HE’S a man who loves a fight, has already taken down Malcolm Turnbull once and is getting ready to take the gloves off once again.
In a move described as “unscrupulous and disloyal”, South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi has quit the Liberal Party today to lead his own political party.
It’s not the first time he’s been accused of being a traitor, Mr Bernardi infamously helped topple Mr Turnbull from the leadership in 2009, after setting up an independent movement against the emissions trading scheme.
Back then, the senator started the Conservative Leadership Foundation, inspired by the tactics of the Tea Party in the US, to rally thousands of people in a grassroots campaign against the scheme.
It worked a charm, and the success of the campaign turned Liberal MPs against Mr Turnbull and saw Tony Abbott installed as leader.
“I always knew he would never just sit in the back,” Mr Bernardi’s wife Sinead previously told The Monthly for a 2012 profile. “He’d want to be upfront and centre — right-leaning centre, of course.”
Many have criticised Mr Bernardi over the years, including fellow senator Jacqui Lambie, who famously described him as an “a**hole” and “typical ‘Hello, I’m born with a silver spoon up my rear end’”, during an episode of ABC’s Kitchen Cabinet.
But the attacks don’t seem to have dinted Mr Bernardi’s confidence.
Mr Bernardi’s wife Sinead said they had the perfect marriage because they were “both in love with the same man”.
“Cory obviously has this huge belief in himself … If you didn’t love a guy who was so in love with himself you’d have a lot of trouble living with Cory. Life — I don’t think he’d mind me saying this — it’s all about Cory. I am all about Cory, and he is all about Cory, so it makes it easy.”
When asked what he loved, Mr Bernardi said: “Family. And my wife says myself, but you know (that’s) a bit unkind.”
“But I have to say I kind of, I love fighting, mm. Yeah, in a metaphorical sense. I love the battle as much as anything else. Sounds really aggressive doesn’t it? But I just do.”
Mr Bernardi is known for being a conservative and for having strict Roman Catholic views, but the former stockbroker and financial adviser, has also been a critic of big government and high taxes.
According to The Australian, he feels that taxes haven’t come down enough under Mr Turnbull’s leadership, and felt the same way when Mr Abbott was in charge too.
His views about the importance of a strong economy, small business and entrepreneurship seem to have been forged at the wheel of his family businesses.
Mr Bernardi’s father Leon Bernardi was an Italian immigration who arrived in Australia at age 16 and worked his way from the David Jones food counter to running his own hotels and restaurants.
Despite joining the Liberal Party at age 17, it took Mr Bernardi years to decide he wanted to be a politician.
While at university, he was selected for a rowing scholarship and went on to represent Australia at the world championships in the former Yugoslavia in 1989. Later he worked as a labourer with a German construction company that put up marquees for international events, including a political conference held by then Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi.
After being injured in a car accident overseas he returned to South Australia to run the family hotel.
It was while recovering in hospital from a bout of tuberculosis that Mr Bernardi realised he wanted to “make a difference” and set his sights on politics.
He started working as a stockbroker and financial adviser, and with the backing of right-wing faction leader and South Australian senator Nick Minchin, Mr Bernardi became the Liberal Party’s youngest South Australian state president in 1998, and the youngest federal vice-president in 2005. He entered the Senate in 2006.
According to The Monthly, Mr Bernardi’s grandfather was a trade unionist and Labor man, and his mother Jo said the man would have turned in his grave to know his descendant had joined the Liberal Party.
One can only wonder what he would make of Mr Bernardi’s latest move.
NO STRANGER TO CONTROVERSY
In recent years, Mr Bernardi has stirred controversy over his remarks on asylum seekers, Muslims and same-sex marriage.
He has called asylum-seekers “welfare squatters” and criticised the government for flying refugees (whose relatives were killed in 2010 when their asylum seeker boat crashed on to Christmas Island) to Sydney to attend the funerals.
After being elevated to shadow parliamentary secretary assisting the opposition leader by Mr Abbott, Mr Bernardi resigned in 2012 after suggesting that legalising same-sex marriage could lead to demands to legalise bestiality and polygamy.
The comments prompted then-Liberal leader Mr Abbott to say that the Coalition did not discriminate against minority groups and that he did not tolerate Mr Bernardi’s comments.
