There’s no stopping “Psycho” Morrison. He’s on a mission from his dark and hungry god:
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has taken the first move to dissolving the Liberal Party’s troubled NSW division, with the party’s federal executive voting to give state officials 10 days to “rectify” their issues and endorse sitting MPs or face a federal takeover.
It is the first step toward placing the division in administration and allowing Mr Morrison and the federal party to install preferred candidates in key seats ahead of the election, expected in May. But the move will be fiercely resisted by some in the NSW division, especially from the Right faction.
…A standoff over those and other preselections in Mr Morrison’s home state means the party still lacks candidates in key winnable seats, even as the Coalition used this fortnight’s parliamentary session to flick the switch to campaign mode.
Some NSW Liberals have complained the preselection process was actually stalled by Mr Morrison and his representative on state executive, Immigration Minister Alex Hawke, in order to justify the federal intervention that is now underway.
…“Members of the state executive will be taking that matter to court should they try to do that,” one official said on condition of anonymity. “All we want to do is give party members the vote that they so duly deserve in plebiscites.
“The Prime Minister needs to remember that he’s no longer the state director of the NSW division.”
Yes, he is. He was appointed by god and nothing will stand in the way of that. What is going on is classic gaslighting by Morrison lieutenants:
In an email sent to members late on Wednesday, Senator Fierravanti-Wells, who is fighting for a ballot of members to go ahead which she believes would secure her senate position, said the move was “intended to advance the position of a handful of factional players”.
“There is a very small group within our party who want to deliver certain seats to their preferred candidates, trampling on the rights of the membership and thereby obstructing the constitution,” Fierravanti-Wells said in the letter.
“By failing/refusing to carry out their obligations these few people are creating such delay in NSW preselections that they can then mount an argument that the NSW division is dysfunctional and that plebiscite preselections be substituted with automatic endorsements. They create the dysfunction, and then use it as an excuse to get what they want.
“These few people are working hard to create a situation where preselection of candidates by plebiscite of members is destroyed. They are afraid that your opinion will be different from theirs, and their preferred candidate or even themselves, will not get endorsement.”
She singled out the prime minister’s representative on state executive, the immigration minister Alex Hawke, for failing to “carry out his party functions as a member of the nomination review committee in a timely manner.”
Make ’em mad then blame ’em for it! Psychopolitics 101 but usually reserved for the enemy!
So, why attack your own party? Recall:
At the heart of it is Scott Morrison’s New South Wales consigliore, [fellow Pentecostal] 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.
Everybody is your enemy if they stand in the way of the Second Coming. That’s the objective:
Scott Morrison may be Australia’s second most famous Pentecostal after his mentor, Hillsong founder Brian Houston, but he is far from the norm. Those who subscribe to the youthful, feel-good, glam-rock, self-help teachings of the Pentecostal church tend not to be white, 50-something and male.
“The Filipina who cleans your house is more your average Pentecostal,” says Elle Hardy, author of a new book on the global rise of the Pentecostal church.
…Pentecostals are increasingly “concerned with the here and now”, says Hardy, and that secular society, or the elites, are taking over the world and they need to fight back.
“Reshaping America and the world so that Christ can return just so happens to look a lot like gaining power in the here and now,” writes Hardy.
…Hardy makes the point that Christian Dominionism is about seeing a religiously run America that conforms to Pentecostal values.
“It’s pretty clear that a lot on the religious right in America have given up on democracy, they know they have lost the battle, and you hear instead the line that the US is a republic, not a democracy,” Hardy says.
“It’s about conquering and victory. That’s where the seven mountains come in because if you can control the seven pillars of society, you can transform society.”
Donald Trump was a gift to the Pentecostalists. His rise, along with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, lies in no small part to the rise of Pentecostals. The movement has a penchant for populist, strong-arm leaders with a flair for entertaining the masses, on one hand, while simultaneously scorning the cultural Marxists with their post-modern notions of gay marriage, gender identity, racial and sexual equality.
A 2019 US study found that 53 per cent of Pentecostals agreed that Trump had been anointed by God.
“Long a shelter for the marginalised and the dispossessed, in an age of gross inequality, Pentecostalism is becoming synonymous with an anti-liberal worldview,” writes Hardy.
Along with a raft of other bad actors, Hardy says it comes as little surprise that the “Stop the Steal” storming of the Capitol in Washington DC on January 6, 2021 involved 7M soldiers.
As one pastor who spoke to the crowd that day put it: “We are not just in a culture war, we are in a kingdom war.” At the same time, a Pentecostal magazine put up a Facebook post that said: “There are but two parties right now, traitors and patriots.”
Morrison’s “kingdom war” brokers no opposition. Not even Liberal. After all, they’re going to hell!
Let’s hope that the LNP party faithful stands up to this psychopolitics and does what they did in local elections, run no candidates at all, to prevent the rise of Morrison’s sectarian sleaze cult.
