Let’s talk quotas, ignoring social media morons and Trump’s toughness. The first topic has to do with all those laments about the supposed dearth of Liberal women MPs. Ignoring the more or less woeful job performance of Kelly ‘Steal our Core Voters’ Superannuation’ O’Dwyer, Marise ‘Sergeant Social-Engineer-in-Chief’ Payne and Julie ‘Stab Abbott in the Back and then moan when no one votes for me’ Bishop, these lamenters claim that who gets picked to run for parliament can’t be left to paid-up Liberal party members.  Some say the Libs need quotas for women, some sort of affirmative action type policy.

And have you noticed how often it is high up, well-off white men who demand these quotas? This really annoys me. I can understand it when women demand the quotas. They’re wrong in my view. But at least there’s a healthy dose of self-interest behind the demand. With the high- up men it’s all virtue-signalling, with the costs to be borne by others, never by them.  Now if Peter van Onselen or Craig Laundy were to say, ‘I am going to step down from my job and I’d like to be replaced by a woman’ there would be a certain consistency and lack of hypocrisy. But these types never say that. Their support for quotas is without cost to them personally.  Presumably these high-up men who push quotas believe that they themselves actually earned their jobs and deserve them.  The non-merit principle, then, is one they don’t want inflicted on themselves. That makes such pleas little more than the worst sort of sickening virtue-signalling. When a high-up man calls for quotas, ask if he’s prepared to stand down immediately from his own job in favour of a woman. If not, tell him to shut up.

And note, too, that any talk of ‘targets’ is just a disguised version of quotas. Either you believe in merit, and that it is better for the Liberals (and, indeed, any organisation) to choose candidates based on merit, or you don’t. Any weasel words, or half-disguised pleas to have it both ways – to pay lip service to merit but aim for top-down social engineering outcomes – is just a call for quotas without the courage of one’s (wrong-headed) convictions. We have too little merit-based consideration in the choosing of Liberal candidates, not too much. The influence of Michael Photios in NSW is living proof of that.

Let’s change topics now to the role of social media and many people’s despair that all the Facebook frenzies and Twitter outcries over this, that and the other thing are seriously undermining free speech, free debate and the whole wonderful edifice we inherited from the Enlightenment. This is the despair that flows from thinking rational discussion is growing harder and harder in the West because of the Twitter thugs and social media bullies who unwittingly mimic aspects of China’s Cultural Revolution and in hysterical terms call out any perceived breaches of the accepted orthodoxy. And of course the diagnosis here is correct. But the remedy is pretty simple in my view. Just ignore them all. Look at Boris Johnson in Britain and his comments on the burqa.  The reaction was incendiary amongst the massively left-leaning social media minions. And do you know what Boris did?  Nothing. He refused to apologise. He stood by his views. And it all died down as he became even more popular, not just amongst Tory party members but amongst voters at large. If you thought about your opinion and believed it was well-founded then the best response to vitriolic abuse is to never back down. If those running universities, companies and governments paid next to no attention to the social media types such types would have very little influence. After all, they represent such a tiny minority, and are mostly fully paid-up lefties at that. So how about all of the movers and shakers in Australia make a pledge to stop being princesses and henceforth never to cave in to any social media campaigns? Or is it that a lot of the people running our universities and companies are pretty Left themselves and agree with the unrepresentative views found on social media? Is that the real problem?

And that brings me to President Trump. One of the main reasons I supported the man when he was running against Lyin’ Hillary, and why I predicted he’d win the election, is that I had the sense he was someone who would fight back; a brawler who’d not cave in to the ever uglier politics coming from the Left.  So many politicians nominally on the right in the UK, Canada, Australia and the US have no fight in them. They cave in at the first sign of trouble. So maybe what was needed was a streetfighter. And that’s sort of the deal voters made who supported Trump. Notice, then, that the Don’s kept every single promise he made to the voters that has been in his power to keep – every single one of them. If Tony Abbott had done that and refused to cave in on s.18C or on higher taxes no matter what advice he was being given or no matter how many of his Liberal MPs threatened to cross the floor then in my view he’d still be PM (which in no way goes against my view that Tony was still miles better than Malcolm).

Look at the political courage Trump is exhibiting right now over his nominee for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh.  The Democrats have plumbed the depths in opposing Mr Kavanaugh, because they desperately need the unelected judges to deliver the various social policy programs they know they can’t get through the elected legislature. Kavanaugh believes judges should interpret legal texts so that their meaning is locked in by the original meaning and does not change over time, with the judges somehow acting as Delphic Oracles with their fingers mystically on the pulse of changing social values.  So the Democrats will seemingly stop at nothing to stop Kavanaugh. If he’s confirmed, judicial activists will be in a minority for the first time in some years. So the Dems, having thrown the kitchen sink at the man, now allege that 37 years ago, in high school, he groped a class mate. She made no complaint to anyone at the time or for decades. When she told her therapist a few years ago (no names mentioned) the therapist’s notes talk of four men in the room, not two.  The other man denies anything of the sort happened. The Democrats want the nomination pulled. Trump says ‘no’ he will not pull the rug from Kavanaugh (though God knows about the spineless Republican Senators who control this). Oh, and a recent poll showed a significant majority of US women don’t believe the accuser.

My point though is: do you think a Liberal PM here or a Tory PM in the UK would have Trump’s cojones or would they fold like a wet blanket in the face of the public broadcaster’s onslaught?