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After almost a year in the post, Dutton comes off as a seasoned, instantly familiar character actor trying to fill a leading man role a one-speed player who struggles to find a new way to ply his trade. His main goal is to avoid arguments and say what the partys diminished base wants to hear. That can keep the show steady for a while, but it wont revive its fortunes.

Peter Dutton is digging deeper in his efforts to appease the Coalitions conservative base. Dionne Gain

The Liberals awful condition is not all down to Dutton. This is a shared failure. Most of its parliamentary representatives and frontbenchers, and the leadership group are in lockstep with him. But Dutton is the most obvious problem because its in his gift to begin to turn things around. When a party is in trouble, the leader is obliged to acknowledge whats wrong and encourage others to help him fashion a remedy, not to continue flawed behaviours.

The Liberals chief weakness before last years election was that it overdosed on unity under Scott Morrison. No one was willing to sound the alarm, even though it was clear by the second half of 2021 that he was leading them over a cliff. The same thing is happening under Dutton.

What courage or genuine leadership is involved in pandering to the partys narrow and ageing membership and its avatars in the party room by denouncing every idea the government comes up with as the end of the world? After all, this is the least ambitious new Labor government in living memory. Most voters know that. Thats why they voted for it.

Liberals failed to speak up as the party lost its way under Scott Morrison. The same is happening under Peter Dutton. Bloomberg

Old political polarities have been reversed. It used to be that Labors leaders were naturally hemmed in by the ALPs Byzantine organisation of activist local branches, the caucus, the policy platform argued out publicly and put in place by the national conference, the national executive, the unions, the factions. Conversely, Liberal leaders had an almost unfettered right to dictate the direction of the partys positions and agenda.

That has now flipped. The Albanese governments agenda was shaped almost exclusively by the leader, his office, and a small group of senior ministers. Over at the Liberal Party these days, it works the other way, with the tail wagging the dog. Despite all the shop-worn bromides about the party being a broad church, its tiny sprinkling of moderates today chiefly fulfil a decorative function at the federal level, while the leadership reflects the angry reactionary positions of the local branches and their parliamentary representatives. Hence, for example, climate change is still not regarded as a serious thing and the very idea of to cherished democratic ideals where, supposedly, every Australian is equal.

Both the Coalition and opposition leader Peter Dutton have seen their approval ratings slip in a new poll.

Whats startling is that although things are going so badly, theres so little appetite to do anything about it. Only months after the partys poorest general election result in almost 80 years, the Liberals this month registered the worst byelection result for an opposition in 100 years, in which Labor campaigned hard on Duttons lack of popularity.

The Liberal Party had won Aston successively under Andrew Peacock, John Hewson, John Howard (five times), Tony Abbott (twice), Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison (twice) but lost it at Peter Duttons first crack.

At last years election, the Coalitions national primary vote was 35.7 per cent, down from 41.4 in 2019.

And yet, its not just steady as she goes; Dutton has doubled down, coming clean at last on his commitment to the No case on the Voice. He did this with the imprimatur of the vast bulk of his fellow Liberal MPs and their most vigorous supporters in the community and the media.

Bringing into the shadow cabinet and giving her carriage of the No case in the Voice referendum will send the rusted-on supporters into raptures and make her one of the countrys best-known politicians by years end.

Whats startling is that although things are going so badly, theres so little appetite to do anything about it.

Maybe it will mean a win for the No case the requirement to get a majority vote in four states in a referendum is a big hurdle. But it wont bring the Liberals any closer to an electoral revival, further deepening the alienation between them and voters under 40.

Probably the best thing that could happen to the Liberals would be for the No case to lose. That could pierce the bubble, causing them to face up to the rolling catastrophe they are creating for themselves.

Frontbencher Dan Tehan last weekend called on Dutton to conduct an urgent policy review. That a senior member of the Liberal team had to go public to nudge his leader towards taking such an obvious step in the wake of a series of shattering defeats offers an eloquent commentary on the partys mindset.

If Dutton complies with Tehans request, it would be the first time the party has produced a comprehensive set of new policy ideas in a long time, possibly since the days of Howard and Peter Costello in the 1990s.

But has he got the inclination to do it? Based on his performance so far, its hard to believe he does.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. .

