TRANSCRIPT:
(This transcript is derived from an automated process. The video recording is authoritative.)
Kevin Martin:
Unlike the young Scott Prasser, I have actually been a member of the Liberal Party since the early 1960s, and I have campaigned for the liberal party from the early 1960s, and I was there at end of Menzies Holt, McMahon, Whitlam, et cetera, et cetera, and I have to say the liberal party has never been in as bad a position in Australia as it is today. In those days, it was the natural party of government in Australia Today, it is the party that will never get back into government again except for a miracle. I've titled this Talk with the Liberals. One of the great things about the liberal party was that it had generally good leaders and leaders are important. Leadership is important. It's the ability to influence others. What do we look for in a leader? Have a look. There's 20 different points that a leader should exhibit. Ask yourself, have the liberal leaders, particularly since Abbott held any or many of those items, I would argue no.
Political leadership is important. Political leadership is the means why by which the individuals and groups influence and guide a community. It's the guiding of the community, the expression of a view as to where the community should be going and telling the community how you are going to get there that will bark a true political leader. Oops, I hit the wrong button. What do we seek in a political leader? We seek vision. We seek the capacity to communicate. We seek decisiveness. We seek emotional and intelligence, and we seek authenticity. Frankly, Turnbull Morrison and sadly Peter Dutton did not display any of those qualities.
Good political leaders from the conservative side. I've just picked three Churchill, Reagan, Thatcher and the World scene and Menzies Howard and Johannes Bjelke-Petersen on the Australian seat. You knew where each of those leaders stood. You knew what they stood for. You knew that if you voted for them and for their policies, you were going to get what you have voted for. You knew that Australia or the state or the country was safe in their hands. That's the mark of true leadership. Our current leaders, I don't believe are safe hands at all. Now, Australian liberalism, it's a peculiar beast because it's always been an amalgam of conservative and small liberal principles.
Howard described it as a broad church. Menzie said it was the forgotten people who were being pul. In other words, Australian liberalism is not a narrow focused sect driven by strong ideology that is not prepared to think and listen about different views. Australian liberalism is a pragmatic form of political belief. It means that we can look at the challenges of the times, develop and apply policies that address those challenges, but those policies are always founded on the fundamental principles upon which Australian liberalism is based. And to my mind, that is best summarised in the principles that Menzies laid down back in the 1940s in We believe you don't find the liberal party today developing policies, expressing support for or applying policy using those principles. What we've seen, particularly since the end of the Howard era in Australia, is the liberal parties moved away from those fundamental principles and it has become completely dominated by faction.
These factions have sought to change society in accord with a different approach from traditional liberal principles on issues such as personal responsibility, sexual preference, feminism, environmentalism. The role of government, and I hate to say it, playing personal greed in the term be era successive leaders have failed to provide the political leadership needed in accordance with the fundamental principles of we believe, oh God, my technological efforts. Now the reality is society is changing and society's always changing. The great problem has been the liberal party hasn't been prepared to challenge question query, and if necessary oppose many of those societal changes that have occurred in Australia. We have stood back in the liberal party and allowed the family to decline as the fundamental building block of our society. We've removed family and individual responsibility and replaced it by increased reliance upon the state. The state now provides child rearing, child education, housing, individual incomes care for the aged and the disabled.
We no longer have personal responsibility for one's actions. We see that just in the increase in criminality in our community today. The young people who run riot commit crimes and are not forced to confront the consequences of their actions. The legal system gives them a tut. Don't do that and go out and commit crime even further. We no longer have personal responsibility. When has the liberal party been arguing for personal responsibility? We failed to address issues of economic management. We've encouraged growth and government expenditure without any relevant economic development and growth. The money can come from somewhere. Frydenberg Morrison government broke the dam about any economic restraint in Australia. The community now believes that there is no limit to the amount of money that Australia can get. It's way our debt is going up time, after time, after time, our debt that we are burdening our children's with the responsibility of repaying.
