Latest news with #Menzies'
The Herald Scotland
19 hours ago
- Business
- The Herald Scotland
Historic Scottish firm acquires major Scandinavian player
Once the deal completes, the Spirit cargo operations will be rebranded as Menzies Aviation, further strengthening the company's presence as a leading aviation services provider in the Nordic region. Safety is Menzies' number one priority, with teams already working to ensure a seamless transition upholding its global safety standards and to ensure the delivery of secure, high-quality cargo handling from day one. Miguel Gomez Sjunnesson, executive vice president Europe, Menzies Aviation, said: "This acquisition marks an exciting step forward in our strategic expansion as we strengthen our air cargo footprint across Europe. "By adding a new cargo station to the Menzies global network, we're building momentum in key markets and reinforcing our commitment to supporting cargo growth across the region. These targeted investments are a clear signal of our ambition and confidence in the sector's long-term potential. Thanks to SAS for their trust and collaboration throughout this process." Beau Paine, executive vice president cargo, Menzies Aviation, said: "Our expansion into the Norwegian air cargo market demonstrates our continued focus on delivering consistent, high-quality service to our partner airlines, while enhancing the overall logistics supply chain. "As we grow our global cargo network, we remain committed to being the cargo provider of choice through operational excellence, reliability, and innovation. The addition of OSL takes our global air cargo network to 73 stations, which handled 2.4m tonnes last year." Founded as a bookshop in 1833, John Menzies later became a news distributor and a series of acquisitions put it into the airport services sector in the 1980s. It sold its distribution arm in 2018, and was acquired by supply chain giant Agility for £763 million in 2022.
West Australian
12-05-2025
- Politics
- West Australian
Richard Wilson: Liberals must win back the middle class to stay relevant
In Australian politics, the middle class has become curiously invisible. We in the Liberal Party — who once drew strength from what Menzies called 'the forgotten people' — have suffered crushing defeats, most recently in last week's Federal election and weeks earlier in WA. These results weren't accidents. They are the consequence of losing touch with our natural constituency. Eighty-three years after Menzies' landmark address, his insights remain prescient. Yet today, our political rhetoric too often borrows from the divisive playbooks of Trump's America or Brexit Britain, rather than engaging with the distinctly Australian experience: a quiet frustration that life isn't getting easier, even as we continue to hold high hopes for our families and futures. In WA, where the Liberal presence has withered to near-irrelevance, we need more than messaging tweaks. We need a fundamental reconnection with middle Australia's personal circumstances, beginning with five underlying truths. First, Australian households have changed. The single-income family with a male breadwinner is no longer the norm. Nearly 74 per cent of couple families with children aged 0–14 now have both parents working. Today's middle class balances dual incomes, outsourced domestic services, complex child care arrangements, and financial stress despite respectable earnings. A 36-year-old healthcare worker in Perth embodies this reality. Juggling irregular shifts and the care of two children, her family earns enough to be considered middle class — yet housing costs consume nearly 40 per cent of their post-tax income. We do not speak convincingly to her daily experience. Worse, our rhetoric often judges her family's pragmatic choices rather than championing their aspirations. Secondly, employment is transforming. Stable, long-term jobs are giving way to gig work, contract roles, and careers threatened by technological disruption. Over half of workers now expect their job's required skills will change in the coming years due to AI and automation. A 42-year-old accountant in Joondalup whose expertise in corporate compliance now competes with intelligent software doesn't oppose innovation, but he reasonably expects leadership that recognises his predicament. He wants a clear, practical pathway to keep contributing. Too often, his concerns are met with silence or patronising assumptions that he can't cope without government support. Thirdly, the middle class has become significantly more diverse. People who migrated here since 2000 now make up about one in six members of the workforce. In metropolitan Perth, about 34 per cent of small businesses are operated by first or second-generation migrants. The Vietnamese-Australian family running an IT services firm in Malaga exemplifies this new middle Australia. They value education, work ethic, and upward mobility — principles entirely aligned with the Liberal tradition of self-reliance and enterprise. Yet our messaging and policy priorities don't speak to them. Fourthly, environmental pressures have become economic ones. WA farmers and regional producers face worsening soil degradation, water scarcity, and extreme weather events. In the past 30 years, winter rainfall in southwest WA has fallen by 24 per cent, undermining agricultural productivity and resilience. A wheat farmer in Merredin, using regenerative practices to prevent erosion, isn't anti-development or ideologically green. He's an environmental pragmatist focused on what works. He doesn't want culture wars about climate. He wants sensible, evidence-based policies that protect both his income today and his land for tomorrow. Fifthly, middle class Australians remain far more compassionate than some commentators suggest. Eighty-six per cent agree that unemployment payments should be enough so no one skips meals, and 84 per cent believe those payments should cover access to medical care. But sympathy for the needy