Kirkup – The Matt Kean of the West

The Western Australian election is a pity date. Everyone knows the outcome, but the whole circus shows up anyway and goes through the motions. We put on our makeup – pick out a suit – just don’t make us pretend that anyone is going to enjoy themselves.

This election was over before it began.

Liberal opposition leader Zak Kirkup seems confused as to whether he identifies as Labor or Green. He is the Matt Kean of the West, left out in the sun too long until bits of bad policy started poking through.

Click here to support Alexandra Marshall’s work.

It’s not just that he’s culturally appropriated the insufferable hand-clap-between-each-word garbage that the Democrats have been carrying on with. He spends most of the time praising the government that he is meant to be fighting. No one is going to dethrone the king for the court jester. It is fine to agree with the odd policy, but never stand up there in a miniskirt shaking your pom-poms.

When Kirkup proudly announced ‘net zero emissions by 2030’ alongside a plan to close down all coal-fired power stations in the next four years – the electorate laughed. If he had any credibility, it was dragged off by the last rats as they strapped on their life vests and jumped off HMAS Nope.

How do we break it to him?

Western Australia is synonymous with mining.

Kirkup’s entire budget (if he were ever to get near it) is propped up by big machines digging crap out of the ground, putting it through blast furnaces, and turning it into infrastructure. It is not a ‘carbon neutral’ activity and never will be. Worse, he claims to believe the lie that ‘renewable energy’ is green – despite its existence increasing open cut mining activities, multiplying demand for minerals that produce dangerous waste during extraction, and creation of an energy technology that struggles to make it twenty years before ending up in landfill.

China loves renewables because the United Nations essentially subsidises them to carve open failed African states, debt-traps corrupt governments into building infrastructure, before collecting the country’s natural resources as collateral on unpaid loans. This is the virtuous environment from which politicians like Kirkup buy their ‘green’ renewables.

Kirkup up says this ethically dubious technology will ‘decrease energy bills’. Whether he is lying or genuinely an idiot is of little relevance, because Kirkup does not understand his voters and so will never find himself anywhere near power. By the end of the year, the only evidence that he existed will be the cached copy of his social media accounts, Googled by an intern journalist writing up his political obituary.

This is what happens when you take a page out of Queensland and Victoria’s Liberal Party manual for ‘How to Lose an Election by Being Invisible and Offering Nothing’.

His ideological failures are not constrained to one issue. Kirkup’s Twitter header image quotes the socially destructive, un-Australian Marxist dogma, ‘Always was, always will be Aboriginal Land’ – though we’re yet to see any evidence of him offering to give up his house and hop on the next cruise ship back to his nearest ancestral landmass. Only two types of people utter this phrase; those who want to extort billions of dollars out of the taxpayer, and their enablers who think that these phrases correspond to free political points rather than sending dangerous fringe lunacy mainstream. Kirkup is telling voters that the homes they built are not really theirs, that despite many of them being here for hundreds of years with their ancestors buried in the Western Australian dirt – they’re not really Australians. So what are they, Kirkup? Squatters waiting to be endlessly blackmailed by identity politics? And you want them to vote for you?

This is the same Kirkup who complained that it was ‘shocking and dangerous’ for a Labor premier to question the effectiveness of a Covid vaccine because ‘it is supported by the WHO’.

One wonders what Kirkup has to say about the World Health Organisation’s integrity when it lied to protect China’s reputation, helping it cover up the origin of the virus while allowing it to spread across the world by accusing nations that shut their borders of being racist. Or indeed, the WHO’s continuously contradictory advice to the point that it changed the definition of herd immunity to fit the Covid vaccine because the vaccine itself did not provide actual herd immunity. This is political propaganda in real-time – a re-writing of the facts to save politicians from being called liars. Does Kirkup find this behaviour shocking and dangerous? Liberal voters certainly do.

Kirkup has the moral fortitude of un-set jelly and the survival prospects of a spear-fisherman swimming through Sydney Heads with dead fish attached to his wet suit.

He even tried to quote Churchill, but here is some free advice. Do not draw parallels to better men unless you want the public to measure you against them. While you repeat the oft-quoted joke that Churchill ‘hated to do without the comforts of civilisation’ during World War I – Churchill was a man who believed ardently in his destiny to lead. He looked directly into the blackest pit of collectivism. The wars that he won whisper from their graves. The last people to survive them linger just long enough to watch their memorials shut on account of a virus created by the depraved machine of Communism.

Click here to support Alexandra Marshall’s work.

The most consistent thing Kirkup has done is count down to the election on his social media accounts, dragging the state toward the scaffold-like the clock chiming away the hours outside the Tower of London.

As he said himself, he’s not going to win.