“They’re views that I don’t share,” Mr Abbott said.
“They are views many people would find repugnant.”
It was the second time that Mr Bernardi lost a parliamentary role, the first time Mr Turnbull sacked him from shadow ministry for writing about a Liberal MP on his blog.
Mr Bernardi said he was told by a MP — believed to be fellow South Australian politician Christopher Pyne, who signed up Mr Bernardi to the local Liberal branch in the 1980s — that he only ran as a Liberal because he lived in a Liberal seat.
Despite pressure from Mr Turnbull, Mr Bernardi refused to apologise for the claim and maintains a feud with Mr Pyne.
More recently, Mr Bernardi defended anti-Islam Dutch MP Geert Wilders ahead of a visit in 2015 to launch a new political party called the Australian Liberty Alliance, which advocates against the “Islamisation of Australia”. Mr Bernardi was earlier rebuked by the Liberal leadership in 2013 for his support of Mr Wilders.
In a 2011 article, Mr Bernardi wrote about why the ideology of Islam was so dangerous and the failure of multiculturalism.
“Things have changed. Across the world there have been new waves of immigrants who have decided that their greatest allegiance is to the religious and political ideology of Islam rather than to their adopted land,” he wrote.
“Their insistence of consuming halal food means that in many countries (including Australia) most of us are unknowingly eating food slaughtered in the name of Allah. I, for one, don’t want to eat meat butchered in the name of an ideology that is mired in sixth century brutality and is an anathema to my own values.”
This month, Mr Bernardi was set to attend a $150-a-head dinner to help anti-Islam organisation Q Society fund a defamation case brought by the Halal Certification Authority.
In the past, the senator has called for the burqa to be banned and sparked criticism in 2014 when he tweeted about the head covering being a “shroud of oppression”.
‘CORY IS DELUDED’
Despite his views being unpopular, they don’t seem to have changed over the years.
During his 2006 maiden speech, the-father-of-two said the mainstream of Australia had clearly rejected the so-called “rights” that were at odds with the country’s laws and traditions.
“I know of childcare centres in Adelaide where management were so worried about offending non-Christian children they decided to ban Christmas celebrations,” he said.
“It is a sad day for our nation when to celebrate the birth of the king of peace causes offence.”
He also spoke about “one element of the natural law: the act of marriage”.
“Marriage is not a right; it was not invented — marriage simply is,” he said.
“Marriage has been reserved as a sacred bond between a man and a woman across times, across cultures and across very different religious beliefs.”
He ended with: “I shall be guided by my conscience, my family, my country and my God.”
But not everyone buys his conviction politician stance. One critic of Mr Bernardi’s said: “Cory is deluded”.
“He is one of the least effective or important members of the parliamentary team,” the Liberal Party colleague told The Monthly in 2012.
“Cory is a person without any intellect, without any base, and he should really never have risen above the position of branch president. His right-wing macho-man act is just his way of looking as though he stands for something.”
‘CATALYST FOR CHANGE’
While Mr Bernardi’s controversial views have seen many of his colleagues distance themselves from the senator, he now hopes they will find a place in his own party.
The new party would be based on his Australian Conservatives movement, which already has more than 50,000 members.
Rumours swirled for months that Mr Bernardi wanted to launch the Australian Conservatives Party, with financial support from Australia’s richest woman Gina Rinehart, ahead of his resignation from the Liberal Party today.
It’s been reported that Mr Bernardi had an epiphany about starting his own party when he was in New York, on secondment to the United Nations while Donald Trump’s unique brand of politics swept through the nation.
Seeing the first flakes of snowfall, Mr Bernardi wrote to supporters in Australia that he had realised “what needs to be done”.
Acknowledging the public distrust in major parties that had encouraged the rise of Mr Trump and the Brexit result, Mr Bernardi said he wanted to be “part of that change” and perhaps even be “in some ways a catalyst for it”.
But unlike Mr Trump, Mr Bernardi seems to be a seasoned professional when it comes to weathering criticism.
“If you look at some of the great people of history, they all had trenchant critics,” he told The Monthly.
“You can’t go through life being loved by everybody, that’s a recipe for nothingness.”
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