Post
by Rorschach » Tue Jul 11, 2017 12:05 pm
11/2001
It is also the defender of the nation's key institutions the family, rural and regional communities, and Australia's system of government. Those who seek to divide the modern-day Liberal Party into factions of moderates, wets and dries will be unsuccessful because the economic debates of the 1980s that gave rise to these labels are now largely settled.
5/2014
The “wet versus dry” battles, between the moderate and economic rationalist wings of the Liberal party, are now all but over; the last wets the victims of a swift and destructive political climate change. Their language was simply no longer the language of a party that had turned neoliberal.
11/2009
Santamaria also covered the war between Liberal economic "wets" and "dries". While he agreed that, in their stand for smaller government, the "dries" were essentially correct, he pointed out that "[it] is, however, a debate on a purely economic agenda. It does not arouse the passion, excite the heart or move the spirit"; neither is their broader programme realistic.
The "wet" and "dry" tags were also utterly unrepresentative of social beliefs within the Liberal Party, where "wet" and "dry" are often a mere statement of factional or tribal loyalty, rather than of any principles.
5/2010
Fraser’s opponents within the Liberal Party also identified as liberals — not just those on the left, who appropriated to themselves the term “small-l liberal”, but also the dries, who argued for free trade and deregulation. Liberalism is a broad church, and the debate over liberal principles could be intense, but there was a consensus that such things existed and were important.
6/2014
This grouping is said to be more economically moderate, or wet, than the Hockey Club; Morrison, for instance, was reported to have argued for a $25 million lifeline to be thrown to SPC Ardmona this year, a proposal opposed by Abbott, Hockey and other economic dries.
Senator Abetz, for example, has argued forcefully for his home state of Tasmania to be treated as a special economic case with handouts such as $16 million for the Cadbury chocolate factory in Hobart; others are more economically dry.
7/2014
Hockey: the moderate man forced to be dry
Opinion
The Drum
By Chris Berg
Madonna King's biography of Joe Hockey may exaggerate his moderate instincts, but the overwhelming impression is of a Liberal moderate assuming a role that demands aggressive dryness, writes Chris Berg.
9/2015
Other ministers once known as moderates include Christopher Pyne, Greg Hunt and George Brandis. Scott Morrison is a moderate too, although he reportedly attends the faction dinners of both the Liberal wets (moderates) and dries (conservatives).
9/2015
Given the recent Liberal spill and now murmurs of a wet liberal resurgence, it is time for self-reflection on the part of the Liberal Party. And as a scholar who works on foundational figures of the liberal intellectual tradition, I would like to suggest that the debates surrounding the vexed legacy of Immanuel Kant offer a few lessons for deliberating between the competing brands of liberalism, wet and dry, that have been with this tradition since its beginning.
1/2016
Falsely derided as an arch-conservative, it is clear that former Prime Minister Tony Abbott did repeatedly try to appeal to the left wing of his party; hence the unfortunate backdown on 18C (a futile gesture to appease the ungrateful Muslim community, as well as the ‘wets’)
This is the sort of careless negative symbolism – not quite in the knighthood category, admittedly, but still potent – that a Liberal Prime Minister must avoid if he is to keep everyone, whether wet or dry, happy within the Liberal fold.
2/2016
For parties of the right, the destruction of Deakin/Menzies-style “small-l” liberalism, with the defeat of “wets” by economic “dries”, disenfranchised a proportion of the party base. This was one catalyst for the broken alignments to come. The narrower individualism of the economic pragmatists was also more conducive to an ultra-conservatism which the need to reach consensus within a “broad church” had earlier kept in check.
Van Onselen the Monthly no date
While the economic philosophy of the dries wasn’t electorally popular, and support for it within the Liberal Party was spotty at best, it gave Howard the foundations for reforms he would go on to enact in government.
wiki no date
The "wet" (moderate) and "dry" (conservative) wings of the Liberal party co-operated fairly harmoniously, but in the early 1970s as conservatives started to dominate in South Australia liberals led by Steele Hall broke off to form the Liberal Movement. In 1977, other dissident small-l liberal[8][9] forces led by Don Chipp created the Australian Democrats.
liberals.net no date
By the early 1980s friction in the Party existed between "drys" and "wets" within the Liberal Party. The Party itself, had been squeezed off a lot of its traditional territory by the ALP which had shifted to the right.
Waleed Aly 2010
The wet/dry division in the Liberal Party was driven locally by the emergence of ...
ANU no date
Given the dominance of Fraser as prime minister and the heavy impact that the 1983 defeat had on Dry members, much of the process had happened quietly. It was only after the 1984 election, when a slew of retirements from the party saw the return of many more Dry members into the opposition parties, that the shift in the party’s outlook was readily apparent to social liberals like Baume.
Contemporaneous news reporting tended to suggest a level of political organisation on the part of the Wets, which as Baume’s diary reveals, was simply not there. The Liberal Forum was less well organised than its forerunner, the Dries, had been during the later years of the Fraser Government.
2/2017
Coming after the fierce wet/dry internal conflicts of the 80s, this “broad church” construct was highly useful in providing “an umbrella under which the party could function”.
2/2017
Only then did the split between “wets” and “drys” lead to liberal moderates being increasingly marginalised. And only then party did hardliners begin to assert their claims as “conservatives”, a term that had never been indigenous to Australian anti-Labor politics, but was appropriated from the US culture wars of the time to serve the same purpose.
6/2017
There have been many leadership battles within the Liberal Party over the past forty years: Fraser and Peacock, Howard and Peacock, Howard and Costello. These divisions were associated with ideological tendencies between wets and dries and social and economic liberals and conservatives.
7/2017
With Tony Abbott and the Liberal conservative “dries” — now in the party’s minority for the first time since the 1980s — very publicly baiting the progressive Turnbull “wets”, the Liberals’ divisions have rarely been more stark.
DOLT - A person who is stupid and entirely tedious at the same time, like bwian. Oblivious to their own mental incapacity. On IGNORE - Warrior, mellie, Nom De Plume, FLEKTARD