does not equate to tolerance for waste or systems that entrench dependency. What many oppose isn't compassion — it's inefficiency, a lack of initiative, and a government that fails to empower people. If the Liberal Party is to rebuild, we must do more than repackage old ideas. We must craft policy that reflects today's middle class reality — addressing housing affordability without undermining existing homeowners, recognising dual incomes as the norm in family life, preparing workers for inevitable technological change, pursuing environmental strategies that ensure both growth and sustainability, and recognising the entrepreneurial contributions of migrant communities as central to our national success. The potential electoral benefits of doing so are compelling. While our primary vote has fallen to historic lows in WA, the untapped coalition of middle class voters — spanning traditional suburbia, aspirational migrant communities, small business operators and pragmatic rural producers — is a formidable electoral force. What unites these voters is neither demographic profile nor unchanging policy preferences, but fundamental values: reward for effort, opportunity through education, security for all law-abiding citizens, and compassion without wastefulness. Menzies understood that electoral success flows from first understanding voters' personal circumstances, then demonstrating how Liberal principles offer meaningful solutions. We have this precisely backward — starting with ideological pronouncements, hectoring voters to fall in line, and then dismissing them as 'woke' or 'elitist' when they don't, even when those labels couldn't be further from the truth. The party that first sees middle Australia clearly and speaks to its hopes, not just its frustrations, will dominate politics for a generation. The only question is: will it be us? Richard Wilson is a former State president of the WA Liberal Party
Sydney Morning Herald
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
After driving into ‘an electoral dead end', where to now for the Liberal Party?
Three weeks out from the federal election, Melissa McIntosh revved up the crowd for the Liberal Party's campaign launch. On the far reaches of suburban Sydney, she made her welcome to Menzies' forgotten people, Howard's battlers, Morrison's quiet Australians, 'and, with Peter Dutton, the heartland of our Australian Liberal Party, the forgotten people, the backbone of our nation'. This was a rallying cry to the aspirational workers, small businesses and tradies who had moved from city centres to outer suburbs, searching for their slice of the Australian dream and a better life. The Liberal Party, at this point, had all but abandoned appeals to inner-city voters lost to independents in former blue ribbon seats. These suburban battlers – in western Sydney and around the country – were to become its base. Those voters had other ideas. McIntosh is one of few Liberal members to survive the scrubbing of more than two dozen blue seats from metropolitan electoral maps over two elections. Instead of flocking to the Liberals, outer suburban voters handed the party of Robert Menzies – Australia's longest serving PM – its worst ever defeat. So did women, young people and multicultural communities across Australian cities, leaving the Liberal Party without a heartland. The MPs returning to depleted opposition benches now face an existential reckoning: what is the purpose of the modern Liberal Party, and who does it represent? The new leader will decide. A decade-long fight over whether the party veers right or claims the political centre will reach a crescendo next week, when MPs choose either shadow treasurer Angus Taylor or deputy leader Sussan Ley to set the course for recovery. They have both committed to bringing more women into the party and expanding its appeal, but numerous reviews and previous leaders have said the same thing without substantial change. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's defection from the Nationals to the Liberals intensifies the contest, damaging relations with the junior Coalition partner and promising to bring more culture wars even as moderates plead to ditch them. The fight for the party's future is not just between members. The Liberals are bleeding votes to minor parties and independents on both their left and right. Labor faces the same challenge. With structural declines in support for major parties, election swings have become more volatile. It makes it harder to gauge whether this is a one-off result or spells a long-term wipeout. Loading Predictions of either major party's demise – such as after a 2012 state election rout took Labor down to just seven seats in Queensland – have often failed to eventuate. State Labor was back in government just one election later. But either way, 'there's no sugar-coating the position the party now finds itself in', retiring senator Linda Reynolds said this week. 'You can see through successive reviews in federal and state in terms of where we have taken the wrong turn, but we haven't comprehensively understood those lessons … I don't think we went into this election, or the last election, with a really clear idea of who we are as Liberals.' Historian Paul Strangio sees this as the biggest watershed moment since the 2001 election, which John Howard won in the shadow of the September 11 attacks and Tampa Affair. He says it defined the next two decades. 'The Liberal Party side has been entranced by Howard's legacy, and the Labor Party to some extent has been bullied by [it],' he says. 'Howard in that election very much transmogrified into the 'strong leader', particularly on issues such as border protection, with a degree of xenophobic underpinning ... It's a politics that trades in anxiety and fear, and the Liberal Party in so much of its rhetoric since then has played to those same emotions.' This isn't Trumpism. 