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The Liberals condition is a shared failure. But Dutton is the obvious problem - Sydney Morning Herald

A letter writer laments the decrease in the numbers attending church, and blames it on politics. In many respects one would have to agree although the reasoning from the point of view about to be given will be in contrast to Ms Dobronyis reasoning. First and foremost our country and God are joined through the words of the founders in the constitution, and our own pledge of allegiance.

Where politics have influenced some religions is the views on abortion, patronizing the LGBT&Q community which both are anathema to the words of the Bible. Religion does not call them out for their sins but embraces their presence. Christians are also instructed to work or they shall not eat. Condoning children being born out of wedlock without speaking against it.

Liberalism is a direct contradiction to the Ten Commandments and it has infiltrated the government to restrict or ban certain displays including Manger Scenes, displays of the 10 commandments on government properties, federal and local. Prayer has been banned in schools and before and after athletic events.

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As adamant liberals are of allowing transgenders to read to children, how would they be if a group of Christians wanted to read to those same children? Liberal heads would spin around and explode.

Believe in God? Then you believe he created two and only two sexes, you need to believe that welfare going to physically able individuals is theft from those that toil and are taxed to support them. You have to believe that taking care of your fellow man means you dig into your own pocket, share your knowledge, demonstrate your caring personally, not through some government program you think is wonderful because it saves you from actually doing something yourself.

Listen carefully to the rhetoric of the young when they ask questions like

Because evil exists, God cannot be all-powerful. all-knowing and loving and good at the same time?

Because God allows pain, disease and natural disasters to exist, he cannot be all-powerful and also loving and good in the human sense of these words?

Destinies are not allocated on the basis of merit or equality. They are allocated either arbitrarily, or on the principle of "to him who has, shall be given, and from him who has not shall be taken even that which he has." God cannot be all-powerful and all-knowing and also just in the human sense of the word.

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Liberals cause decline in church attendance | Letters to the Editor ... - Citrus County Chronicle

Trying to pick a side in the public servants strike? Heres how I break the situation down.

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While not normally the biggest fan of public sector unions, I have to say that the Public Service Alliance of Canadas position is reasonable, in most respects. The exception is the 30-per-cent increase that 35,000 Canada Revenue Agency employees are seeking. The number is so ridiculous its not even worth examining.

The majority of striking public servants, about 120,000 people, are Treasury Board employees who work primarily in administrative positions. According to the union, most make between $40,000 and $65,000 per year.

The union wants a raise of 13.5 per cent over three years, with increments of 4.5 per cent each year. Lets put that in context. Average annual wages increased by 5.1 per cent in Canada in December, so the PSAC demand isnt out of sync with that. The latest inflation figure is 4.3 per cent, just about what the union is seeking.

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The government is offering nine per cent over three years, so the sides arent miles apart. The matter is complicated by the fact that the union contract expired in 2021. This contract is primarily about covering past inflation, not speculating on future inflation. The government wants to pay only 1.5 per cent for 2021, a year of low inflation, followed by 4.5 per cent for last year and three per cent for this year.

The PSAC also wants the contract to spell out details of how the governments hybrid workplace will play out. Given the governments vagueness and confusion on the topic, thats not unreasonable, either.

The union isnt asking for the moon, but Canadians have to put up with a public service strike.Its difficult to see an issue or a gap that justifies a strike, but the union wanted to bring slow-moving negotiations to a head.

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The Justin Trudeau government has put itself in a weak position when it comes to championing thrift. The government has never seen a dollar that it didnt want to spend. In its last budget, it gave up even the pretence of fiscal responsibility, planning deficits for years to come. This is a government that spends hundreds of millions of dollars on consultants and billions on business subsidies. Its easy to see why public servants with middling salaries would expect their own slice of the infinite fiscal pie the Liberals believe exists.

To make things even more challenging for the government, the prime minister had to defend his latest Caribbean vacation freebee in the House on the eve of the strike. Not a good look, as people like to say.

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Given its usual inclinations, the governments stance on public service salaries is inexplicable. Were it a book-balancing government with responsible spending habits, trying to hold down the federal wage bill would be in character. For the Trudeau government, its astounding.

The government cant credibly claim that the raise the PSAC workers want is unaffordable. Inflation has helped create a tax windfall worth tens of billions of dollars, but the government had other priorities for the money.

If the Trudeau government was concerned about the size of its wage bill, perhaps it shouldnt have increased the number of federal employees by nearly 31 per cent since it took office. Did it not see the salary implications?

