Free Republic

Freepers, please help me out with interpreting some recent political history. As I recall Ron DeSantis briefly surpassed Donald Trump as favourite for the 2024 GOP nomination after DeSantis condemned Australia as being "off the rails" and like communist China. Desantis' comments came at about the same time that Catholic former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott described Victoria Police in Melbourne, Australia, as being “……. lined up like stormtroopers …….” to stop a peaceful protest by “people who are sick and tired of (lockdown) restrictions which frankly are now becoming absolutely unreasonable”. Who else sees a connection here? I may...

Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott is one of far too few people in Australia who have condemned the police state tactics used against their political opponents by the socialist left Andrews government of the state of Victoria. This morning I witnessed a beating of a homeless man outside the parliament that looked very similar to what we have see far too often. Two young police officers holding a debilitated motionless unfortunate to the sidewalk while a third officer beat him with a truncheon. I don't know everything about what preceded the beating but the number of police present suggested...

Australia’s former prime minister Tony Abbott visited Taipei on Friday where he gave a speech urging the international community to show “solidarity” with the self-ruled island, resulting in a quick reaction out of China demanding that Canberra officails stay out of its internal affairs. Abbott provocatively told the conference that “any attempt at coercion would have incalculable consequences” for China and strongly suggested that both the United States and Australia would come to Taiwan’s aid militarily. “I don’t believe America could stand by and watch [Taiwan] swallowed up,” he said, added of his own country: “I don’t believe Australia would...

Socialist Left Premier Daniel Andrews in the Australian State of Victoria has had the most draconian lockdown laws in Australia during the C-19 pandemic and has achieved both the worst health results and the worst economic results of any state in Australia. Freedom works. Big Government lockdowns of private business don’t do any good. The Andrews government rules are so draconian that the federal government has had to send soldiers of the Australian army in to Victoria to help the police do the extra new police work. This is at a time when the federal government is courageously challenging Chinese...

Here's what you need to know: * The PM has abandoned the emissions reduction target section of his National Energy Guarantee * Cabinet ministers have openly admitted this morning they were facing an outbreak of disunity within the party over energy * It's been suggested the Coalition's Longman by-election loss sparked a push for Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton to challenge Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's leadership * The PM says Mr Dutton has given him "his absolute support" and Cabinet ministers maintain Mr Turnbull has the confidence of the party

Even 18 months into his presidency, the world is still having trouble coming to grips with Donald Trump, the most unconventional president ever. Still, he’s not a bad dream from which America will soon wake up, or a fool to be ridiculed. For someone the legion of critics say is a compulsive liar, he’s been remarkably true to his word. A new age is coming. The legions are going home. American values can be relied upon but American help less so. This need not presage a darker time, like Rome’s withdrawal from Britain, but more will be required of the...

TONY Abbott must return as leader of the shattered Liberals after Saturday’s election disaster. ..... True, Abbott ideally needs months more to repair the image that a smart-arse media tore to shreds, feeding off his sometimes dumb mistakes. But who else but Abbott could hope to fix what Turnbull has just smashed? This election result has been a near-total catastrophe for the Liberals, who have been left without a mandate, platform, unity, honour or real power after letting Turnbull hijack their party last year. Turnbull, a man of the ABC Left, then ditched the Liberals’ base, Liberal principles and even...

Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott is taking heat for comments he made about Islam, saying that the West "can't remain in denial about the massive problem within Islam." "Islam never had its own version of the Reformation and the Enlightenment or a consequent acceptance of pluralism and the separation of church and state," he wrote in a letter published in a Sydney tabloid last week."It's not culturally insensitive to demand loyalty to Australia and respect for Western civilization. Cultures are not all equal. We should be ready to proclaim the clear superiority of our culture to one that justifies...