'It's an Australian-made conservative populism that Howard was a master at. What the Liberal Party has gone to, particularly under Abbott and Dutton, is a doubled down, more aggressive version of Howardism,' Strangio says. 'The problem is that his proteges have been no good at it. Howard could straddle constituencies, and people saw him as strong on the economy, which helped him ... He funnelled his message in a much more clever way, to speak to mainstream Australia. He wasn't tribal in his media communications.' But this era could be ending, Strangio says. 'There was a sense, on Saturday, that there was finally a repudiation of that [direction]. Whether the Liberal Party wakes up to it, and can step away, is the big question.' A resounding rejection came from the suburbs Liberals thought they'd win over with a 25-cent fuel discount and promise of lowering immigration to boost housing supply. Dutton made a strategic shift to target outer-city mortgage-belt suburbs at the expense of inner-city voters. He came away with neither. The western Sydney seat of Werriwa, which hosted the Liberal campaign launch, remained comfortably with the government while the neighbouring Liberal seats of Banks and Hughes fell to Labor. In the Melbourne growth corridor seat of Hawke, where Dutton held his final rally of the campaign, Labor increased its margin. On the other side of the city, the Liberals lost the mortgage belt seats of Menzies and Deakin. Howard's battlers did not heed his cry. They may no longer exist as the Liberals imagine them. Dutton's pitch to end tax breaks for electric vehicles, for example, would have hit hardest in the outer suburbs, rather than the inner city, according to a postcode analysis. 'The outer suburbs are places of enormous growth and vast demographic change. They're a kaleidoscope of ethnicities and cultures. I think the Dutton formula for those, which spoke to them with a strain of xenophobia based on division, missed the mark. It condescended them,' says Strangio. 'More broadly, there are long-term problems in how the Coalition is trying to pitch itself. Clearly, it has drifted towards conservative populism, and that's losing women, it's losing young voters, and now it's losing the cities as a whole. They've driven into an electoral dead end.' Loading Demographic trends compound the Liberal Party's predicament. Ian McAllister, who has been tracking elections for decades, says women, young people and the university educated have tracked away for at least four elections, regardless of the party in power. 'These are underlying structural changes in the composition of society. All of these are working to the disadvantage of the Coalition,' he says. Much of this is organic. Higher education correlates with more left-of-centre political views, and the portion of Australians with a university degree has soared from 4 per cent in the 1970s to more than 30 per cent today. The gender gap in voting patterns widened around 2010. 'This was kick-started under Julia Gillard and continued ever since,' McAllister says. He links women's lean left to higher rates of university education, more labour force participation, a growing number of single-parent households and decline in religion. Even if the Liberal Party hasn't driven this dynamic, there is a potent question about its response. The review of its 2022 election loss identified that 'the Liberal Party performed particularly poorly with female voters, continuing a trend that has been present since the election of 1996'. It said voters sensed the Liberals were 'failing to adequately represent values and priorities of women in modern Australia' and noted gender representation in parliamentary ranks was its lowest since 1993. Then it went into this year's election without directing any policies at women, outside of domestic violence. It ran twice as many men as women. 'Ten years ago I was part of a review into gender … and we recommended targets and how to get there without quotas,' Reynolds said this week. 'That's been the Liberal Party policy for 10 years, but it's just sat on a shelf.' Women will be found at the political centre, moderates say. The same with professionals and city voters. This was the argument being pushed by former premiers Nick Greiner and Barry O'Farrell this week. 'I think that in the future the party needs to be liberal, sticking to its values, and it needs to be sensible, and it needs to be in the centre,' Greiner told this masthead. 'The notion that you can get anywhere by not being sensible and centric is, I think, pretty bizarre.' Retiring Liberal MP Warren Entsch has watched the Liberals' move to the right unfold. He has sat in the lower house every year since Howard became prime minister in 1996, aside from 2007-10, and praises the long-serving prime minister, particularly for economic performance. But he agrees the party has been 'slowly, slowly drifting' away from the centre. 'I think we lost an opportunity when we didn't elect Julie Bishop as leader [in 2018],' he says. Entsch has identified changes in how policy is made. 'With Howard, when there were contentious policies being discussed, he would invite backbenchers he thought were interested, share it with them, take opinions, and where necessary make adjustments,' he says. 'From a backbenchers' perspective [in this election], most didn't know the policies until they were announced.' Another is the dominance of regional interests. Entsch cites the Liberal and Nationals partnership as a troubling force for the moderates, particularly since the parties merged in Queensland in 2008. 'Nobody had any problem with me when I was campaigning for gay rights, when we had the Liberal Party separate. But when there was an amalgamation, and I was campaigning on gay rights, I was summoned to Brisbane to show cause why I shouldn't be disendorsed,' he says. The partnership muddies the waters for voters, Entsch says. The Nationals appeal to their regional constituents, as they should. But when LNP senator Matt Canavan stands in front of banners with 'I choose coal', it's the likes of Jenny Ware in suburban Sydney who lose their seat. Ditto when Price is pictured in a MAGA cap. '[People] assume her voice is the voice of the leadership of the party. This is why moderates are punished,' Entsch says. A Coalition split has been raised in the election aftermath, including by Canavan himself, as the Nationals' influence in the joint party room grows proportionately. 