Category Archives: Liberal

As Tony Abbott became impossible to avoid this week, Malcolm Turnbull railed against the media's obsession with "personalities" rather than the real stuff of politics.

It's probably the only play left in the book at this point when you're facing a relentless undermining campaign from within.

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As former PM Tony Abbott continues to criticise his party, more are heaping criticism on him. Perhaps he should take some advice from fellow former PM Julia Gillard.

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An tourist with autism who went missing from a Melbourne beach has returned to the place he was staying with his family. Vision courtesy Seven News, Melbourne.

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North Korea's decision to test an intercontinental ballistic missile has provoked anger and stern words from world leaders.

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Coca-Cola Amatil has announced it will close its South Australia manufacturing plant after posting a drop in annual profit.

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Authorities are cracking down on teens bus surfing in Brisbane. Vision courtesy: Seven News.

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The Northern Football League has ended the playing career of AFL diversity manager Ali Fahour, handing him a lifetime ban effective immediately.

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Australia's dark history of mass killings has been catalogued by the University of Newcastle, showing the prevalence of massacres in our own backyard

As former PM Tony Abbott continues to criticise his party, more are heaping criticism on him. Perhaps he should take some advice from fellow former PM Julia Gillard.

Even so, it never seems to work. It didn't work for Julia Gillard against Kevin Rudd, and it's even less likely to be effective for Turnbull. And that's because, for all the superficial similarities, there is one extremely important difference here. Turnbull's ever-escalating conflict with Abbott isn't simply about personalities. It's at least partly about ideas. It's about the soul of the Liberal Party. It's not just about power and revenge.

In some ways, that makes it more noble than the Labor farce of 2010-2013. But it also makes it far more catastrophic. Labor is now a largely stable entity - the odd nudging of Anthony Albanese aside. Granted, the blowtorch of government tends to reveal fault lines that the burden-free nature of opposition conceals. But Bill Shorten's basic agenda on housing affordability, penalty rates and taxing the wealthy surely gives it enough to go on with for some time if it takes government. With Rudd and Gillard gone, Labor has far less to fight about because it wasn't fighting over anything meaningful in the first place.

It's hard to see the Coalition faring similarly. The most operative phrase in this week's leaked recording of Tony Abbott was that the Liberal Party needed help "so that we can be what we really are".

Apparently right now, they are being what they really aren't. And given the Turnbull government has now accepted Labor's fundamental approach to education policy, and is slowly dragging itself to something similar on climate change, you'd have to concede this has a ring of truth. If you believe that's a problem, you're most likely to fight that to the death.

And you won't stop simply because you're in opposition and there's a Labor government to attack. And because the concern isn't just confined to Abbott himself, itwon't go away if and when Abbott decides to retire. This is a movement. An increasingly marginal and unelectable movement, but a movement nonetheless. That's why all this talk about whether or not Turnbull will see out the year is not nearly as important as it seems. The question isn't whether Turnbull survives. It's whether in the long run the Liberal Party does.

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The truly seismic problem here is that the big ideas on which the party is based are now exhausted. Its free-market liberalism, only recently an unimpeachable orthodoxy, is suddenly the target of populist assault from every political angle. Its conservatism has long since shrunk from a sober philosophy of pragmatic, ordered political change to one of reactionary culture warring against greenies and minorities.

In the space of, say, a decade, the Liberal Party has witnessed a gathering consensus against it. Turnbull's "Labor-lite" turn on education, for example, does not happen in a vacuum. It is the result of having run the argument against a Gonski-style approach to funding twice and lost. Twice.

It is easy to forget that, before Abbott stormed to power, he had committed to some version of the National Broadband Network he had previously dismissed as a "white elephant", described himself on a "unity ticket" with Labor on education funding having previously called it a "Conski", and agreed to support the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Abbott won the election, but Labor had won these debates. When Abbott proceeded to break those promises, the electorate swiftly turned on him. These undercurrents in politics move things far more than the mere fact of which party happens to be in power. That's why the past four years under Coalition control have been the same four years in which debates have shifted so firmly against it on things such as negative gearing, same-sex marriage and corporate taxation.

That isn't a criticism of the Liberal Party. All parties have their moments during which they find themselves in tune with the season. Then those seasons change.

