What’s in a name? Liberals fear Liberal Democrats
WHEN Mendooran farmer Peter Rothwell put his hand up to stand as the Liberal Democratic party candidate for the federal seat of Parkes just a couple of weeks ago, he didn’t think he’d have to rebrand within a fortnight, but he wasn’t counting on the spectre of fear his party’s name held for the Coalition’s major partner.
This latest political bunfight began when the major parties joined together to pass a bill called the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Party Registration Integrity) Bill 2021 which has been upheld by the High Court after two previous unsuccessful challenges.
That law will now mean the Liberal Party effectively has monopoly rights to the word Liberal when it comes to naming political parties, and they’ll be able to call for the Liberal Democrats to be de-registered.
The Liberal Democrat’s lead senate candidate for NSW, John Ruddick, was in town two weeks ago for the launch of the party’s local candidate and says the ruling is “a joke”, although he still hopes the party will be able to use the current name for the impending election.
“We were fighting for the principle that big political parties do not have a legal monopoly on certain words. We lost that battle and now an illiberal party owns the word liberal,” Mr Ruddick told Dubbo Photo News.
“The truth is that it is false and misleading advertising for the ‘Liberal’ Party to use the word “liberal” in its name but we small government Liberal Democrats don’t believe in a heavy-handed state that can tell political parties what their name should be.
“Until the past decade or so, the Liberal and National Parties were defenders of individual freedom but those days are behind us and are not coming back in those old parties.”
Peter Rothwell said it’s this sort of behaviour from the Liberals that caused him to walk away from the coalition. He believes he’s just one of many, which is why, he says, the major parties are so scared.
“People are fed up with government overreach, Covid alarmism, the amount of red tape hindering small business and the rapidly increasing national debt. The upcoming election is a critical fight for removing power from the government and returning that power to where it should reside, with the individual,” Mr Rothwell told Dubbo Photo News.
Political commentator Topher Field, who was also in Dubbo for Mr Rothwell’s campaign launch, said the move to disallow the Liberal Democrats the right to use their party name was symptomatic of the problems confronting representative politics in Australia.
“So the big-party-bullies are at it again, and this time they’ve managed to ‘own’ words and stop other parties from using any words that they are already using,” he said.
“It means words like ‘liberal’ are no longer allowed to mean anything... they are a proper noun only.
“Still, I actually suspect this is going to work out in favour of the Libdems, and the Liberal Party are not going to be celebrating this “win” for long.”