'The Nationals party has been able to hold seats,' he said. 'The way the Liberal Party is being pulled and pushed in different directions, there's an opportunity ... for the Nationals party to run in more seats. If that leads to us breaking up, great, fine.' It's not just this week that the junior Coalition party prevailed. The Nationals have come out on top over more than a decade of tussling over climate change and energy, including with the nuclear policy taken to this year's election. The Liberals lost six seats to teals over climate in 2022; the Nationals lost none. This year in Queensland, where the parties are merged, all losses aside from Entsch's former seat of Leichhardt came from Brisbane. The LNP held eight of the city's 12 seats in 2019. Now it holds two. 'We hardly have any members, now, in metropolitan areas,' Entsch says. 'We're never going to get back into any sort of government unless we bring back voters [there].' This starts with dampening language around social and cultural issues. Loading 'We need to be a little bit more conscious that, as Howard always said, we're a broad church,' Entsch says. 'Don't start these culture wars in the middle of election campaigns … We've got to be prepared to make concessions that allow voices in those metro areas to be heard.' There is a diminishing number of moderate voices in the party room. Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg, one of few left, is making the same push. 'I think it's very important that we focus on the economic issues and that we avoid these cultural issues at all costs,' he told the ABC. 'I think we have a healthy 'live and let live' ethos in this country, and we have diversity, and generally speaking, that's what most Australians are comfortable with.' Others think cultural debates should assume an even greater role as the party asserts its purpose. This is part of Price's vision for how the Liberal Party should rebuild. 'Let this be the moment we stop whispering our values and start declaring them again, not as fringe ideas, but as the foundation on which this country was built,' she said in a statement. Former prime minister Tony Abbott, who encouraged Price's move to the Liberals, also pointed to flaws in progressive values as he dissected the campaign's failings. 'They accuse us of starting a culture war. I don't think we started the war on our culture. There has been a war on our culture for the best part of 50 years,' he said on the Rebuilding Australia podcast, produced by former Nationals leader and deputy prime minister John Anderson. 'The long march of the left through the institutions is essentially a war against Anglo-Celtic culture ... We need to resist the attack on our culture.' But there is strong consensus, from both moderates and conservatives, that the Liberal Party must find its economic narrative. This is a key part of its identity crisis. McAllister's research observes a decline in the Coalition's ownership of economic issues since 2019. Its position was further confused when it went into the campaign promising higher income taxes and state-owned nuclear power plants – anathema to traditional Liberals. It complained about government spending while matching Labor's promises. 'We jeopardised our reputation for economic management by proclaiming a cost-of-living crisis as the only thing that mattered, which invited both sides to then offer relief packages, and it tended to generate into a competition as to who could give the bigger handout,' Abbott said. 'While we did occasionally acknowledge that you can't subsidise your way to success, you can't tax your way to prosperity ... We didn't prosecute the argument, and we didn't have the policy to make all those things come right, and that's why there is such a challenge ahead.' Abbott and other Liberal heavyweights are not conceding a decade in the wilderness just yet. Tim Wilson's successful effort to reclaim Goldstein – one of just two inner city seats the party is guaranteed to hold – buoyed hopes that strong Liberal campaigns can rival the independent movement. 'We can come back, but it is going to take a lot of effort by people of conviction and courage over the next few years,' Abbott said. 'My plea would be that we don't get lost in debates about conservatives versus progressives and all of that sort of stuff.' Former Liberal senator and moderate Simon Birmingham was more circumspect about its prospects. He urged an overhaul that reached every element – from its membership to the way it approaches culture wars. Loading 'The broad church model of a party that successfully melds liberal and conservative thinking is clearly broken. The Liberal Party is not seen as remotely liberal and the brand of conservatism projected is clearly perceived as too harsh and out of touch,' he wrote on LinkedIn. 'The Liberal Party has failed to learn lessons from the past, and if it fails to do so in the face of this result, then its future viability to govern will be questioned.' The next Liberal Party leader bears this responsibility. 'They're now left with an existential question,' says Strangio. 'Will the new leader try to shift to the centre, or double down further?' Which way the party swings will be decided on Tuesday. Both Taylor and Ley says they want to win back women and rebuild the party, but the party is far from settled about how it does so. With stakes so high, backgrounding in the lead-up has been rife. Entsch, after almost 30 years in politics, doesn't underestimate the importance of next week's vote. 'The first thing we need is to make sure we get the new leaders right.'
