Killing Amanda Stoker

Numbers persons like McGrath – a numbers man for Malcolm T, no less – attract support in this day and age, whether deserved or not. (How a Senate candidate who was once an apparatchik of middling skill-set can help to win an election is not readily apparent). Scott Morrison and Barry O'Farrell are other examples of middling skill-set backroom boys.

The Queensland pre-selectors' sense of the big ideas battles to be fought and won was borderline non-existent. In their minds, the role of a parliamentary representative is reduced, perhaps unsurprisingly absent any core agreement about philosophy in the ranks of Liberals, to retail politics. Yes, this is a sad reality. But it needs to be called out, repeatedly, and to be exposed as a prime example of the political deficit in contemporary Australia.

What about the "captain's pick"? The reaction by pre-selectors demonstrates that the spirit of Joh and the presumed war of Queensland against "southerners" persists deep into the twenty-first century. Joh's political longevity was powered by them-and-us. It still works!

The pre-selection shows, yet again, that the voting blocks and the factions still dominate outcomes. Real talent is ignored, especially conservative talent. Deals, paybacks and stitch-ups rule. It is unedifying. This was the modus operandi of the once relevant Labor Party. It clearly jumped the aisle.

Should any of this astonish? Probably not. The Liberal Party is now a low-rent operation populated by mediocre millennials, careerists, rent-seekers and chancers. Apparently at the level of the "base", as well. Not for Queensland the spirit of the Tea Party and the principled, righteous populists of what the Queenslander pre-selectors would probably dismiss as the Trumpian "alt-right".

Not much of this is remotely surprising, of course. Politics in this country is now a lowest common denominator game, played for minimal spoils by those who simply turn up. Little wonder that Stoker's conservative colleagues like Kelly, Flint and Christensen are jumping ship. Kevin Andrews was shafted, just like Eric Abetz.

Perhaps the scariest comment by a pre-selector was that which stated that "we don't want a culture warrior". This is either an admission of abject defeat in these wars or, worse, a confirmation of the fact that the Liberal Party has lost all interest in conservatism as a guiding set of principles and ideas, and has also lost its former spine. Lost interest in fighting the fights that matter. In flaying the ideological enemy. Disdaining matters of high principle as a matter of course is not a good look. Those pesky, second-order issues like the right-to-life, the survival of the family, patriotism, the collapse of our education system, prosperity, the rule of law, and lost basic rights and freedoms. We can park all. We just want to win elections and look after our mates. Put brutally, any Liberal who does not understand the culture wars has no business to be voting for our elected representatives.

The Queensland Liberal Party is, like its fellow Eastern State Divisions, a creature of creepily weird factional groupings which have little connect with the real world of families, workers and everyday struggles. And the Queensland version of factional wars is especially underwhelming, based as it has always been on attachments to personalities of indifferent ability and its Joh Wars overhang. What a mess it is up north.

The outcome of the recent carnage in Brisbane is that we will face an unfortunate and possibly unedifying contest next time around between Amanda Stoker and the ageing and still effective warrior Pauline Hanson, a personage of long-term commitment to the values held by many of us who would be normally expected to cheer on Amanda.

The pre-selection will merely concentrate the minds of right-of-centre ("club sensible") voters who might reasonably be expected to conclude that the Liberal Party is no longer the answer, whatever the considerable merits of Senator Stoker.