It’s amusing to watch, in the usual dark way, as the Liberal Party of Australia gives all Australians a wonderful lesson in how not to run an organisation and nation.
In all groups of people without strong governing normatives or checks and balances, the practical truth is that certain unwholesome personality types come to dominate.
Without putting too fine a point on it, the psychopathic climb the greasy pole of politics better than the merited because they are prepared to over-invest the time and effort in doing so when more balanced folk are not.
This is as true at the community club as it is at the large corporation or government. It is a danger to all organisations that are unaware of the risk and have don’t have processes to prevent it.
It is a particular danger within the realms of the neoliberal political economy given the moral imperative of the heroic individual is so well suited to psychopathic manipulation. The so-called “snakes in suits”.
This is why the best elite recruitment services also specialise in the identification of charismatic psychopaths. Once unleashed at the top, the psycho will cause untold damage to the resource base of any organisation.
Alas for LNP, this is where it finds itself today. Successive and convulsive failures of governance have allowed a “psycho” to rise to the seat of party leadership and prime minister and, inevitably, it is now being torn apart at every level.
With this unutterable truth now defining the federal ranks for the public, why has the party not set about the process of inquiry and probity that will bring the sunlight to cure itself?
Because it is doing what the psychopath always does instead. Unleashing the witch hunt! That is, covering over the psychopathic with the psychopathic!
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has called on the Liberal cabinet minister who allegedly called Scott Morrison a “complete psycho” in a leaked text to former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian to come forward.
Speaking in Tamworth today, Mr Joyce said “like 3000 people” knew who the minister was.
If you are wondering why it is that Morrison’s psychos are unable to grasp the obvious, that we can all now see what they are doing, and every further step into cannibalism reinforces not assuages general alarm, it is because they have no such insight. The psychopath knows only one way. To bully, gaslight, blame and divide. That is who he is. He does not have access to the basics of empathetic humanity to understand or even see it any other way. There is no cure for him. Nor can the destruction be stopped so long as he is in a position to wreak it.
This is particularly the case when real leadership is required in a crisis, such as during a national pandemic. This is when the “psycho’s” lack of real leadership tools – moral centre, judgement, reason – are exposed and things fall apart with spectacular speed.
Indeed, chaos in the federal ranks of the LNP is only the tip of the iceberg. At the state level, the LNP is, if anything, even more sundered by the “psycho”.
There his minions have wreaked havoc as they seek to recruit greater numbers of aligned and unquestioningly loyal sectarian sleazebags. As we know. “Psycho” Morrison’s lieutenant, Alex Hawke, has helped create a factional firestorm by seeking to install the Psycho’s favoured state candidates, but it has blown up spectacularly, and now, in typical “psycho” fashion, Morrison is blaming them as he readies a takeover:
NSW Liberals are warning a worsening factional battle will spark “civil war” in the seat of Hughes ahead of the federal election and party members in the south Sydney electorate will not accept a candidate being imposed on them.
…“We cannot ask our branch members to hand out on election day, man stands, help for hours on polling days if we do not give them the chance to have their say. It is absolutely outrageous,” the senior party member said.
With the party yet to select candidates in a number of key seats including Hughes, Dobell and Tony Abbott’s former seat of Warringah, Mr Morrison on Wednesday told the warring factions to end their “childish games”.
Speaking on 2GB, Mr Morrison described the internal stoush as “factional rubbish” and warned NSW party officials may need to “get out of the way” to allow the federal executive to endorse candidates if there were further delays.
Gaslighting 101. Make people mad then point them out as mad to discredit and manipulate.
Even at the local level, the Liberal Party is showing all the signs of gaslit disintegration. Recall that in recent Sydney elections, many liberals refused to even preselect as they fought off the insurgency of the “psycho”:
At the heart of it is Scott Morrison’s New South Wales consigliore, Alex Hawke.
…Since 2007, Hawke has been the member for the electorate of Mitchell, part of the outer north-western “Bible Belt” of Sydney. He is currently a member of the Morrison cabinet and minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs. Like Morrison, he is of Pentecostal faith. More importantly for this story, he is the leader of the Morrison faction in NSW, the centre-right, and is Morrison’s appointed delegate on the party’s state executive.
The other two, larger factions are the right, sometimes called the hard right, which is the faction of Premier Dominic Perrottet, and the moderate or left faction, led by the treasurer and minister for Energy and Environment, Matt Kean.
Hawke is reviled by both.
As one senior right faction member says, Hawke “has used his time as Morrison’s representative on the state executive in an endeavour to advance their factional position to the detriment of both the conservatives and the moderates – to the point now where the conservatives and the moderates are in an alliance against Hawke. And that means against Morrison.”
The anti-Hawke feeling goes beyond institutional opposition. It is personal. Like his prime ministerial mentor, Hawke is hard-charging and abrasive. While the left and right have in recent years come to a sometimes-uneasy agreement in sharing the spoils of power, Hawke has a winner-takes-all approach. It has come back to bite him, his boss and the party.
Australians already know in their bones the truth about the “Psycho” Morrison regime. Even the psychologically uninitiated can see something is horribly wrong when rape and pillage define our national parliament. Morrison’s psychos have overseen the rise of this toxic ethos, as well as openly and obviously covered it up and systematically lied about it.
We should all doff our hats to the secret cabinet minister that has given the sickness the label that it deserves. It is an immense relief to the populace. Such knowledge sweeps away the gaslighting and leaves awareness in its place that “it is not me, it is him”. That will be the defining sentiment at the forthcoming election.
Hopefully the devastating defeat will exorcise these demons from the Liberal Party. If not, they will devour it permanently.