The Age
09-05-2025
- Politics
- The Age
After driving into ‘an electoral dead end', where to now for the Liberal Party?
Three weeks out from the federal election, Melissa McIntosh revved up the crowd for the Liberal Party's campaign launch. On the far reaches of suburban Sydney, she made her welcome to Menzies' forgotten people, Howard's battlers, Morrison's quiet Australians, 'and, with Peter Dutton, the heartland of our Australian Liberal Party, the forgotten people, the backbone of our nation'. This was a rallying cry to the aspirational workers, small businesses and tradies who had moved from city centres to outer suburbs, searching for their slice of the Australian dream and a better life. The Liberal Party, at this point, had all but abandoned appeals to inner-city voters lost to independents in former blue ribbon seats. These suburban battlers – in western Sydney and around the country – were to become its base. Those voters had other ideas. McIntosh is one of few Liberal members to survive the scrubbing of more than two dozen blue seats from metropolitan electoral maps over two elections. Instead of flocking to the Liberals, outer suburban voters handed the party of Robert Menzies – Australia's longest serving PM – its worst ever defeat. So did women, young people and multicultural communities across Australian cities, leaving the Liberal Party without a heartland. The MPs returning to depleted opposition benches now face an existential reckoning: what is the purpose of the modern Liberal Party, and who does it represent? The new leader will decide. A decade-long fight over whether the party veers right or claims the political centre will reach a crescendo next week, when MPs choose either shadow treasurer Angus Taylor or deputy leader Sussan Ley to set the course for recovery. They have both committed to bringing more women into the party and expanding its appeal, but numerous reviews and previous leaders have said the same thing without substantial change. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's defection from the Nationals to the Liberals intensifies the contest, damaging relations with the junior Coalition partner and promising to bring more culture wars even as moderates plead to ditch them. The fight for the party's future is not just between members. The Liberals are bleeding votes to minor parties and independents on both their left and right. Labor faces the same challenge. With structural declines in support for major parties, election swings have become more volatile. It makes it harder to gauge whether this is a one-off result or spells a long-term wipeout. Loading Predictions of either major party's demise – such as after a 2012 state election rout took Labor down to just seven seats in Queensland – have often failed to eventuate. State Labor was back in government just one election later. But either way, 'there's no sugar-coating the position the party now finds itself in', retiring senator Linda Reynolds said this week. 'You can see through successive reviews in federal and state in terms of where we have taken the wrong turn, but we haven't comprehensively understood those lessons … I don't think we went into this election, or the last election, with a really clear idea of who we are as Liberals.' Historian Paul Strangio sees this as the biggest watershed moment since the 2001 election, which John Howard won in the shadow of the September 11 attacks and Tampa Affair. He says it defined the next two decades. 'The Liberal Party side has been entranced by Howard's legacy, and the Labor Party to some extent has been bullied by [it],' he says. 'Howard in that election very much transmogrified into the 'strong leader', particularly on issues such as border protection, with a degree of xenophobic underpinning ... It's a politics that trades in anxiety and fear, and the Liberal Party in so much of its rhetoric since then has played to those same emotions.' This isn't Trumpism. 'It's an Australian-made conservative populism that Howard was a master at. What the Liberal Party has gone to, particularly under Abbott and Dutton, is a doubled down, more aggressive version of Howardism,' Strangio says. 'The problem is that his proteges have been no good at it. Howard could straddle constituencies, and people saw him as strong on the economy, which helped him ... He funnelled his message in a much more clever way, to speak to mainstream Australia. He wasn't tribal in his media communications.' But this era could be ending, Strangio says. 'There was a sense, on Saturday, that there was finally a repudiation of that [direction]. Whether the Liberal Party wakes up to it, and can step away, is the big question.' A resounding rejection came from the suburbs Liberals thought they'd win over with a 25-cent fuel discount and promise of lowering immigration to boost housing supply. Dutton made a strategic shift to target outer-city mortgage-belt suburbs at the expense of inner-city voters. He came away with neither. The western Sydney seat of Werriwa, which hosted the Liberal campaign launch, remained comfortably with the government while the neighbouring Liberal seats of Banks and Hughes fell to Labor. In the Melbourne growth corridor seat of Hawke, where Dutton held his final rally of the campaign, Labor increased its margin. On the other side of the city, the Liberals lost the mortgage belt seats of Menzies and Deakin. Howard's battlers did not heed his cry. They may no longer exist as the Liberals imagine them. Dutton's pitch to end tax breaks for electric vehicles, for example, would have hit hardest in the outer suburbs, rather than the inner city, according to a postcode analysis. 