The ABC’s documentary series Nemesis has further exposed how ugly and broken our politics is.
The examination of the Coalition’s years in power under three Prime Ministers – Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison – exposes a toxic culture and on-going civil war within the Liberals and Nationals.
The Coalition is certainly a house divided with deep running hatreds that persist.
In sit down interviews for the program, obscenities are liberally used to describe each other with the F word the lingua franca of politics.
In one instance, Barnaby Joyce looks down the barrel of the camera and calls Malcolm Turnbull a “sh..head”.
Turnbull describes the current Liberal leader Peter Dutton as a “thug”. How he maintains his membership of the Liberal party is anyone’s guess.
Abbott declined to appear on the program, passing up the opportunity to “get square” in the same way others used Nemesis to offer free character assessments, justify their own actions and settle old scores.
Morrison comes out of it poorly with many colleagues asserting he played a double game in both leadership coups, something he denies.
After the chaos and bile of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd coups, no one expected the Coalition to follow suit.
But they did and Nemesis reveals the conservatives to be just as bad if not worse.
As someone involved in the same-sex marriage debate and 2017 plebiscite, Nemesis brought back old memories and reinforced that it was the Liberals who facilitated a policy that is unjust for children, has trampled freedom of speech and religion, and turbo-charged LGBTIQA+ gender-fluid ideology with disastrous consequences for families.
Leading left-wing figures in the Liberal party, such as Christopher Pyne, revelled in their opportunity to campaign for change while leading conservative figures like Morrison, squibbed the fight.
The failure of most senior Christian and conservative Liberals to get into the marriage debate in public left a vacuum which was filled by the Liberals’ gay activist parliamentarians and their supporters such as north Queensland MP Warren Entsch.
The public did not get to hear the other side of the argument as they did in the Voice debate where Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price stood up.
No significant Coalition figure stood up during the same-sex marriage plebiscite in the way Price did in 2023.
Turnbull clearly sees implementing the redefinition of marriage as the crowning achievement of his Prime Ministership.
The canary in the coal mine, Christian schools, have been fighting for their lives since with Morrison and Albanese both kicking the religious freedom can down the road as activists try and impose their new legal concept of gender on schools.
LGBTIQA+ activists hate the fact that there are schools which teach that marriage is heterosexual and that gender is binary and now that the Liberals facilitated same-sex marriage, Christian schools have the law against them.
Nemesis underscores the importance of the Family First party project.
We simply must have parliamentarians of character and principle elected.
Family First is not seeking to be a party of government, but it can over time through courageous and principled MPs, help shift politics to a place of civility where the national interest, not self-interest, is served.