Labor faced a similar moment in the 1980s when the world turned away from the very ideas that gave Labor its identity. National economic borders would become porous, tariffs and subsidies removed, currencies floated, financial services deregulated and public services privatised. It was a liberal golden age, and yet it was a Labor government that ushered in these changes. Today, we take the Hawke-Keating era as a given - as though it were some natural expression of Labor's approach to reform. But there was very little that was Labor about it. Hawke assailed numerous articles of faith for Labor, and caused plenty of anger among the rank-and-file for being too business-friendly.

Of course, Hawke succeeded, and the result was 13 years of Labor government. But another result was a fundamental change in the meaning of Labor: a recognition that its strongly protectionist ideas had nothing more to give. And once the reforms were done, and through 11 years of John Howard, Labor struggled to justify its existence. It was now a liberal party offering only shades of difference from its main political foe.

It took an act of massive political overreach in the form of Howard's WorkChoices to give Labor meaning again. Even so, with that fight won, it quickly collapsed into pointlessness under Rudd.

Only now, thanks largely to forces beyond its control, is Labor emerging from this. This is a moment in which social goals such as equity and economic ones such as growth and sustainability are beginning to come into alignment; where gaping inequality is becoming less convincing as a price to be paid for prosperity. That helps Labor's reinvention, obviously. But if it keeps playing out this way, it puts the Liberal Party where Labor was 35 years ago - not merely seven years ago.

The times are asking the Liberal Party to accept ideas it has long rejected as foreign, and to discover meaning somehow within that. That's a painful process even if you have a figure such as Bob Hawke leading it.

How you manage it with an Abbott insurgency that clearly has no intention even of beginning this task is Turnbull's problem, and anyone's guess.

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Tony Abbott v Malcolm Turnbull are fighting for the soul of the Liberal Party - The Sydney Morning Herald

To be a liberal, in this account, is in some sense to be a fake. Its to shroud an ambiguous, even reactionary agenda under a superficial commitment to social justice and moderate, incremental change. American liberalism was once associated with something far more robust, with immoderate presidents and spectacular waves of legislation like Franklin Roosevelts New Deal and Lyndon Johnsons Great Society. Todays liberals stand accused of forsaking the clarity and ambition of even that flawed legacy. To call someone a liberal now, in other words, is often to denounce him or her as having abandoned liberalism.

Liberal-bashing on social media has reached a kind of apogee, but its targets have not yet produced much real defense of the ideology. This means the word liberal is, for the moment, almost entirely one of abuse. It is hard to think of an American politician who has embraced it, even going back two or three generations. If liberalism is dead, then, its a strange sort of demise: Here is an ideology that has many accused sympathizers, but no champions, no defenders.

Americas version of liberalism has always been a curious one. In Europe, the word has traditionally meant a preference for things like limited government, separate private and public spheres, freedom of the press and association, free trade and open markets whats often described as classical liberalism. But the United States had many of those inclinations from the beginning. By the 20th century, American liberalism had come to mean something distinct. The focus on individual liberties was still there, but the vision of government had become stronger, more interventionist ready to regulate markets, bust monopolies and spend its way out of economic downturns. After the end of World War II, this version of liberalism seemed so triumphant in the United States that the critic Lionel Trilling called it the countrys sole intellectual tradition. Its legislation legalized unions and, with Social Security, created a pension system; a health plan for older Americans, Medicare, was on the way.

But as these same liberals initiated anti-Communist interventions in Korea and Vietnam, or counseled patience and moderation to civil rights activists, they quickly found themselves in the same position we see today: under heavy abuse from the left. In a landmark speech at an antiwar rally in April 1965, Paul Potter, the president of Students for a Democratic Society, asked: What kind of system is it that justifies the United States or any country seizing the destinies of the Vietnamese people and using them callously for its own purpose? What kind of system is it that disenfranchises people in the South? The first step, as he saw it, was clear: We must name that system. In a speech later that year, his successor as S.D.S. president, Carl Oglesby, did precisely that, calling it corporate liberalism an unholy alliance of business and the state that was enriching to elites but destructive to working-class Americans and the worlds poor.

