Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt joined The Young IPA Podcast this week to talk about a range of topics. Here are some highlights.
Why he spoke at Milo Yiannopoulos’ events.
“I saw a clip of the Western Australian premier Mark McGowan saying ‘Milo Yiannopoulos isn’t welcome in Western Australia, we won’t extend any government building.’ And I thought ‘you bugger’ and I got really cross. And I thought I’d come out of my cocoon just to stick it up his kilt and so I went there and opened. Here’s a state with the rabbit-proof fence, now they’ve got a conservative-proof fence.”
How Milo has built his audience.
“He’s done it in a way that sometimes is yuck but done in a way that we notice. I put exactly these points to him on stage and he said ‘everyone else has failed.’ And I said if we dropped the civility that we believe conservatives stand for then we’ve failed already. But on the other hand, he’s part of a mega-reality show in which the audience are willing recruits, extras in it. And part of that is by saying certain things no more rude than the average leftist comic or commentator – in fact, less rude – and provoking an over-the-top reaction and a violent one that you never see outside a Barry Humphries thing. And the audience sits there and they are loving the fact that he’s tweaking the nose of the bear because conservatives and libertarians have been taking it for years without hitting back. Seeing those hypocrites [of the left] fume is pretty good.”
What the Liberal Party completely disassociating itself from Milo means.
“I addressed on tour with Milo a couple of Liberal Party meetings where the mood was sombre, angry, defeated. Particularly angry at the Liberals not standing for anything and not fighting for anything. Speaker after speaker in the Q&A sessions I did with Mike Nahan, former Executive Director of the IPA now opposition leader in WA, were furious about this, and despondent and wanting to fight back. Well, Milo Yiannopoulos does fight back – not with the weapons I’d choose – but he does fight back. And the energy in his audiences, by contrast, was amazing. I’m thinking if the Liberals can’t engage with these people, then who are they engaging with? These are libertarians, the people who are sick of political correctness, identity politics and all that. The Liberals aren’t engaging them – Milo is.
How the Liberal Party can be restored.
“When I went to Western Australia, people were saying ‘we’ll lose five seats here’. And then you go and look at the seats – Christian Porter, who’s actually been doing great work, Andrew Hastie, the future, his seat would also be gone. This is the thing. When we think ‘let’s destroy the Liberal Party in order to rebuild it’ the cockroaches will probably live and the good ones will be all dead.”
“It’s a big knock on me – I’m so mean to Malcolm Turnbull that all I’m doing is paving the way for Bill Shorten and that is infinitely worse, and that the Labor Party will have won. And I think hasn’t the Labor Party already won? What’s the point of a Liberal government that implements many Labor ideas?
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