WENDELL HUSSEY | Cadet | Contact

In some breaking news out of Sydney, it has been confirmed that the Liberal Party Branch brawl stemmed from a disagreement over a famous book.

The brawl in South Western Sydney last night, which resulted in police attending the premises and a man being taken to hospital, reportedly kicked off after a discussion about Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

The famous 1957 novel, although ever popular since its publication, has experienced a recent resurgence over the last few years in the large L liberal circles.

The 1100 page book depicts a dystopian United States crippled by increasingly burdensome laws and regulation upon private enterprise and businesses and has been a pseudo bible for libertarian free-market advocates for decades.

Our reporters have been told that a couple of rogue members at the Liberal Party Meeting last night spoke negatively about the book, inciting a violent altercation.

One of those rogue members has exclusively come forward to The Advocate today and explained what happened.

His name has been withheld due to concerns about reprisals.

“They always go on about the book at the meetings, and I simply said that I thought it was actually a bit of an incoherent, illogical ramble and that I wasn’t sure of its merit,” the member said.

“At that point, some of the other members began to become aggressive, and told me that the only way to live in a truly fair society is to have completely deregulated industries that can act in whatever manner they want in order to pursue ultimate profit.”

“I then raised the whole GFC thing and the fact that Alan Greenspan, one of the men culpable for the deregulating of the financial system in the US and helping to bring on the GFC was a disciple of Rand, and then bang, someone hit me in the side of the head,”

“I fell to the ground and I remember someone standing over me and saying ‘You have no idea how the world treats the prime movers. They pursue the ultimate goal for humanity, in the creation of individual wealth at all costs and go to extreme lengths in order to avoid sharing that wealth. Fool.’’

The member said that by the time he got back to his feet the whole thing had teed off.

“Yeah, basically our 2 female members had scattered and the boys were just going hell for leather.”

We contacted the Betoota Labor asking whether anything of the like has happened to their knowledge, and the told us it hasn’t.

“Yeah it can get testy at times, but basically our meetings just consist of a bunch of bland middle-class ‘progressives’ arguing about their favourite Paul Keating quote, so nah, it’s never teed off really,” they said.