'The outer suburbs are places of enormous growth and vast demographic change. They're a kaleidoscope of ethnicities and cultures. I think the Dutton formula for those, which spoke to them with a strain of xenophobia based on division, missed the mark. It condescended them,' says Strangio. 'More broadly, there are long-term problems in how the Coalition is trying to pitch itself. Clearly, it has drifted towards conservative populism, and that's losing women, it's losing young voters, and now it's losing the cities as a whole. They've driven into an electoral dead end.' Loading Demographic trends compound the Liberal Party's predicament. Ian McAllister, who has been tracking elections for decades, says women, young people and the university educated have tracked away for at least four elections, regardless of the party in power. 'These are underlying structural changes in the composition of society. All of these are working to the disadvantage of the Coalition,' he says. Much of this is organic. Higher education correlates with more left-of-centre political views, and the portion of Australians with a university degree has soared from 4 per cent in the 1970s to more than 30 per cent today. The gender gap in voting patterns widened around 2010. 'This was kick-started under Julia Gillard and continued ever since,' McAllister says. He links women's lean left to higher rates of university education, more labour force participation, a growing number of single-parent households and decline in religion. Even if the Liberal Party hasn't driven this dynamic, there is a potent question about its response. The review of its 2022 election loss identified that 'the Liberal Party performed particularly poorly with female voters, continuing a trend that has been present since the election of 1996'. It said voters sensed the Liberals were 'failing to adequately represent values and priorities of women in modern Australia' and noted gender representation in parliamentary ranks was its lowest since 1993. Then it went into this year's election without directing any policies at women, outside of domestic violence. It ran twice as many men as women. 'Ten years ago I was part of a review into gender … and we recommended targets and how to get there without quotas,' Reynolds said this week. 'That's been the Liberal Party policy for 10 years, but it's just sat on a shelf.' Women will be found at the political centre, moderates say. The same with professionals and city voters. This was the argument being pushed by former premiers Nick Greiner and Barry O'Farrell this week. 'I think that in the future the party needs to be liberal, sticking to its values, and it needs to be sensible, and it needs to be in the centre,' Greiner told this masthead. 'The notion that you can get anywhere by not being sensible and centric is, I think, pretty bizarre.' Retiring Liberal MP Warren Entsch has watched the Liberals' move to the right unfold. He has sat in the lower house every year since Howard became prime minister in 1996, aside from 2007-10, and praises the long-serving prime minister, particularly for economic performance. But he agrees the party has been 'slowly, slowly drifting' away from the centre. 'I think we lost an opportunity when we didn't elect Julie Bishop as leader [in 2018],' he says. Entsch has identified changes in how policy is made. 'With Howard, when there were contentious policies being discussed, he would invite backbenchers he thought were interested, share it with them, take opinions, and where necessary make adjustments,' he says. 'From a backbenchers' perspective [in this election], most didn't know the policies until they were announced.' Another is the dominance of regional interests. Entsch cites the Liberal and Nationals partnership as a troubling force for the moderates, particularly since the parties merged in Queensland in 2008. 'Nobody had any problem with me when I was campaigning for gay rights, when we had the Liberal Party separate. But when there was an amalgamation, and I was campaigning on gay rights, I was summoned to Brisbane to show cause why I shouldn't be disendorsed,' he says. The partnership muddies the waters for voters, Entsch says. The Nationals appeal to their regional constituents, as they should. But when LNP senator Matt Canavan stands in front of banners with 'I choose coal', it's the likes of Jenny Ware in suburban Sydney who lose their seat. Ditto when Price is pictured in a MAGA cap. '[People] assume her voice is the voice of the leadership of the party. This is why moderates are punished,' Entsch says. A Coalition split has been raised in the election aftermath, including by Canavan himself, as the Nationals' influence in the joint party room grows proportionately. 'The Nationals party has been able to hold seats,' he said. 