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While the strike wont be terribly visible across the country, for Ottawa businesses it will mean a short-term financial hit. People making no more than $375 a week in strike pay are going to spend cautiously, especially when inflation has already left them short.

That inflation isnt going away. While the rate of increase is slowing, the cost of living is still going up. Prices are not going back to what they were. Federal employees want help with that, just like everyone else. The government needs to stop pretending it suddenly cares about money and settle the strike.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa political commentator and author. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com

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Randall Denley: Liberals unconvincing as champions of thrift against striking union - National Post

On the day after Wisconsins nasty and expensive state Supreme Court election, the lead sentence of the Wisconsin State Journals front page election story proclaimed: Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated conservative Dan Kelly for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court Tuesday, giving liberals a court majority for the first time in 15 years, boosting Democrats bid to toss out Wisconsins near-complete abortion ban and promising to dramatically reshape politics in the battleground state.

Wisconsin Public Radio, meanwhile, said this in its election-night report: Democrats have scored a major off-year election victory in Wisconsin, winning the states open supreme court seat and flipping control of the court to liberals for the first time in 15 years.

Both articles contain a contention that is highly questionable if not objectively false.

Protasiewicz did clobber Kelly by an unheard-of-for-Wisconsin 11-point margin. But in asserting that liberals controlled the Wisconsin Supreme Court as recently as 15 years ago, these news outlets were just repeating a shorthand description that became common during the election.

Heres the headline and subhead of an ABC News story published on the morning of Feb. 19, the day of the primary election that narrowed the field to Kelly and Protasiewicz:

Democrats see a prime chance to take control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court

Democrats, who havent had a majority in 15 years, see concerns over abortion access and voting rights as key opportunities to take back control.

And two days before the election, NPR reported, An election on Tuesday could change the political trajectory of Wisconsin, a perennial swing state, by flipping the ideological balance of the state Supreme Court for the first time in 15 years.

Since the election, the idea that Wisconsin liberals have just gained a court majority for the first time in 15 years has continued to percolate.

Heres The Capital Times in the lead sentence of a piece published April 6: As Wisconsins state Supreme Court shifts toward its first liberal majority in 15 years, a liberal law firm plans to challenge the states voting maps based on the assertion that partisan gerrymandering violates the Wisconsin Constitution.

And on April 13, the State Journal republished an editorial in the Kenosha News that said this marks the first time the court will have a liberal bent in 15 years.

In fact, Wisconsin did not have what could be safely described as a liberal majority 15 years ago and quite possibly ever if you count the many years in which liberal and conservative were not terms commonly applied to Supreme Court justices and contenders.

From 2004 to 2008, the court had three liberal justices, three conservatives, and one justice, Patrick Crooks, who was a swing vote. Yet while Crooks was appointed to a circuit court judgeship in Brown County by Wisconsin Gov. Martin Schreiber, a Democrat, he ran for election to the Supreme Court in 1995 as a conservative, losing in the general election to Ann Walsh Bradley. His campaign was run by Scott Jensen, a former Republican Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly who would later end up being convicted of ethics violations.

Crooks was elected to the court the following year, beating Ralph Adam Fine, and was seen as a reliable conservative for much of his tenure, which ended when he died while still in office in 2015, after announcing that he would not seek reelection the following year. He was replaced by conservative Rebecca Bradley, appointed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and then elected to a full ten-year term in 2016.

In 2004, Crooks joined court liberals in a series of decisions seen as affecting businesses, drawing a hysterical reaction from the states big business lobby, which claimed that Americas personal injury lawyers are racing to Wisconsin to take advantage of these rulings, which the group said in an ad send a clear signal to every CEO and top executive in the U.S. that Wisconsin will be a risky state in which to operate. The ad showed a billboard that proclaimed, Hello, Trial Lawyers! Good-bye Jobs!

Yet despite this heated reaction, Crooks was still considered enough of a conservative that WMC sat back and let him get reelected without challenge in 2006.

Its true that some people called him a liberal but that is far from firmly or clearly established. From his Wikipedia entry: Crooks generally joined the conservative majoritys opinions, especially in criminal matters, but joined the liberal minoritys dissents on certain constitutional issues and matters of court administration. In a 2011 Milwaukee Magazine article entitled Crooks Is Not a Liberal, journalist Bruce Murphy wrote:

Yes, he is considered a liberal and is typically described that way in the media, but in fact, hes a centrist who tends to lean right. Murphy called the identification of Crooks as a liberal the medias error.

