When Peter Dutton was voted into the leadership of the Liberal Party by his federal colleagues in 2022, they did so on the understanding that he was the pre-eminent hard man so revered by the hard men who now prevail in the party of Robert Menzies.

Menzies was an urbane scholar with a refined intellect and a sound understanding of the thinking of British Philosopher, John Locke, the father of liberalism, whose ideas he loosely used as the foundation of the Liberal Party he created in 1945.

Eighty years have passed since Menzies founded the Liberal Party and much has changed. The scholarly liberal credentials for which Menzies was so admired in the 1940s, 50s and 60s are regarded by most of his parliamentary successors these days as suspect qualities gained from university institutions that they increasingly dismiss as woke, and which they undermine by innuendo and cuts to funding.

The same doctrinaire men that have ruled the party since Tony Abbott’s federal cabinet now lament that the naturally submissive sex has lost her way and has become a hectoring movement of harpies and harlots with designs on castrating the young patriotic men who stand up for the unblemished values embodied in the British variant of Western civilisation. In increasing numbers, they see themselves as under existential threat in Australia on multiple fronts and are fighting back. They are energised by sitting at the feet of Canadian right-wing darling, Jordan Petersen, and by the adoption of two steadfast beliefs: one, that it’s okay to be white, and two, that it’s okay to be male.

What was once Menzies’ Liberal Party has now become a male bastion infiltrated by hard-line religious zealots who would have us believe that hordes of trans-gender women queue up to invade ladies change rooms with malign intent, who make every attempt to get sentenced into female prisons to mercilessly rape the female inmates, and who become elite athletes in order to unfairly dominate the athletic tracks of the world.

Menzies would hardly know what to make of his party, nor would he understand how it has elected into its leadership a man in Peter Dutton who was not unhappy to have himself described by his one-time party leader and prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, as a thug.

The Liberal Party hard man confirmed Turnbull’s moniker in August 2024 when he travelled to Israel to meet the ultimate global thug of the moment, Benjamin Netanyahu. Without authority to do so, he assured the Israeli leader that Australia supported his unrestrained slaughter of Palestinian citizens and that the illegal occupier of Gaza had........

© Pearls and Irritations