Does anyone in the liberal party argue against that? No. Every time the Labour Party puts up a spending programme, we match it. Oh, no. We don't want to be seen to be opposing expenditure. 50 cent traffic fairs here in Queensland by the so-called LNP Conservative and Small Sea Government, they're spending money like drunken sailors. We're going to have a horror budget and we're not going to have next week any restraint being imposed by this government. Why? Because they seem to think that money just grows on trees. Other societal changes that we have not even questioned the growth of internationalism through the United Nations in these world agencies we're still signing up and supporting in the liberal party, the diminution in our national sovereignty and handing over to a strange collection of socialists, communist radicals who comprise the United Nations and far be from anyone to query what the United Nations is on about are at a communist running the World Health Organisation.
Yet we in Australia have signed up to allow the World Health Organisation to determine policy in the future when there isn't the next pandemic as there no doubt will be. Given the nature of the way in which the world has evolved, we've allowed free trade to destroy and deindustrialized Australia. Oh, great. We've had a marvellous time selling off all our natural resources. We can't manufacture glass in Australia. We can't manufacture anything in Australia nowadays of any degree of sophistication. It's all coming in from China and India and places like that. We've allowed technology to grow. We've allowed technology to become the play thing of multinational companies. We as a nation, as a sovereign nation and we in the liberal party have not attempted to challenge that at all. Those corporations are not responsible to any government. They're only responsible to themselves that all they're interested about is money and power, and are we prepared to challenge it? Are we prepared to query it? No. We've accepted that when you get a pandemic like COVID, which is merely one of innumerable pandemics that have gone on for the centuries and will continue to occur, we've accepted that government has the right to control everything you do to keep you confined to your home, to punish you and shoot you with rubber bullets and jail You if you dare to challenge the draconian policies that the government of the day imposes.
Now, we've ceded control of our education system to those forces that seek to control and train society and are opposed to our traditional values such as critical thinking and our Judeo-Christian cultural history. And whether we like it or not, Australia is a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles. Our institutions, our rights, our responsibilities, our laws, our society and its structures are all founded on those principles, but we now allow that to be challenged willy-nilly. You talk to any child nowadays coming out of the education system, their mind has been warped. They have no capacity for critical thinking. They just regurgitate the godly goop that they have been taught by the education system and where do we find the party being prepared to challenge that? No, our education minister would in Queensland would rather go off to an arts conference than get down and do the hard work at looking at curriculum and controlling the way in which our teachers are educated than the way in which they implicate our children.
We accept cultural relativism. All forms of society norms are to be supported by society. There is no right or wrong anymore. Everything is okay. It has led to the types of society that we have today, and I have to say I for one, do not believe society that treats women as second class citizens is a cultural norm that we should accept. I don't believe we should accept things such as female genital mutilation or slavery or treating people as being less than worthy. Yet if we are going to have this Sharia law recognised in Australia as the United Kingdom is now recognising it, that is the consequence of the appellation or the application of that type of legal system. Women are second class citizens. Women are property. Women do not deserve to be treated as equals to men and we're sold. Oh no, it's all multiculturalism. Cultural relevance.
We let people do their own thing in their own time. One of the great problems too is no one on our side of politics is prepared to stand up to the woke agenda and the media pile on that occur too much. Too many of our politicians are guided by public opinion polls and what the clickbait is saying on Tinder and Twitter and all the rest of these other things. I don't know half of them strange beyond me. Another great problem for the liberal party, our party organisation has collapsed once political parties in Australia were mass parties. They involved people Nowadays, both the liberal party and the Labour Party are dying. Organisations you only get active members should really be seeing itself when you see the Greens in action or the teals of some of these single issue candidates. The reality is the liberal party is now controlled by the Black hand group and they proudly call themselves the black hand.
They hold annual dinners each year where there's a federal council of the liberal party. They're the wets, they're the Birmingham's and the people of that ilk who were mentioned before who now control the liberal party across Australia who have forced the new leader lay upon us who are stuffing her office with their acolytes. They are the people who have brought the liberal party low to the condition it is today, and they control the liberal party here in Queensland too. Now, these factions, some of 'em are driven by the sexual revolution, particularly in New South Wales. The gay cabal that has run the New South Wales liberal party for the last 15 or 20 years is a site to behold when it's in operation. They are the type of people who create an image of the gay community that is that arch, typical bitchiness that people think that that people who are gay always exhibit those characteristics and they're the ones who have ruined the liberal party in New South Wales.