Wisconsin Supreme Court watcher Alan Ball, a history professor at Marquette, has backed this up with numbers. In an analysis published a day after the election, he calculated that between 2004 and 2008, when Crooks was a critical swing vote, he sided with the three liberals in 44% of non-unanimous decisions (Table 1)considerably more often than the next closest fourth man, Justice David Prosser, who joined the three liberals in only 11% of non-unanimous decisions during this period.

But still, Ball found, Crooks voted with the conservatives slightly more often than with the liberals. Therefore, he wrote, it seems a stretch to describe the supreme court as liberal during [this] period.

So how long has it been that liberals comprised a majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court?

The court has never had a clear liberal majority in the decades that Ive covered it, Ball told me in an email last fall. In the 21st century there have been years when it has leaned conservative when there have been three liberals (Abrahamson, AW Bradley, and Butler, for example, or, currently, AW Bradley, Dallet, and Karofsky) and periods when it has been heavily conservative most recently, the Gableman and Kelly years.

Thus, if a liberal prevails in next springs election, the court will be clearly liberal for the first time in living memory, Ball wrote. Given these stakes, I imagine that the upcoming race will completely shatter all spending records for judicial elections in Wisconsin.

He got that right. The estimated $50 million that was sunk into the states Supreme Court race on behalf of the two candidates, in nearly equal measure, is five times the previous record for a Wisconsin Supreme Court race and more than three times the record for a judicial race anywhere in the United States.

When Protasiewicz is sworn in this August, liberals will comprise a Wisconsin Supreme Court majority for the first time in at least four decades.

Just ask liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, the courts longest-tenured member.

Ive been on the court for twenty-eight years, and Ive never served with what is labeled a liberal majority, one that sees the role of government and democracy the way that I do, Bradley told journalist Dan Kaufman in an article published April 12 in The New Yorker.

In other words, despite all the advertising and national media attention, the issue of control of the court by liberals is an even bigger deal than what youve often been told.

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Liberals haven't controlled the Wisconsin Supreme Court for a lot ... - Wisconsin Examiner

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie lashed out at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday, arguing he was not handling his conflict with Disney like a "conservative."

Christie made the comments during an interview with Semafor, saying DeSantis was using the government to bully businesses like Disney. DeSantis' conflict with Disney stretches back more than a year, when the company sought to oppose the governor's education reform bill.

"I'm a conservative, and I believe the job of government is, in the main, to stay out of the business of business," Christie said. "I don't think Ron DeSantis is a conservative, based on his actions toward Disney.

"Where are we headed here now, that if you express disagreement in this country the government is allowed to punish you?" he continued. "To me, that's what I always thought liberals did, and now here we are participating in this with a Republican governor."

WAR OVER THE CORPORATE KINGDOM: DESANTIS' NEW BOARD SPARS FOR CONTROL WITH DISNEY

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie argued that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is "not a conservative" due to his ongoing war with Disney. (Photo by WADE VANDERVORT/AFP via Getty Images)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has feuded with Disney for more than a year, and he has threatened to remove some of the company's priviledges in Florida. (Photo by CHENEY ORR/AFP via Getty Images)

DISNEY'S REEDY CREEK IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT TO GET NEW NAME, GOVERNOR-APPOINTED BOARD

DeSantis is currently in a battle over the development rights for the area surrounding Disney World, known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Disney was able to block DeSantis's efforts to take over control of the district by signing a development deal earlier this year, something the governor has vowed to undo.

Nevertheless, Christie argued DeSantis had essentially been outmaneuvered.

"That's not the guy I want sitting across from President Xi and negotiating our next agreement with China, or sitting across from Putin and trying to resolve what's happening in Ukraine, if you can't see around a corner that Bob Iger created for you," Christie said. "I don't think that's very imposing."

DeSantis's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

The area around Disney World is the subject of a major legal battle between Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Disney Corporation. (Getty Images for Disney Dreamers Academy)

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For his part, DeSantis argues Disney "usurped" control over the improvement district, and he announced on Monday that the state legislature is drafting a bill to reassert control over the area.

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Chris Christie bashes Ron DeSantis over war on Disney: 'I thought that's what liberals did' - Fox News