It was the 1980 victory of Ronald Reagan and his brand of conservatism that set in motion the villainizing of American liberalism from the right this time not for warmongering but for supposedly being soft on crime and communism, bloating the government with ineffective social programs and turning American universities into hothouses of fetid radicalism. Many demoralized liberals responded by abandoning the label completely. The nasty 1988 presidential campaign may have been a watershed. In one debate, Bush demanded that his opponent, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, explain some of these very liberal positions. Dukakiss reply, a weak Lets stop labeling each other, only confirmed the word as an insult. A few weeks before the election, dozens of distinguished figures from novelists to editors to former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara bought a full-page ad in The Times to print a letter titled A Reaffirmation of Principles, expressing their alarm at the use of liberal as a term of opprobrium. But their own definition of it was oddly vague: They called it the institutional defense of decency. All those attacks on liberalism seemed to be weakening peoples sense of what liberalism even meant.

As the insult gathered steam in the 90s, Bill Clinton was studiously aiming for the political center, ending welfare as we know it and pushing through a tough-on-crime bill. In 2011, Barack Obama made a deal with Republicans to adopt a program of fiscal austerity, prompting the left-wing critic William Greider to declare, in The Nation, the last groaning spasms of New Deal liberalism. Conservatives will fight one another to the death over whos the truer conservative, but the people most accused of being liberal have often seemed as if theyre the ones most ambivalent about actual liberalism.

If liberalism really is Americas core, hegemonic intellectual tradition, its easy to see how it has become the word we use to deride the status quo. For the left, thats a politics in which government cravenly submits to corporate power and cultural debates distract from material needs. For the right, its one in which government continually overreaches and cultural debates are built to punish anyone who isnt politically correct. But in both cases, liberal points to the consensus, the gutless compromise position, the arrogant pseudopolitics, the mealy-mouthed half-truth.

Each side has drawn tremendous energy from opposing this idea of liberalism. At the same time, the space occupied by liberalism itself has shrunk to the point where its difficult to locate. Different strands of it now live on under different names. Conservatives have styled themselves as the new defenders of free speech. Democrats have sidestepped liberal and embraced progressive, a word with its own confusing history, to evoke the good-government, welfare-state inclinations of the New Deal. Some of the strongest defenses of liberalisms achievements come from people who identify as socialists. And free-trade advocates, with no more positive term to shelter under, are now tagged, often derisively, as neoliberal. The various ideas to which liberal has referred persist, in one form or another, among different constituencies. Liberalism may continue. But it may well end up doing so without any actual liberals behind it.

Nikil Saval is an editor at n+1. He last wrote for the magazine about the trend of turning abandoned railways lines into urban parks.

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A version of this article appears in print on July 9, 2017, on Page MM11 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Off Center.

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Hated by the Right. Mocked by the Left. Who Wants to Be 'Liberal' Anymore? - New York Times

Updated July 05, 2017 13:25:20

A former candidate for a conservative Christian party is seeking Liberal preselection in a key seat for next year's Victorian election, amid internal tensions about the party "lurching to the right".

The Liberal Opposition needs to win a minimum of seven seats to seize government from Premier Daniel Andrews, including in Melbourne's sandbelt.

A former candidate for the Australian Christians party, Frank "Papa" Papafotiou, is seeking Liberal Party preselection for Bentleigh, which Labor holds by just 0.8 per cent.

In the race against Mr Papafotiou is former MP Elizabeth Miller and Asher Judah, who was the Victorian deputy executive director of the Property Council.

Preselection candidates are banned from speaking to the media. But Mr Papafotiou's candidate booklet for voters uniquely includes endorsement from the former state director of the Australian Christians.

Mr Papafotiou ran for the Australian Christians in the 2012 by-election for the seat of Niddrie, winning 5.75 per cent of the vote.

The Liberals did not field a candidate in the safe Labor seat.

The number of former members of conservative Christian parties, including Family First and the Australian Christians, trying to join the Victorian Liberal Party has recently been the source of internal tension.

Members of the party's executive have also revealed fears the party's religious right has been stacking branches with Mormons and Catholic groups in a drive to preselect more conservative candidates.

If a person has been involved in another political party they require the endorsement of the Liberal Party state assembly.

A group of prospective members was blocked last year, but others were allowed in.

Some members, including MPs, are concerned that the influx could see a potential "lurch to the right" on social issues such as gay marriage, which could dent Liberal chances at the next poll.

"We are in dangerous territory now," one senior Liberal figure said.