'The way the Liberal Party is being pulled and pushed in different directions, there's an opportunity ... for the Nationals party to run in more seats. If that leads to us breaking up, great, fine.' It's not just this week that the junior Coalition party prevailed. The Nationals have come out on top over more than a decade of tussling over climate change and energy, including with the nuclear policy taken to this year's election. The Liberals lost six seats to teals over climate in 2022; the Nationals lost none. This year in Queensland, where the parties are merged, all losses aside from Entsch's former seat of Leichhardt came from Brisbane. The LNP held eight of the city's 12 seats in 2019. Now it holds two. 'We hardly have any members, now, in metropolitan areas,' Entsch says. 'We're never going to get back into any sort of government unless we bring back voters [there].' This starts with dampening language around social and cultural issues. Loading 'We need to be a little bit more conscious that, as Howard always said, we're a broad church,' Entsch says. 'Don't start these culture wars in the middle of election campaigns … We've got to be prepared to make concessions that allow voices in those metro areas to be heard.' There is a diminishing number of moderate voices in the party room. Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg, one of few left, is making the same push. 'I think it's very important that we focus on the economic issues and that we avoid these cultural issues at all costs,' he told the ABC. 'I think we have a healthy 'live and let live' ethos in this country, and we have diversity, and generally speaking, that's what most Australians are comfortable with.' Others think cultural debates should assume an even greater role as the party asserts its purpose. This is part of Price's vision for how the Liberal Party should rebuild. 'Let this be the moment we stop whispering our values and start declaring them again, not as fringe ideas, but as the foundation on which this country was built,' she said in a statement. Former prime minister Tony Abbott, who encouraged Price's move to the Liberals, also pointed to flaws in progressive values as he dissected the campaign's failings. 'They accuse us of starting a culture war. I don't think we started the war on our culture. There has been a war on our culture for the best part of 50 years,' he said on the Rebuilding Australia podcast, produced by former Nationals leader and deputy prime minister John Anderson. 'The long march of the left through the institutions is essentially a war against Anglo-Celtic culture ... We need to resist the attack on our culture.' But there is strong consensus, from both moderates and conservatives, that the Liberal Party must find its economic narrative. This is a key part of its identity crisis. McAllister's research observes a decline in the Coalition's ownership of economic issues since 2019. Its position was further confused when it went into the campaign promising higher income taxes and state-owned nuclear power plants – anathema to traditional Liberals. It complained about government spending while matching Labor's promises. 'We jeopardised our reputation for economic management by proclaiming a cost-of-living crisis as the only thing that mattered, which invited both sides to then offer relief packages, and it tended to generate into a competition as to who could give the bigger handout,' Abbott said. 'While we did occasionally acknowledge that you can't subsidise your way to success, you can't tax your way to prosperity ... We didn't prosecute the argument, and we didn't have the policy to make all those things come right, and that's why there is such a challenge ahead.' Abbott and other Liberal heavyweights are not conceding a decade in the wilderness just yet. Tim Wilson's successful effort to reclaim Goldstein – one of just two inner city seats the party is guaranteed to hold – buoyed hopes that strong Liberal campaigns can rival the independent movement. 'We can come back, but it is going to take a lot of effort by people of conviction and courage over the next few years,' Abbott said. 'My plea would be that we don't get lost in debates about conservatives versus progressives and all of that sort of stuff.' Former Liberal senator and moderate Simon Birmingham was more circumspect about its prospects. He urged an overhaul that reached every element – from its membership to the way it approaches culture wars. Loading 'The broad church model of a party that successfully melds liberal and conservative thinking is clearly broken. The Liberal Party is not seen as remotely liberal and the brand of conservatism projected is clearly perceived as too harsh and out of touch,' he wrote on LinkedIn. 'The Liberal Party has failed to learn lessons from the past, and if it fails to do so in the face of this result, then its future viability to govern will be questioned.' The next Liberal Party leader bears this responsibility. 'They're now left with an existential question,' says Strangio. 'Will the new leader try to shift to the centre, or double down further?' Which way the party swings will be decided on Tuesday. Both Taylor and Ley says they want to win back women and rebuild the party, but the party is far from settled about how it does so. With stakes so high, backgrounding in the lead-up has been rife. Entsch, after almost 30 years in politics, doesn't underestimate the importance of next week's vote. 'The first thing we need is to make sure we get the new leaders right.'
