From burner phones to disappearing ink, the Liberal leadership saga is now a shrine to myth, martyrdom, and maternal veto.

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“The mother of disgraced former soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has launched an extraordinary character attack on Andrew Hastie, emailing Coalition MPs with accusations that the man who testified in her son’s defamation trial was ‘not fit’ to lead the Liberal party.” source: AAP via Australian Online News.

In a move that would make Lady Macbeth blush and Kafka reach for his tactical vest, Sue Roberts-Smith; mother of disgraced war hero Ben Roberts-Smith—has reportedly sent a 49-page email to Coalition MPs accusing Andrew Hastie of betrayal and declaring him “not fit” to lead the Liberal Party. Hastie, who testified in her son’s defamation trial, is now cast as Brutus in a maternal morality play where burner phones, pink plastic lunchboxes, and disappearing ink form the sacred relics of reputational redemption. This isn’t just a political intervention; it’s a séance conducted by the high priestess of myth preservation, backed by WA’s Supreme Oligarch Kerry Kezza Stokes and the Dickensian Defence Department, which has seen more lawsuits than Jarndyce v Jarndyce.

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In the sun-bleached theatre of Australian politics, where myth is currency and accountability is a disappearing act, the Liberal Party has found itself taking moral instruction from the mother of a convicted war criminal. Sue Roberts-Smith, WA matriarch and self-appointed custodian of the Anzac mythos, has reportedly penned a 49-page epistle to Coalition MPs warning them off Andrew “Handy Andy” Hastie as a potential leader. It’s less a letter than a liturgical scroll; equal parts grievance, gaslight, and ghost story. In Australia’s overheated media monopoly, Sue’s words are as if by some supernatural power in all the news, from the new Trumpier Tik-Tok, to parrot-cage liners and Murdoch fish-wraps.

But let’s be clear: this is not a political intervention. It’s a séance.

Andrew Hastie, former SAS commander, parliamentary intelligence overseer, and a Liberal Brutus who stabbed the myth, not the man, is accused of dobbing on BRS For war crimes. He’s a traitor for testifying in the defamation trial that torched Ben Roberts-Smith’s reputation like a tactical vest soaked in kerosene. In Sue’s version of events, Hastie is Brutus, and her son; armed with burner phones and a pink plastic kids’ lunchbox; is the misunderstood Caesar. The irony is thicker than a WA mining contract.

The Pink Lunchbox of Moral Authority

The lunchbox, reportedly used to transport sensitive documents and burner phones, as you’d expect, has become the perfect metaphor for the Liberal Party’s ethical architecture: childlike, plastic, and easily snapped shut. Inside it: disappearing ink, tactical amnesia, and the kind of reputational laundering that would make John Winston Howard weep into his borrowed cos-play tactical vest.

“When Mum becomes the moral compass, expect magnetic anomalies.”

This is the party that once prided itself on Churchillian resolve. Now it’s taking leadership cues from a woman whose son was found, on the balance of probabilities, to have committed war crimes. The only thing disappearing faster than ink is accountability.

Kezza’s Moral Dry-Cleaning Agency

Enter Kerry Stokes, Supreme Oligarch of WA and patron saint of reputational redemption. If BRS is the fallen idol, Kezza is the temple priest with a cheque book. His media empire has spent years buffing the myth of Roberts-Smith into a gleaming monument of selective memory. (When not funding Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case and rip-snorting lifestyle.) Now, with Sue’s letter circulating like a holy writ, we see the full machinery of the Sandgroper oligarchy at work: myth preservation as political strategy.

“Blessed are the mythmakers, for they shall inherit the masthead.”

Handy Andy: The Man Who Knew Too Much

Hastie, with his Cold War cosplay and Churchillian affect, was once the party’s great hope; a man who could speak in complete sentences and wear a tactical vest without irony. But truth-telling in the Liberal Party is treason. His testimony in the BRS trial marked him as a heretic in the temple of denial. Now, thanks to Sue’s maternal veto, he’s being ghosted by the ghost of Anzac exceptionalism.

Courage is not the absence of fear; it’s the absence of burner phones.

The Dickensian Defence Department

Meanwhile, the Department of Defence; once helmed by Linda Reynolds and championing Bruce, another loose unit who was a senior staffer; has seen more lawsuits than Dickens’ Jarndyce v Jarndyce. It’s a bureaucratic purgatory where accountability goes to die and myth goes to metastasize. The Defence portfolio has become a legal landfill, a place where reputations are buried under NDAs, strategic silence and the fabled sound-deadening properties of billions of dollars being shovelled into any space available. It’s a sort of Bleak House, but with tactical vests and pink lunchboxes.”

The Philosophical Farce

Nietzsche warned, “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” In this case, the monster is not war, but the myth of untouchable heroism—the idea that medals absolve men, and that maternal grief grants political clairvoyance. Groucho Marx might’ve said, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”—especially if that club is taking moral direction from a war criminal’s mum and a media oligarch with a VC fetish.

In the end, the Liberal Party isn’t choosing a leader. It’s choosing a myth. And in the myth of BRS, truth is treason, silence is strategy, and leadership is burying a plastic lunchbox full of burner phones in your backyard.

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Epilogue: The Lunchbox, the Sulk, and the Svengali

As the Liberal Party staggers through its post-myth hangover, the reactions are as predictable as they are operatic. Tony Abbott, the Incredible Sulk of Warringah, has reportedly emerged from his ideological cryogenic chamber, muttering about “manhood,” “tradition,” and “the good old days when leaders didn’t need burner phones, just a good pair of budgie smugglers and a war on wind turbines.” His Svengali and former landlady, Peta Credlin, is already running interference—whispering vengeance into the ears of backbenchers like a Shakespearean ghost with a Sky News contract.

Together, they form the shadow chorus of the Liberal Party’s revenge opera, determined to install a bloke; any bloke, so long as he’s angry, unrepentant, also in The IPA and preferably armed with a tactical vest and a subscription to Quadrant.

Meanwhile, Sussan Ley, the party’s placeholder leader and reluctant Joan of Arc, is battling on multiple fronts: pretending to be in charge, placating the far right with rhetorical crumbs, and dodging the maternal missiles launched by Sue Roberts-Smith. If she’s smart, she’ll leave the legend in the pink lunchbox and his mum alone, because martyrdom by proxy is not a viable campaign strategy.

Ley’s public comments have been diplomatic to the point of invisibility. She insists her relationship with Hastie is “fine,” though admits they’re “not besties on the phone every day” . Translation: she’s bracing for a leadership challenge, possibly before Christmas, while Hastie builds his base with Churchillian cosplay and ominous warnings about the extinction of Judaeo-Christian values. It’s not easy.

Conflating two separate and irreconcilable religious traditions whose foundational beliefs, such as views on God, Jesus, scripture, and salvation, are fundamentally different and at times directly opposed? The Coalition’s secret agreement between the Nationals and Liberals is just as resistant to reason.

The party room is divided. Some want generational change. Others want generational denial. And a few just want the lunchbox to stop glowing. But no-one wants a bar of the budgie-smuggler.

In the end, the Liberal Party may not choose a leader. It may simply choose a myth; again. And in that myth, truth is treason, silence is strategy, and leadership is a tactical vest stuffed with burner phones, disappearing ink, and a 49-page maternal veto. Mum’s the (last) word.

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