SYDNEY—Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage said that former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull pretended to be a conservative while praising recent victories for the conservative movement in Australia, the UK, and the United States.
Farage made the remark while speaking Aug. 10 at the second day of Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Australia, a conference for those who identify with conservative and libertarian values that favor small government to gather and share their vision for the nation’s future. The event is the first of its kind in Australia.
“Malcolm Turnbull ... pretended to be a conservative but actually turned out to be a snake,” Farage said.
Farage’s Brexit Party recently surpassed German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany to become the largest single party in the new European Parliament.
A former UK Conservative, Farage parted ways with the political establishment on the right side of politics early in his career, and now is attempting to win support by fighting “global corporatism” under the slogan of “change politics for good.”
At CPAC Australia, Farage observed that the rise of figures such as Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Australia, President Donald Trump in the United States, and the Independence Party and Brexit Party in the UK owed to one main factor.
“There has been a revolt on the right,” Farage told the audience of about 500.
“This has all happened because what purported to be conservative parties and those who made themselves out to be conservative leaders actually were nothing of the kind,” Farage said.
“We had David Cameron running the British Conservative Party—somebody who was not conservative in any way at all, but a part of the trendy metro liberal elite, masquerading as a conservative, being quite the opposite,” he said.
He also called former UK Prime Minister Theresa May “somebody else who pretended to be conservative but wasn’t conservative in any way at all.”
Farage said in Australia, “your Liberal Party—your conservative movement—had been hijacked by the other side, taken over by a bloke called Malcolm Turnbull.”
He observed why Scott Morrison, leader of the center-right Liberal Party of Australia, was voted in as prime minister in the recent election.
“You’ve got somebody who is conservative and guess what—mainstream media may not like it, those in the middle of Melbourne and Sydney may not like it, but out where real people live, they voted for him and he won it,” Farage said.
“We now are generally across the Western world going for leaders ... that believe in the basic tenets that the nation states in the world are the building block to whom we pay our allegiance, our taxes, our loyalties,” he said.
“And it’s through the nation that we want to live our lives, not through the new false bureaucratic globalist movement,” he added.
Farage said that he decided to support CPAC Australia because he believes conservatives in Western nations “need to start working together,” noting that, “the other side, globalists, work together.”
“[The globalists] operate together,” he said. “They have been working for decades to achieve a new global government in our world.”
“We on our side in the generally conservative, nationalist, or nationist movements have tended to operate very much on our own. And that now needs to change. We now need to start working together. We now need to start recognizing that because we want to put the interest of our nations and its citizens first, does not in any way deter us or stop us or hinder us from cooperating on the international stage.”
“That’s why I’m going to go on whatever I do working with other groups around the world dedicated to nation-state democracy,” he said.