Also seeking preselection is Chandra Ojha, who stood as an independent for Bentleigh in 2014. He won just 271 votes out of 36,330 cast in the marginal seat.

In his candidate CV, Mr Ojha takes a swipe at previous Liberal election campaigns.

"During past election campaigns, I have observed that members of the Parliamentary Liberal Party failed to understand the genuine mood of the electorate, and for this reason, were not able to communicate in a succinct and timely manner the true essence of the policies offered by the Liberal Party,'' Mr Ojha said.

Liberal preselection ballots for a swag of Labor-held marginals Carrum (0.7 per cent margin), Cranbourne (2.3 per cent), Frankston (0.5 per cent), Mordialloc (2.1 per cent), Ivanhoe (3.4 per cent) and Bentleigh will be held early next month.

Topics: liberals, political-parties, states-and-territories, state-parliament, parliament, government-and-politics, melbourne-3000, vic, australia

First posted July 05, 2017 13:20:57

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Ex-Australian Christians candidate's preselection bid fuels tensions in Victorian Liberals - ABC Online

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has used a guest appearance at a branch meeting in the electorate of Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar to bash Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's second budget and call on members to rise up against the Liberal Party's direction.

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In leaked audio obtained by Fairfax, the former PM this time criticises the government's budget and says the Liberal Party is at a 'low ebb'.

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The Northern Football League has ended the playing career of AFL diversity manager Ali Fahour, handing him a lifetime ban effective immediately.

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Australia's dark history of mass killings has been catalogued by the University of Newcastle, showing the prevalence of massacres in our own backyard

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New health research finds over the last two decades portion size increases has been going up at the same time as obesity rates.

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Hawthorn recruit Tyrone Vickery and former Richmond hardman Jake King have been arrested for alleged extortion and threats. Vision courtesy Seven News, Melbourne.

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Ben Wyatt was last seen at Black Rock and now his family, desperate to find their son, are hoping a possible sighting in Cheltenham on Wednesday morning will lead to clues. Vision courtesy Seven News, Melbourne.

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The death of Paul Costa is now the subject of a homicide investigation after his body was found in a Brunswick West reserve. Vision courtesy Seven News, Melbourne.

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The "con" of building resilience has left junior doctors vulnerable to mental illness and suicide by ignoring the systemic failures of the medical profession.

In leaked audio obtained by Fairfax, the former PM this time criticises the government's budget and says the Liberal Party is at a 'low ebb'.

Fairfax Mediahas obtained audio of Mr Abbott's speech to conservative Liberals on Monday night, in which he asserted Turnbull government ministers did not believe in the "second-best, taxing and spending" budget they had been forced to deliver.

Mr Abbott said the Liberal Party needed help "so that we can be what we really are", and said Australians had for too long tolerated those who did not share the fundamentalGod-given values that underpinned Western civilisation.

"Just at this moment, let me tell you, we're at a bit of a low ebb," he told the meeting in the Melbourne seat of Deakin..

"If you listen to some senior members of the government, because of the reality - the unfortunate reality - of the Senate, we have had to bring forward a budget which is second-best. A taxing and spending budget.

"Not because we believe in these things, but because the Senate made us do it. Well, a party that has to do what's second-best because the Senate made us do it is a party which needs some help."

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Facing questions from members eager for him to return to the prime ministership, Mr Abbott said that, as a conservative, "your first duty is to improve the existing situation" rather than change it drastically.

"Our first responsibility is to fight so that the existing government, the existing cabinet and the existing prime ministerare as good as they possibly can be," he said.

"One of the reasons why I'm speaking out is not because I think we've got to change the personnelbut because I think we've got to just move the direction a little bit.

"And if we can't, because of the Senate, entirely change the directionat least don't lose the sense of what the bloody direction should be, for God's sake.

"You can't always determine the speed of the advance, but by God we should be able to determine the direction of the advance. We shouldn't let the Senate go the wrong way, even if it is trying to stop us from going very far in the right direction."

Mr Abbott was invited to address Monday night's branch meeting in the electorate of Mr Sukkar, who played a significant role in putting together the May budget.

Branch members were invited to "a rare opportunity to join former prime minister Tony Abbottto discuss how to navigate the political sphere as a Christian and ensure legislation supports family values".

The event was organised in conjunction with Mr Sukkarand respected HIV specialistDr Ivan Stratov, a recent defector from the Family First party and convert to Mormonism.