They've done the same in Victoria with PTO and Deming. No wonder we can't win an election when our very organisations are split apart on these fundamental issues. We've allowed this to occur. Factions. Factions are driving us into the ground. They're white handing everything. Now the reasons well the collapse of our Judeo-Christian underpinning our society, we've given an excessive emphasis on individual rights as opposed to collective responsibility. We've supported all these human rights bodies all over the place, anti-discrimination, commissions, rights for this, rights for that. Where have we been talking about the responsibility that goes with rights? Now, I've worked with the United Nations on the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on Economic, social and Cultural Rights. One thing in the Australian context we always forget is rights can only exist in the context of a society, a functioning operating society. You cannot have a situation as we have in Australia today where individual rights are given supremacy and the responsibilities that an individual owes to their family and society are ignored.
We've also fallen for this concept of universalism. We're all human beings. We're on this one small planet orbiting a sun and a big universe. We've all got to live together. It's great kumbaya, pot smoking, 1960s hippie theory, but it doesn't reflect the reality that where there are differences in society, they are historically based and they're not going to be got rid of for centuries to come. We can't have moral relativism. Not all behaviours are correct or appropriate. Cultural differences do exist, and they shouldn't be forced to be accepted by our traditional society. Now look what we should be doing. We should be looking to the fundamental principles upon which our society was based and they basically come out of the enlightenment. A good summary for the liberals is still, we believe now this book, dinghy and Prosperity, is a good summary of the issues facing the liberal party of Australia today because of its failure to go back to its fundamental principles, it's written by authors who largely reflect a conservative approach.
That conservative element of the great Australian liberal principle. I'd recommend you read it and think about it. It's a couple of years old now, but the issues are still relevant to us today. Now, I have to say, if the Turnbull Morrison and Dutton campaigns that reflected those principles, we might've had different outcomes, but what has happened, we've just collapsed. We've got to get Australia's economy under control. We've got to stop spending and borrowing. We have got to educate the community that you can only spend by taking from the community. We've got to stop using budgets to subsidise what the government of the day ideologically approved on. We've got a focus policy on all areas on the family as the fundamental societal unit. Oops, I did it again.
We've got to focus policies to improve individual initiative and responsibility. We've got to protect the right of the ownership of economic assets and the rights of people to profit there from. It's only when people earn a profit that they invest, that economic activity occurs and that economic growth occurs, and Australia is not achieving economic growth. Our per person productivity in this country has been declining for years now and will continue to decline if we continue the policies we have been pursuing. We've got to look at our long-term population interests and population and migration, trade and development, environmental protection, enhanced societal value through shared Australian cultural values, and we've got to turn our parties back to mass based parties. We've got to be prepared to be different from the status quo. Be prepared to challenge what the media and the mob say. We've got to base our policies on our fundamental principles. Liberalism is the Judeo-Christian values of a democratic society with enlightened values that respects the rights of the individual while acknowledging the necessity of collective actions in appropriate circumstances. We also need to be Australian, not worry about the latest international fad, be it from the President of the United States or the Prime Minister of England or France or whoever it is. It's Australia, it Australians. Our future is in Australia. Our life is in Australia, and we must focus upon Australia.
These are the fundamental principles that we believe. The crown, the individual, the rule of law, the spirit of the volunteer that writes connote duties. Government assists in the development of the personality. Liberty, the class. War is a false war. Liberalism means flexibility and progress. National financial and economic power are not to be designed to control men's lives. We believe in the great human freedoms, social justice, religious and racial tolerance among our citizens. All forms of industry, primary, secondary, or otherwise depend upon one another, and we also believe that under divine providence, Australia can and will succeed. Why has the liberal party moved away from this? Why has it followed the latest fad told to them by some media guru, some influencer? Why has it abandoned it? It has abandoned it because the proof's in the pudding. We are in a bad position now, but the path is clear. The path is there. What we have to do is get people of goodwill to band together, go back to our fundamental principles and build a political organisation based upon broad scale membership and based upon what is best ultimately for the future of our Australian nation. Thank you. You as a straight shooter. Excellent, excellent. Thank you.