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Yahoo
Will Ralph Menzies' dementia keep him from a firing squad? Attorneys make final argument
Ralph Leroy Menzies during a competency hearing in 3rd District Court in West Jordan on Monday, Nov 18, 2024. (Pool photo by Rick Egan/The Salt Lake Tribune) After nearly 40 years on death row, a judge will soon determine whether Ralph Menzies' dementia is advanced enough to spare him from being executed by firing squad. Lawyers for the 67-year-old convicted murderer say his brain is so damaged he can't form a 'rational understanding' of why the state is pursuing the death penalty — prosecutors for the Utah Attorney General's Office say while Menzies might be impaired, he is still 'clearly competent.' Attorneys for both sides met at the 3rd District Courthouse in West Jordan on Wednesday to make their final oral arguments before Judge Matthew Bates, who will issue a ruling sometime in the next 60 days. It marked what is likely one of the final hearings to determine whether Menzies is competent enough to face execution, the end of a monthslong process that included testimony from numerous medical experts and the victim's family. The competency hearing began in November, but due to scheduling and logistical conflicts, final oral arguments were pushed to May 7. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Menzies was brought into the West Jordan courtroom at about 2 p.m. Wednesday. The death row inmate sat in a wheelchair with oxygen tubes running up his nose during the hearing, sporting a scruffy, somewhat unkempt white beard and short, receding brownish-grey hair. He would occasionally lean over to speak with members of his legal team, but otherwise sat in silence during the roughly hour-long hearing. Menzies was sentenced to death in 1988 after he kidnapped and murdered Maurine Hunsaker, a 26-year-old gas station clerk. Menzies took her up Big Cottonwood Canyon, where she was later found tied to a tree with her throat slashed. In recent years, Menzies' health has deteriorated, his attorneys say. After falling several times in prison, he was diagnosed with vascular dementia, where the brain's blood flow is disrupted, leading to memory loss and declining cognitive function. An MRI exam showed Menzies' brain tissue is deteriorating, and his balance is fraught, causing him to fall several times each month. According to his attorneys, Menzies is so impaired by his dementia that he does not have a 'rational understanding' of why he is facing execution, meaning he can't make the link between his crime and the punishment. That means society's goal of retribution and deterrence — the foundational goals of the death penalty — aren't being fulfilled, they say. Per Utah code, and U.S. Supreme Court case law, that means he should be deemed too incompetent to face an execution, his lawyers say. On Wednesday, Menzies' attorney Lindsey Layer pointed to MRI results that showed the death row inmate had 'the highest level' of brain damage, with parts of it atrophied and filled with fluid. There are also the physical signs, backed by the medical experts hired by Menzies' attorneys who found him to be incompetent. He struggles with basic activities, Layer said, like forgetting to bathe, flush the toilet or renew medication, and often has issues with his personal finances and the prison commissary (a store for inmates). 'His inability to engage in what is a fairly simple process of renewing his medication,' said Layer, 'demonstrates his inability to engage in that analytical thought that is necessary to have a rational understanding of the state's reasoning for his execution.' That rational understanding was at the heart of Layer's argument, and she repeatedly underscored the difference between awareness and understanding. 'Mr. Menzies can understand the concrete things,' Layer said. 'He can understand, 'I was sentenced to death and the state is going to kill me.' But what he can't understand is the how or why.' Daniel Boyer with the Utah Attorney General's Office pushed back on the standard of competency outlined by Layer, telling the judge Menzies simply needs to understand why the state is pursuing his execution. If the court agrees with that standard, Boyer said, 'he's clearly competent.' SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE Boyer encouraged Bates to listen to recordings of Menzies' recent phone conversations, which show 'his ability to converse, to problem solve' — and Menzies' use of his prison-issued tablet. 'I think the tablet is a good indicator of his competency,' Boyer said, noting that he can buy items from the commissary, check his finances, and access prison rules and policies. 'This showed an extraordinarily high level of functioning.' Matt Hunsaker, Maurine's son, gave his first statement to the court since the competency hearing began last year. In the decades since his mother's murder, he's attended hearing after hearing, read countless rulings and court orders, and advocated nonstop for Menzies' execution. It's the end of the road for Hunsaker. If Bates finds Menzies incompetent to be executed, he won't protest the ruling. 'I don't envy you for the decision you have to make,' Hunsaker told Bates. 'I just want to put it out there — this man took my mom from a gas station where she was trying to support her family.' Speaking to reporters outside of the courtroom, Hunsaker repeated a familiar sentiment — he's tired of this. 'It's taken a toll on the whole family. There is some closure possibly ahead, but 39 years, two months, nine days, that's a long time,' he said. 'I've got a grandbaby now, it's time to shift the focus of wasting time on this, and bring a new little girl into the family.' Hunsaker didn't want to speculate on how Bates will rule, telling Utah News Dispatch 'there's good arguments on both sides.' 'My personal opinion is he's competent. He knows what he did. It's time to stop with the games. He needs to be executed. And again, I believe this is just a delay tactic,' he said. Bates, while asking several questions during both Menzies' and the state's arguments, offered no indication of how he would rule. He concluded Wednesday's hearing telling attorneys that he'll issue a ruling in the next 60 days. In Utah, death row inmates sentenced before May 2004 had a choice between lethal injection and firing squad. For those sentenced after 2004, the default method of execution is lethal injection, unless the necessary drugs are not available. Firing squads are rare in the U.S. But earlier this year, South Carolina executed two inmates by firing squad — Brad Sigmon and Mikal Mahdi — making it the first state other than Utah to utilize the method in the last several decades. According to the Associated Press, at least 144 civilian prisoners have been executed by firing squad in the U.S. since 1608, almost all of them in Utah.