A Liberal Party source who attended Monday night'smeeting said the audience of about 200 was "basically in raptures" at the end of Mr Abbott's presentation.

"He is definitely on the war path," the source said. "I have never seen him speaking so well or looking so good."

Mr Abbott began his address by imploring members to heed the "two fundamental precepts" of Western civilisation, "both of which stem originally from the Gospel". Those were equality in the eyes of God ("equal rights, equal dignity, equal responsibilities"), and treating others as you would have them treat you.

He also warned that, "for too long, the good people of our country have been too tolerant of people who do not share some of the fundamental values that have made us who we are".

"As Michael [Sukkar] said a few moments ago, a majority that stays silent does not stay a majority," Mr Abbott said.

Asked about the environment, he said "politics has got in the way of common sense" and that climate change should not take precedence over living standards, national security or matters of deprivation and justice.

"Yes it's an issue, but if it comes to a choice between your job and reducing emissions, I choose your job every time," he said to applause.

Mr Abbott was also asked about the United Nations' Agenda 21 sustainable development plan, derided by some nationalists and conspiracy theorists as a ployfor global government.

While he defended the globalised economy, he said: "There are a lot of people out there who worry about countries like Australia surrendering their sovereignty and losing, effectively,some of our independence.And I think this a real worry."

Mr Abbott has made a string of appearances at think tanks, in the media and at party functions in the past week, stirring internal ructions and condemnation from ministers and MPs. He reflected on the criticism in his speech.

"Just at the moment, I'm not always the person that every Liberal wants to associate with," Mr Abbott said, to laughter.

"But Michael [Sukkar] is someone who knows what he believes, he knows who his friends are, and he sticks by them through thick and thin. That's someone you can rely on."

Mr Sukkar on Tuesday defended Mr Abbott's attendance of the branch meeting, saying it was a long-standing commitment and one that had engaged his branch members.

He told Sky News he was"very proud" of the budget handed down in May and said the Turnbull government had got the major policy settingsright.

"It's a very routine branch meeting," Mr Sukkar said. "He certainly gave the government credit where it's due. I don't think there was anything that was a particularly tough critique."

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'We're at a low ebb': Tony Abbott bashes Liberal leadership in leaked audio - The Sydney Morning Herald

Jorge Bergoglio is the first Jesuit to become pope and may end up the last Jesuit to be pope, in light of the havoc that he is wreaking upon the Church. But who knows? After all, he is stacking the college of cardinals with liberal appointees in the hope that they will elect a modernist clone in the next conclave.

In any case, it was exceedingly reckless that the cardinals chose a Jesuit to lead the Church at the very moment that that religious order was at its most corrupt and theologically flaky. This fact alone will give Gibbonian historians in the future fodder for works on the decline and fall of the modern Catholic Church.

Bergoglio had entered the Jesuit order around the time of the revolutionary ferment of the spirit of Vatican II precisely because he wanted to push liberal revolution in the Church. A left-wing political activist who had been mentored by a Paraguayan communist, Bergoglio naturally gravitated to the Jesuits as they abandoned orthodoxy for social justice (which just meant the promotion of socialism) and trendy psychobabble. It shouldnt surprise anyone that the signature phrases of this pontificate Who am I to judge? and Inequality is the root of all evil come from a Latin American Jesuit immersed in the liberalism of the 1960s.

Pope Francis has described himself as undisciplined, implying that that made him an odd fit for an order founded by the militaristic St. Ignatius of Loyola. But in the 1960s it was that lack of discipline thatmade him a perfect fit. The Jesuits were busy turning their back on St. Ignatius and all of his reactionary hang-ups. Ignatiuss Spiritual Exercises had been replaced by the works of Sigmund Freud. Vatican II-era Jesuits were infamous for inviting destructive psychologists like Carl Rogers to hold seminars for them on non-directive therapy(repentant Carl Rogers assistant William Coulson once said to me that the purpose of those sessions was to make the priests feel good about being bad).

