WA election catastrophe - ABC News