White Ants Gonna White Ant

Termites eat the Liberal Party from the inside out

Why does Tasmanian Liberal MP Bridget Archer stay in the Liberal Party?

The better question is why the Liberal Party suffer her to remain.

Archer, who has voted against her own party no less than 27 times, wasted no time last week telling the media she would not support her party’s opposition to the Voice.

Big surprise. Honestly, these days its news when Archer does support her own party!

The Liberal Party meeting to decide on a referendum position had barely broken up last week before Archer was telling all and sundry that she would be doing her own thing.

She declared she would not follow the Coalition’s opposition to the Voice and would instead join the ‘yes’ campaign.

“I think we need to elevate this issue (the Voice) above divisive, nasty politics and walk together into the future with unity, with purpose, for a united Australia,” Ms Archer told ABC Radio National on Thursday.

If only the rest of the Liberal Party was as righteous as Ms Archer.

Archer would never engage in “divisive, nasty politics”.

Archer is all about “unity”.

Apart from when she’s retweeting comments by Labor politicians accusing her Liberal leader of a “dog act”, I mean.

Among the responses to the article Archer retweeted - an article she is now promoting on her own Twitter feed - were multiple tweets describing her leader as a “dog”.

One person said that Peter Dutton, a former police officer, had been given “a tin of dog food as a going away present” when he resigned from Queensland Police.

Another asked if the opposition leader had “taken over Pauline Hanson as the most racist person in our country”.

But, I mean, apart from promoting all of that via her Twitter feed, Bridget Archer is all about unity and supporting her party.

Oh, and there was this other tweet where she describes accusations that her leader was the “undertaker of the Uluru Statement of the Heart”, as “important” and “powerful”.

But seriously, other than those two tweets, she’s very committed to walking into the future with unity and stuff like that.

Well, I mean, except for this other retweet of an activist who describing Archer’s Liberal leader as “shameful”.

Or maybe that was a butt tweet. Who knows?

The member for Bass was one of five MPs who reportedly spoke in favour of the Voice to Parliament during the Liberal party’s marathon party room meeting last week.

As was her right.

But she failed to convince colleagues of her argument. The party voted instead to oppose the Voice.

Archer, being all about unity, left the party room to start tweeting nasty and divisive things in order to demonstrate that there must be an end to nastiness and divisiveness.

Archer told Sky News she had considered leaving the party but decided to tweet smack instead, er, I mean “remain and reform the Liberals from within”.

The old stay and white-ant, ahem, “reform” from within routine.

It does beg the question … why reform the Liberal Party into the Greens when the Greens already exist, and would gladly welcome Archer into their fold?

Meanwhile, shadow cabinet member Simon Birmingham, has said he will not support the shadow cabinet’s decision to oppose the Voice.

Don’t worry though. He’s not quitting the shadow cabinet to take a lower wage on the backbench.

Why should he?

He’s not actually opposing the shadow cabinet decision, he’s just not supporting it. If you can’t see the difference that’s because you lack the special self-serving perspective that only white-anters possess.

And he’s not quitting as the Liberal Party’s Senate leader either, despite the fact that he will not campaign for the Liberal Party’s position on the Voice.

It’s not like he’s campaigning against it. He’s just not campaigning for it. Again, it’s white-anter logic.

Sky News Chief News Anchor Kieran Gilbert asked Birmingham if he would “follow suit and quit the front bench over the Voice” as his colleague Julian Lesser had done.

Birmingham replied “that’s not my intention”, and then spoke for a full minute about how Julian Lesser, the former Shadow Indigenous Affairs Minister, “has a long and deep history on this issue” and should be listened to etc, etc, etc, etc.

When Birmingham finally stopped eulogising Julian Lesser in order to avoid talking about his own duplicitousness, Gilbert asked:

“Will you campaign for a no vote?”

Birmingham replied “well that’s equally not my intention” before talking for more than a minute and a half about how the Australian people would vote (no kidding) and about how there were different aspects to the vote (no joking) and about how some people say some things and other people say some other things.

Riiiiight.

Gilbert asked:

“Can I ask you, at a personal level, will you vote “yes” in the ballot box when it comes to that referendum?

To which Birmingham replied:

“Well every Australia is going to enjoy the normal secret ballot of this type of process.”

In other words … “not telling”.

An exasperated Gilbert tried one more time:

“In this context of a Voice, you haven’t considered standing aside?”

“Look, I haven’t considered doing so at this stage Kieran,” Birmingham replied, before launching into a two minute monologue about how much he admired Julian Lesser.

So the Liberals Senate leader will not campaign for the Liberal position. Nor will he vote for the Liberal position. But he will remain in the position of Liberal Senate Leader.

The one thing you can be sure of in the modern Liberal Party is white-ants gonna white-ant.