Pedro Arrupe, the disastrously permissive leader of the Jesuits as it plunged into socialism and modern morality in the 1960s and 1970s, saw Bergoglio as a rising liberal star within the order and elevated him to the top Jesuit position in Argentina at the mere age of 36. Arrupe used Bergoglio as one of his liberal enforcers against restless conservative Jesuits. At a worldwide gathering of Jesuits in the early 1970s, at which Arrupe blessed the liberal trajectory of the order, he asked Bergoglio to run off some Spanish Jesuits who had petitioned the Vatican for relief from Arrupes modernist dictates. Bergoglio complied.

If the future casts its shadow backwards, as Malcolm Muggeridge used to say, one catches a glimpse of it in these biographical details. Bergoglio was in on the ground floor of the revolution in the Church and bided his time until he reached the papacy. Safely ensconced within it, he then began throwing plums to his fellow liberal Jesuit revolutionaries.

I was never a right-winger, he said in an interview with Jesuit editors the same interview in which he declared the Church too obsessed with abortion and gay marriage.

The Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, one of Pope Franciss closest advisers, led that interview. Spadaro is openly heterodox, saying perhaps most famously that under the caring-and-sharing pontificate of Francis two plus two no longer equals four. In other words, the new orthodoxy is heterodoxy.

Not a month passes without some dismal announcement about this or that heretical Jesuit receiving a promotion under Pope Francis. I have already written about the Venezuelan communist and relativist he installed as the head of the Jesuit order.

In April, Pope Francis turned the Jesuit James Martin who has just published a book trashing the Churchs teaching on homosexual behavior into a consultor to the Vaticans Secretariat for Communications. Martin brings some weighty credentials to the position; he once served as chaplain to the Colbert Report.

Last week Pope Francis sacked the head of the Churchs doctrinal office Cardinal Gerhard Muller, who had annoyed Francis by not supporting Communion for adulterers and replaced Muller with a Spanish Jesuit, the pliable Archbishop Luis Ladaria.

An excited New York Timesturned to the aforementioned James Martin for insight into the meaning of it all. This gives the pope the chance to finally place his own man in a very important spot, said Martin. For many admirers of Benedict, Cardinal Mller was the last link to Benedicts way of doing things.

Translation: the modernist Jesuit captivity of the papacy continues apace.

George Neumayr is author ofThe Political Pope.

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The Liberal Jesuit Captivity of the Papacy - American Spectator

A NSW MP has apologised after she falsely claimed to have completed two undergraduate degrees on nomination forms for Liberal party positions.

North Shore MP Felicity Wilson claimed to hold "a double degree of Bachelor of Media/Bachelor of Arts from Macquarie University" when nominating for a vice-president position, Fairfax Media reports.

But in her official parliamentary biography, Ms Wilson is listed to hold a Bachelor of Media, attained in 2005.

A Macquarie University spokesman confirmed Ms Wilson had completed the single degree.

"She has not currently completed any further degrees at the university," they said in a statement.

Ms Wilson on Wednesday told AAP she began an arts degree in 2001 but later decided to also study subjects for a media degree.

"Due to the subjects I had completed, I graduated with a Bachelor of Media, however, I could have chosen to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts instead," she said in a statement.

The Liberal MP issued an unreserved apology for the "errors" on the forms and said she currently held two degrees - a Bachelor of Media and a Master of Public Policy - and had also deferred enrolment in an MBA to focus on her electorate.

"I will continue to give every effort to representing our community in NSW parliament," she said.

It's not the first time Ms Wilson, who scraped into parliament on preferences in an April by-election, has been somewhat loose with her words.

In the lead up to election day, she was forced to admit she gave misleading information about her residential and voting history.

Ms Wilson said it was "unintentional error" when she told party members she moved to the electorate in 2005.

The same justification was given for a Facebook post in which Ms Wilson wrongly claimed that the first vote she cast in an election was for former prime minister John Howard.

Opposition leader Luke Foley again dubbed Ms Wilson "fibbing Felicity".

"She's the Pinocchio of the parliament," he told reporters in Sydney.

"What will she say next?"

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NSW Liberal apologises for degree claims - NEWS.com.au

After months of weighty policy shifts by Premier Kathleen Wynne, Ontarians appear to be warming up to their unloved Liberal government, according to a new poll from the Innovative Research Group.

The long-governing Liberals have trailed the opposition Progressive Conservatives in a number of polls since last summer but with less than a year before the next provincial election, the gap between has closed and they are almost tied in public support, according to advisor Greg Lyle; 30 per cent of Ontarians say they would vote PC compared with 27 per cent who would vote Liberal.

