Still, South Australians of a certain age will hear faint resonances of Tom Playford’s Liberal-Country League.

Better than Bligh? Really? I’m not that impressed with her, but she ain’t no Morris Iemma. How are the LibNats going to improve on her performance?

Writing in Crikey on Friday, Richard Farmer believed he had cut to the heart of the reasons why the foundation of the Pineapple Party has been accompanied by so many alarums and such bitterness:

“Underlying the problem is clearly the impossibility of combining liberal thought, free market believers, Neanderthal agrarian socialism and intolerant social conservatives.”

Incidentally, one might note that exactly the same problem has been evident in the post-Howardian Liberal Party, absent the dead hand of Howard himself and the glue of office.

In Queensland, of course, the political traditions and electoral and social geography of the state make both the free market strand and the social liberals very much minority constituencies, and there’s no doubt they will now be swamped by the social conservatives and the agrarian socialists within the LNP.

Not to mention those ardent souls, the greenhouse denialists and Marohasian anti-environmentalists in general.

Huh? The ALP has done a decent job of it in NSW and Victoria.

BBB

None have produced any policy that will progress their cause. Surely the Pineapple Party is not going to tolerate the laziness and unproductivity we have seen from these members when they were Nationals and Liberals.

Mal Brough will now be a member of what?

Well, he’s the President of the Queensland Liberal Party, he says. Which doesn’t exist. But he might still have a political career, he says.

Does that mean:

(a) Brough will seek to be the new new saviour of the Liberals federally, and become the next member for Higgins? (…as was mooted earlier in the year)?

(b) Try to get some sort of continuing Qld Liberal Party going at state level?

Or does it mean - he’s played his hand so badly he’s completely screwed?

It’ll be very interesting to watch what Bruce Flegg does. I wonder if he was at the Borg’s love-in.

This along with their policies on daylight saving, tree clearing, gun laws and child safety changes will make the next day or two busy for them as their combined wisdom comes off the printing presses.

Perhaps Mark McArdle could quickly get out his policy for protecting seniors from being ripped off by unscrupulous investment schemes.

It’s going to be a busy couple of days but I will read it all with interest.

“Desperately deserve” now that’s The Borg.

I suspect that Anna is already contemplating legislation that will rent them asunder. More gun restrictions? Daylight saving?

Mal Brough will now be a member of what?

Nevertheless, Clive Palmer will be well satisified. He has financed a successful takeover.

So what now? The party that might have at least once represented a liberal standpoint (although by your reckoning not so much in QLD) is gone, replaced by the type of social conservatism that I’m finding more unpleasant by the day. And Labor showing little more restraint, with unnerving mumblings of moral outrage and a reactionary policy approach (using the nice words today for a change). Leaving us with yet more unpalatable choices for an election that could happen either later this year or next.

It’s not going to change is it, not until someone changes it for us, ‘Special Economic Region of Australia’ here we come … OK a little melodramatic maybe but what we are getting now is what a population as apathetic to its leadership as ours ends up with and ultimately deserves.

PinkyOz

And can anyone understand what this paragraph is meant to convey?

Our capacity to generate renewable power isn’t to be measured as a quantity - as our vast reserves of coal and minerals, prime agricultural land, or fishing grounds have been measured in the past. Across Queensland, our diverse regions offer diverse opportunities to generate energy to drive our homes, our commerce and our way of life and keep on driving them in perpetuity.

Are they for renewables or against it?

http://www.lnp.org.au/index.php

I figure any real liberals in the federal Liberal Party had spent so many years being held fast by the toxic glue of the Howard years that the liberal streak was pretty much mummified anyway.

(pondered whether to make bad pun about sticky situations, but decided against it)