Mr Insincere is Back!
Tim Smith MP
Tim Wilson, the Liberal Party’s Mr Insincere, with the shit-eating grin and the moral compass of a Spanish Inquisitor, is back in Parliament — because apparently, Australia didn’t learn its lesson the first time this smug spiv was inflicted on us.
The former (laughably titled) Human Rights Commissioner, walking capitalist press release, and all-round sleazebag has been released from the Liberal Party’s ideological hibernation crypt — that sealed vault where they keep their smirking, market-worshipping culture warriors cryogenically frozen between scandals. It's from where they wheel John Howard out of, dust off the mothballs, and trot him out to play Elder Goblin come election time.
Tim’s been reanimated with the tears of hungry children and the hopes of wage slaves, now fully juiced and ready to resume his role as the Liberal Party’s most gleamingly hollow front man. Proof that you can polish a turd.
Clearly the People that voted for this asshole have selective memories and have selected to forget Tim's inhumanity.
While asylum seekers children in prison camps in Nauru were cutting themselves in desolation of the soul, their hollowing, deep, gnawing emptiness stealing from them even hope, Tim was Human Rights Commissioner, but did nothing for them. He did not publicly critique Australia's asylum seeker policies, which were widely condemned for human rights violations. When children were so traumatised, so endlessly brutalised by indifference and cruelty, that they stopped eating, they stopped speaking. Some sewed their lips shut. Others tried to die. Tim did fuck all! Worse than doing fuck all, Tim resigned his position to be part of the government that made deliberately grinding hope out of human beings a feature of the system.
A drawing by a child in the Christmas Island detention centre in 2014.
Since then, Tim has spent most of his time being the mouthpiece for the Institute of Public Affairs (Tim used to be a director) — a right-wing, corporate-funded think tank hellbent on fucking the poor. Tim busies himself penning breathless op-eds about the right to negatively gear your fourth investment property, and warning against the existential threat of vegan protesters.
The only causes Tim did champion were gay rights —Tim's openly gay — and “religious freedom,” which in Tim-speak translates to the freedom of the Australian Christian Lobby to be absolute bastards to people they hate (there are a lot). Ironically, the people the ACL hate the most are the gays. Tim was one of the loudest voices calling for the repeal or watering down of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act — the bit that makes it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate someone on the basis of race or ethnicity. He claimed it was a threat to free speech and part of what he called a “freedom deficit” in Australia. The freedom to be a complete shit!
His stance lined up very neatly with his old bosses at the IPA, who had long wanted 18C scrapped entirely. As Human Rights Commissioner, Wilson leaned hard into the “free speech” warrior role, often ignoring the fact that Section 18C was there to protect people from racial vilification — not to ban political disagreement.
Critics (and there were many) said he wasn’t defending human rights so much as the rights of bigots to punch down without consequence. He didn’t talk much about the right not to be racially abused, for instance. Because nuance, apparently, gets in the way of libertarian outrage.
Tim Wilson is a symbol of everything broken in Australian conservatism: anaphylactic to empathy, the way vampires are to sunlight., obsessed with protecting privilege, and incapable of even pretending to give a shit about anyone who’s not already rich. Tim's idea of “freedom” is deregulated banks, corporate tax shelters, and protest-free streets. He cries foul when billionaires pay tax, but couldn’t care less about renters, or casual workers being fleeced by their bosses.
Remember the franking credits circus? Remember that? Wilson hijacked a parliamentary committee and turned it into a taxpayer-funded Liberal Party roadshow, parading entitled retirees around the country to whinge about losing a tax perk most Australians couldn’t dream of? That wasn’t oversight. It was propaganda. And we all paid for it.
And now the smug prick is back, and we're in for another round of economic gaslighting and culture war tantrums.
The Liberal party are fucking shameless.