The poll follows a number of feel-good announcements in April and May in which Ms. Wynne announced a tax on foreign buyers to cool an overheated housing market, the move to a $15 minimum wage, a balanced budget with a new pharmacare plan, a basic-income pilot project and a 25-per-cent cut to hydro bills.

Globe editorial: Why Kathleen Wynne has become a great NDP premier

Former Liberal heavyweights have suggested in recent months that the party could be staring at defeat next summer if Ms. Wynne stays on as leader. However, while Ms. Wynne remains unpopular with the majority of Ontarians, Mr. Lyle says his polling shows paths for the Liberals to win again. By next summer, the Grits will have been in power for 15 years.

What were seeing is that the pool of people open to the Liberals is starting to move, Mr. Lyle told The Globe and Mail. That doesnt mean that theyve got them, but theyve got a lead in party identification and the number of people open to considering them is growing.

Despite lagging in the polls, the Liberal brand remains the most popular in Ontario, with 34 per cent of those polled identifying as Liberals. The governing partys base has also grown over the past few months, with 25 per cent of Ontarians disagreeing that its time to change government nearly equal to the 27 per cent who say they are hostile with the government.

The Liberals are also in the lead across much of the Greater Toronto Area, after months of wobbly support in the partys seat-rich heartland. The Tories lead everywhere else in Ontario, with commanding leads in southwestern and south-central Ontario.

Since November, the Liberals base support has grown, while the number of Ontarians mad at the government has shrunk. Thats good news for Ms. Wynne, according to Mr. Lyle the pollster for former Tory premier Mike Harris.

Anger directed at Ms. Wynne has also dropped. While she ranks third when asked who would make the best premier, after PC Leader Patrick Brown and the NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, the number of people angry at the Premier has dropped five points to 41 per cent. Admittedly, thats still quite unpopular, according to Mr. Lyle.

While the numbers are improving somewhat for Ms. Wynne, Mr. Lyle said he was surprised by the incremental increase. Whats striking to me is that the policies were so dramatic and the gains have been relatively so small, he said.

What may account for the discrepancy, Mr. Lyle said, is the governments inability to form a narrative that has gained currency among Ontarians. While the governments announcements on housing and minimum wage have been well regarded, it hasnt led to a more cohesive story. In an interview with The Globe in June, Ms. Wynne summed up that narrative in one word: Fairness.

And while Mr. Browns party might be ahead in the polls, more than half of Ontarians say they dont know enough about him to form an opinion. Thats a problem also facing Ms. Horwath, as an increasing number of Ontarians have said they dont know much about her, either.

Follow Justin Giovannetti on Twitter: @justincgio

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Ontario survey shows rise in support for Liberals a year out from election - The Globe and Mail

The founder of a new liberal mosque in Berlin, Germany has received numerous death threats, prompting police protection around the clock out of fears for her safety.

Seyran Ates is a feminist Turkish-heritage woman who founded the progressive mosque that welcomes gay Muslims, atheists, allows women and men to pray together and prohibits Islamic full face veils inside.

She toldtoldWelt am Sonntanewspaper that shes under police protection following 100 death threats she has received since opening the mosque three weeks ago, The Local reported.

Over social media, I have received so many death threats due to the founding of the mosque that the State Office of Criminal Investigations has determined that they must protect me around the clock, Ates told the paper.

The 54-year-old claims she was once approached by three men in the street asking whether she founded the perverse mosque where men, women, lesbians and gays gather together to pray.

After dodging the inquisitors, they shouted youll die.

She recently met with Germanys Green Party leader Cem zdemir and out of safety concerns was driven in an armored limousine and had the protection of three guards.

According to the Green Party leader, however, the threats and harassment aret just from homegrownresidents. He claims Turkish PresidentRecep Tayyip Erdogan is behind the threats and even reportedly tried to pressure the German government into closing down the mosque.

That shows again what sort of man Erdogan is, that he has never understood democracy, or more precisely that he does not want to, Ates said. Erdogan thinks nothing of personal freedoms.

The founder of the mosque also said German media and Islamic organizations close to the Turkish governmentare behind the threats against her.

They have accused her and her mosque being aligned with exiled preacherFethullah Glen, who was blamed by Turkish President for an attempted coup last year.

