Disraeli switches gears

Sir: Malcolm Turnbull’s statement that Liberals are not Conservatives finally settles a question that has puzzled me ever since I first began to study Australian politics. If the Liberals and the Conservatives were the two rival powers for all of nineteenth Century British politics, how could the Liberal party in Australia consider itself Conservative? Gladstone and Disraeli were the leaders of these two parties and their rivalry for government dominated much of Queen Victoria’s reign, yet there was this anomaly that the Australian Liberal party was actually Conservative!

This struck me as being a contradiction in terms.