Independents day
The defeated Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, described himself as “a bit of a bulldozer” in the last days of the election campaign – a hollow analogy he hoped might convince those dispirited by his overbearing manner that he recognised he needed to change.
It was too late. By then, Morrison had bulldozed the Liberal Party he led into an organisation almost unrecognisable to many who have supported it and had ensured it was the most successful political party of the nation’s past 80 years. Far from the broad church of conservatives and liberals that the party’s founder, Sir Robert Menzies, had intended when he started it in 1944, under Morrison it changed into a feckless lobby that traded in disparagement, punishment and fear.
