Tool Of The Week: Have We Got Principles!

"Those are my principals, if you don't like them, I have others." - Groucho Marx.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for the Liberal Party along comes Doctor Brendan Nelson – ex Union Boss, ex ALP Member, ex progressive, in fact it’s probably just best if we think of him as our ex.

The quantum leap in faith taken by the Liberal Party is best summed up by another front-runner for this week’s Tool Of The Week, Tony Abbott, who saw the rise of the good Doctor as an opportunity to announce his own future plans to pick up the pieces after the inevitable train wreck we can all see coming.

Dr Nelson has taken up some very reasonable positions in the past; about gay rights, Aboriginal land rights and education, opposition to mandatory sentencing laws, supporting safe injecting rooms and telling it how it is on the Iraq war (it’s about the oil, stupid).

Indeed, Dr Nelson is a man of principal, but if you don’t like those principals he has others.

Think we’re exaggerating? Sydney University’s vice-chancellor, Professor Gavin Brown, described Dr Nelson as “an example of ambition overriding principal”.

The new leader of the Liberal Party is someone who said that he would feel “comfortable” in the Labor Right.

He has come a long way since Arch-conservative former Treasury secretary John Stone described him as “a political hermaphrodite”; while Greg Barns, former staffer to John Fahey when he was Federal Finance Minister, who described Dr McNelson as “totally manufactured”.

Chris Bonner, President of the NSW Secondary Principals Council, gave an insight into the intellectual colossus that is the good Doctor when he said that the then Education Minister, criticised practices there was no evidence of, and came up with policy solutions already being carried out.

He voted for the Iraq war, which we were told at the time were because of WMD’s and Saddam Hussein’s cruelty, then it was only this year he made international headlines ‘fessing up it was about the oil.

He also told us earlier this year that there was “no such thing as victory in Iraq”.

Sydney Lawyer and former Liberal Party member Ifran Yussuf, who was intimate with Dr Nelson’s preselection in 1995, said “Nelson had the kind of flexibility that enabled him to both support and oppose identical policy proposals and still sound completely credible. Issues didn’t matter. What mattered was who was listening and how many votes they could swing.”

Mr Yussuf also revealed he had conversations with Dr Nelson where the doctor presumably read something into Mr Yussef’s name and slammed Israel for its ongoing occupation of the West Bank.

Current NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell recalled to the Sydney Morning Herald in December 2005 that when he was state Liberal party director and Dr Nelson was looking to go into politics, the doctor was really only interested in a safe seat.

Mr O’Farrell also predicted Dr Nelson was “capable of going the whole way in politics”.

What qualities make someone capable of going the whole way in politics, Mr O’Farrell did not say, but the ability to change one’s fundamentally held beliefs in the pursuit of power might be one.

It’s pretty obvious that the dedicated follower of fashion has done a deal with the “uglies” in the ultra-right wing of the NSW Liberal Party, re-branding himself as McNelson - the man who will do whatever it takes to climb the greasy pole of power.

And what a fine bunch he has decided to throw his lot in with.

The secretive cult, the Exclusive Brethren was caught out in February giving thanks for Dr Nelson’s support. A report in the Age newspaper revealed a conversation between Brethren figures, including cult chief Bruce Hales, about a meeting with Dr Nelson which resulted in “unexpected recognition” and favourable treatment.

In this case it was an exemption from testing of computer literacy for students in Brethren schools. Given the written threats the Brethren peddled around during the recent election campaign it looks like he gave the god-botherers an exemption from written literacy as well.

Aside from the nut job religious right, Dr McNelson is also making the right noises for the Party’s free-market ideologues.

Despite admitting the electorate had roundly rejected WorkChoices, he says unfair dismissal laws should not be brought back.

Nelson may have presided over cuts to education, supported nuclear power, voted for the Iraq war, screwed up a multi-billion dollar defence purchase and may be back-pedalling furiously on the ALP’s mandate to rip up WorkChoices, but hey, maybe he doesn’t believe any of this stuff.

After all, a man whose principles can bend like a garden hose on a hot day probably doesn’t believe in anything. Maybe he is taking the free-market mantra of ‘flexibility’ and applying it to facts, beliefs and ideas?

It certainly looks that way.

Look forward to an opposition that will show all the backbone of a garden slug, but with none of the attractiveness.

And with lunatic number one, Tony Abbott, waiting in the wings, the good Doctor’s reign is likely to provide much needed comic relief in the Federal sphere before he takes the Liberal Party right off the rails.