COULD Tony Abbott make a comeback? The Abbott-haters and the feral army of Twitter addicts who are so delighting in his downfall will pour their usual bile-laden scorn on such a suggestion, but they clearly don’t know their history. Political precedent tells us that Abbott returning to the leadership of the Liberal Party is not only possible, but worth punting a few bob on. Forget Abbott’s current unpopularity, because the public soon will. John Howard was publicly derided after he lost the 1987 election to the charismatic Bob Hawke, so much so that the Bulletin magazine, the trendy political rag...

NOW Tony Abbott is gone I can finally tell the truth about him. Folks, you made a big mistake with this bloke. No, no. The mistake wasn’t that you voted for him. In fact, you got one of the finest human beings to be Prime Minister. ..... And he did all this in the face of astonishing heckling and even vilification from our media class, and despite often feral opposition in the Senate. But your mistake was not to care about all that. Deeds didn’t count with you. Image was all. And so you told the pollsters you didn’t like...

OF the five prime ministers we have had since the 2007 election, Australians have elected only two in their own right — Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott. They have voted out but one — Kevin Rudd, in favour of Tony Abbott. ..... But it is my view that, just like Kim Beazley was perhaps the best prime minister we never had, Tony Abbott was potentially the best prime minister we had but never knew it. ..... He espouses a set of values, principles and personal ethics that speak to community values that many of us could probably only aspire to....

FROM the loneliness of political exile, Tony Abbott is urging conservative members of the Liberal Party not to walk away from the party he led into government two years ago. Aware of the tsunami of anger created by his ousting among party stalwarts, the former prime minister is telling friends that the Liberal Party will always be a better organisation with good people working within it than against it from the outside. ..... It is noteworthy that it took Malcolm Turnbull and his accomplice Julie Bishop two years to achieve what Labor could not do — remove Tony Abbott from...

The knifing of Tony Abbott will go down as one of the most destructive and arrogant acts of political bastardry this nation has yet seen. In many ways, it surpasses Labor’s two similarly bloody coups, so forensically explored in Sarah Ferguson’s superb Killing Season documentary, for the simple reason that Mr Turnbull’s treachery was done despite the knowledge that the electorate genuinely deplore such brutality. If there was, indeed, one clear lesson to come from the Rudd/Gillard danse macabre, it is that the voters prefer to do the knifings in the sanctity of the ballot box, and have little time...

It is being described as "front stabbing" - a brutal attack on his leader by Malcolm Turnbull, who has long coveted the job of prime minister of Australia.

Watching the ceremony now.

MALCOLM Turnbull has replaced Tony Abbott as Prime Minister because the Liberals let his bull weaken their nerve and bury their judgment. Here’s Turnbull’s challenge in a nutshell: he stole the prime ministership he could not have won in an election. He stole it by boasting of superior communication skills he does not have. He will now campaign on successes by Abbott he could not have achieved himself. And he will now be the leader of a party he cannot unite. What have the Liberals done? Many of their members will be distraught and disgusted. Whether Turnbull wins the next...

Just announced live on Australian TV.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has confirmed coalition MPs will not have a free vote on same-sex marriage, destroying any chance of the law being passed under this Parliament. He said roughly 60 MPs supported the existing position, while 30 called for a conscience vote after a marathon six-hour party room meeting. 'There was strong support for the existing position... that marriage is between a man and a woman,' Mr Abbott told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday night. Following the party room meeting, Mr Abbott conducted a press conference and said that of the 30 who said there should be a...

Australia has slammed the door shut on any new government-funded investment in renewable energy schemes as Prime Minister Tony Abbott extends his “war on wind power”. In doing so Mr Abbott has sent a clear message to the mendicant green renewable energy sector that there will be no more cheap state-supplied financing for its projects.

Australia’s political opposition hopes to harness momentum from the Irish gay marriage referendum after it proposed a law Monday that would recognize same-sex marriages, something the country’s conservative prime minister is against. Center-left Labor Party leader Bill Shorten became the first leader of a major Australian political party to back a bill to overturn a national ban on gay marriage. Gay rights advocates fear that government lawmakers will be reluctant to support the bill as such a law would be seen as a political victory for Shorten over Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a former Roman Catholic seminarian and a staunch...