Liberal MP Kelly O’Dwyer says Liberals are now viewed as “homophobic”
Image: Kelly O'Dwyer. Image: ABC News.
Cabinet minister Kelly O’Dwyer has said her colleagues in the Liberal Party are regarded as “homophobic, anti-women, climate change deniers” by the general public, according to the Herald Sun.
O’Dwyer reportedly made the comment during a 90-minute post-election meeting of federal Liberal MPs in Victoria earlier this week, adding that “it’s not who we are as Liberals”.
She blamed “ideological” warriors who had recruited members from conservative religious groups as a means to hijack the Liberal Party’s positions on social issues, and said the “crusades” of some MPs had reinforced the view that Liberals were anti-gay.
The meeting – which was attended by Prime Minister Scott Morrison – was held amid warnings of an electorate wipe out after Victorian Labor’s landslide victory at the state election over the weekend.
Victorian opposition leader Matthew Guy has previously come under fire from the LGBTI community, for his opposition to Safe Schools and silence on a number of key issues identified as priorities for sexual and gender diverse people.
During the state election over the weekend, experts forecast that 55 seats would likely go to Labor in the state’s lower house.
In Victoria’s upper house, the ABC’s election computer calculated that Labor would increase its numbers from 14 to 19, while the Liberals’ numbers were forecast to decrease from 14 to 9.
Early last year Kelly O’Dwyer announced $14,975 in funding for the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA) to help it digitise outtakes from a classic documentary about the events leading up to and including Sydney’s first Mardi Gras.
Good accurate commentary from Dave and a pity Mickey falls into the trap of relaying inaccuracies. In 2004 some, not all of the Liberals initiated the change to the marriage act to prevent SSM and the MP’s had to vote along party lines aided by a lot of the Labor MPs who supported passing the legislation.
Turnbull in the face of a deal done when he grabbed the leadership was not delaying anything – but he had limited options to get it through due to the Tony Abbots, Eric Abetz and Cory Bernardi in the party. He was not the one to blame for the delay.
The fact is Liberals in general are not anti gay as some in our community would like everyone to believe – and there are a lot of gays who identify as being basically Liberal supporters. Not all gays follow a left wing bent. It is therefore not correct to generalise that all Libs are anti gay but it is very accurate to say that over recent times the ultra right within the party have done everything they could to frustrate reform no matter what the consequences and for that the party is now paying the price.
Menzies’ vision for the Liberal Party of Australia was a broad church party with both conservative and liberal threads. I emphasise that by ‘conservative’ I refer to the British conservative tradition (think the Queen for exhibit A) and by ‘liberal’ I again refer to the British liberal tradition, John Stuart Mill and all that. I certainly don’t mean conservative or liberal in their modern American usage, which mean vastly different things to what these words meant to Menzies.
The likes of Abbott, Bernardi, Abetz and Christiansen are not conservatives in any way Menzies would have approved. They are reactionaries. They dismiss science if it’s inconvenient. They promote religion in politics, not secularism which is at the cornerstone of what made Britain great during the two hundred years after 1750. They favour discrimination on all sorts of grounds, contrary to the efforts of intelligent British conservatives who successfully backed the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK years before Don Dunstan started this process in South Australia.
These chaps from staunchly catholic or continental European protestant backgrounds wouldn’t know traditional British conservatism if it bit them on the arse. They are trashing the Liberal Party every day with their US-style grandstanding, their divisiveness, their culture wars and their terrible lies.
The funniest aspect to this is that they’re terrible at being reactionaries. They’ve greatly diminished “religious freedom” by whinging that there wasn’t enough of it. Their denial of science is now causing industry to back away from the Libs. Their grandstanding about the Israeli embassy has turned into an international embarrassment which will result in a humiliating backdown for ScoMo.
Either the Liberal Party reclaims its proper ground or voters are going to do this for it, but either way Abbott is the best thing the ALP have going for them during the lead up to the upcoming election.
Maybe we think they’re homophobic because the Liberal party LITERALLY changed the definition of marriage to exclude gay people in 2004.
Maybe we think they’re homophobic because when Turnbull was given the option to call a referendum, or even just put a policy position through the government, he instead called a PLEBISCITE, to delay the inevitable as long as possible.
And maybe we think they’re homophobic because Tony Abbott, who is know the politician all the Liberal media heads are saying should become prime minister STILL maintains that the gay marriage decision was wrong.