This is how this line of thought emerges: Glen followers, terrorists, outlaws, she added, denying any contact withGlen supporters.

The Central Council of Muslims in Germany has condemned the threats.

I utterly condemn the death threats and can unfortunately empathize with Ms. As situation because I now and then also receive death threats, said the councils chair, Aiman Mazyek.

Read the original post:

Germany's First 'Liberal' Mosque Founder Under Police Protection After Death Threats - Heat Street

To the editor:

Three simple thoughts shed light on the liberal, progressive, Democratic movement and the very biased, overly rich, celebrity elite and lemming so-called journalists and comedians who back and cover for Dems at every turn by bashing Republicans.

1: When gas was close to $4/gallon, the Dems and biased liberal lemming media blamed President Bush and the oil companies for gouging and making too much money. When prices came down the media applauded Obama. Now that gas prices are at or below $2 will they give President Trump and the evil rich oil companies applause and positive press? Not in my lifetime. By the way, the majority of people who own a retirement account with a mutual fund invests in oil companies. When they lose, you lose a bit also.

2: If the Deems and biased lapdog media are so worried about the Russian meddling matter related to the 2016 election and how it was threatening our democracy, why didnt they ask for an FBI investigation into what Obama, Kerry, Hillary, Podesta, and other Dem leaders knew and what actions the Dems took in the year they had knowledge about it, before the Nov 2016 election?

3: With climate change and the Paris Dis-cord, why are so many liberal officials suddenly for state rights and why are so many liberal mayors making up city rights"? If so many mayors are already undertaking actions similar to the Paris Dis-cord, it only proves President Trump is right, again. The federal government has no reason to give away billions to be wasted in other polluting countries.

Liberal hypocrites always parade as tolerant politicians who care about middle-class Americans.

James Dargan, Jacksonville

Link:

LETTER: 3 strikes against the liberal agenda - Jacksonville Daily News

Nationals senator John Williams also says Tony Abbott needs to just fit into the team and be a team player. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

National party senator John Williams has warned the Liberal party that a plebiscite on marriage equality is part of the Coalition agreement, signed by Malcolm Turnbull and Barnaby Joyce.

The agreement was signed when Turnbull took the leadership from Tony Abbott in September 2015 and Williams said it was part of the deal for National party support.

I know that it is in the Coalition agreement, a signed agreement between Nats and Liberals by Barnaby Joyce and Malcolm Turnbull, Williams said.

The Coalition agreement is signed by every incoming Liberal and National party leader. In the last agreement, Turnbull agreed for the water portfolio to go back to the agriculture portfolio with Joyce as minister, which happened immediately. The agreement also states there will be no policy move to a carbon price and no change to the definition of marriage without a plebiscite.

Williams chastised the defence industry minister and leader of the government, Christopher Pyne, for telling his moderate Liberal colleagues that marriage equality might be resolved sooner than you think, a boast soon scotched by Turnbull.

Williams said if the Nick Xenophon team or Labor had supported the plebiscite, the issue of same-sex marriage could have been resolved by now.

But instead these issues keep bubbling along and get so much media attention and Chris Pyne shouldnt say those things, Williams said.

He was worried the ongoing Liberal division would risk marginal seat holders such as fellow National MP Michelle Landry in Capricornia in Queensland. Landry holds the seat by a margin of just 0.8% and Williams said her seat creates the one-seat majority that keeps the Coalition in power.

Im annoyed with the Liberals because everyone knows division is death and they are so divided every time Tony Abbott makes a statement publicly, he said.

We need to concentrate on their job, which is to work for betterment of all Australia.

Williams reminded Abbott that Coalition MPs had been team players when he was prime minister but he would not give advice about whether Abbott should leave parliament after the Guardian Essential poll found 43% thought Abbott should resign.

I think what Tony needs to do is just simply be more of a team player, as we were with Tony when he was prime minister, Williams told ABC earlier.

I certainly was. We had a couple of disagreements on the odd occasion but I think Tony needs to just fit into the team and be a team player. What he does in the future is his decision.

He said the continual division made it impossible for the government to talk about its positive messages such as budget commitments on inland rail, roads and education.

These things cant get any light of day because of this division, Williams said.

Read more here:

Nationals senator reminds Liberals same-sex marriage plebiscite part of their deal - The Guardian