The writer is in Australia.
What Anglosphere country presently offers Right-of-centre voters the least hope for change? I don’t think there is much debate that the answer to that question is ‘Australia’. A Liberal Party that had every opportunity to romp home in last week’s election instead imploded and was crushed by an Albanese-led Labour Party – one that had seen living standards drop almost 8% in its first term; that spent far too little on defence; that had been humiliated in its Voice referendum to entrench racial division; that despised free speech and half-welcomed pro-Palestinian activists who gave more than a few signs of being antisemitic; that had opened the floodgates to over a million immigrants, causing house prices to soar; that was in the full-on embrace of ‘climate change’ zealots worshipping at the altar of an impoverishing Net Zero religion; that oversaw tanking productivity, ever worsening education results and mushrooming power bills and public servant hires; and that had Australia on course to hit a national debt of one trillion dollars and deficits as far as the eye can see. That was the Albanese Labour Party that our supposedly conservative Coalition Party not only failed to defeat but, by running such an emasculated, incoherent campaign, allowed itself to be crushed by.
Here are two theories for why this happened. One is patent nonsense but for all that still extremely widely believed (and not just by Left-wing pundits but by plenty on the Right too, those in the firm grip of Trump Derangement Syndrome, ‘TDS’). This boils down to claiming ‘it was Trump what dunnit’. The US President puts a 10% tariff on Australia (the lowest he put on any country) and this theory suggests that at that point Peter Dutton and the Libs were cooked. Centrist voters and more than a few conservative ones would flood over to Labour. But why think Albo would handle Trump better than Dutton? That’s what I’ve been asking without once getting a plausible answer. A few of the TDS sufferers point to Canada and the fact the Tories lost a big lead there and the Left-wing Mark Carney won the election. But they don’t mention that Poilievre actually achieved a 40-year high in the conservative popular vote share and that Carney won only a minority government that will most likely depend on Quebec separatists. What happened in Canada, with its First-Past-the-Post voting system, is that the progressive Left voters – a significant majority in all Canadian elections – abandoned the two other Left-wing parties and coalesced around Carney’s party.
If you think that was more Trump’s fault than Poilievre’s then look at Britain. Nigel Farage’s Reform Party just made a once-in-a-century breakthrough in terms of taking on the two established parties. His insurgent Reform Party defeated Labour in a by-election in its 16th safest seat that had a 14,700 vote Labour majority going in. Reform cleaned up in the local council elections, crushing the Tories and three-quarters crushing Labour. Reform got almost as many votes as Labour and the Tories combined. You know what both those establishment parties tried to do? They tried to tar Farage as a British Trump. It failed mightily. Why? Because Farage didn’t run away from Trump’s accomplishments. He recognised that in just 100 days Trump has a great record on closing the border and dealing with illegal immigration, championing free speech, fully abandoning the Net Zero religion and going all in on the cheapest energy possible, standing up for women against the trans ideologues, calling out judicial activism, finding hundreds of billions of dollars of government waste, ending all taxpayer funding of the incredibly Left-leaning public broadcasters NPR and PBS. What would conservative voters dislike about any of that? And if the attempt to tar Farage as a Trump is linked to the latter’s tariffs, well it’s simple as pie to point out that Farage has a much higher chance of bringing Trump around on that issue than a bunch of socialist ideologues who for four years have been calling Trump a racist, white nationalist, psychopath. In other words, Farage fought back against the ‘You and Trump are Hitler’ political playbook of the Left and by doing so this line of attack had zero effect.
Here’s a far more persuasive reason why Team Dutton got smoked. It was because it deserved it! Where Trump and Farage are fighting the culture wars (Farage is taking things directly out of the Trump playbook), the best way to sum up the attitude of Australia’s Liberal Party to any and all culture war fights is this: ‘We abjectly and permanently surrender. Not just on issues we’ve already lost and won’t relitigate but on any future ones that might come up.’ Free speech stuff? We surrender. Transgender idiocies? Ditto. De-wokeifying the school curriculum and dealing with the ABC? Well, we were half-tempted to half-fight but on reflection, we surrender. Ditto working from home (which all Reform controlled councils in England now say they’re going to ban).
And then there was the failure to fight Labour over Net Zero – not ‘we’ll pull Australia out and tell voters why we need to do this in a world where China, India and the US are all now out and not afraid of coal’ but rather ‘we’ll also genuflect to the impoverishing renewables gods, just a couple of decades slower and less sincerely’. They were against tax cuts. Offered a truly pathetic and limp-wristed cut in Labour’s immigration intake (when the correct approach was to say they’d go right back to the Howard era intake of below 100,000 per year, all carefully chosen). Heck, Dutton seemingly had to focus group things before he knew which way to go on Welcomes and Acknowledgements of Country.
Put it this way. Peter Dutton and the Libs died on their knees, forsaking any conservative values they may (who knows now?) once have had. It would have been far better to die on their feet after a big fight over immigration, Net Zero and dividing the country by race. Of course had they fought big time on those issues then I think they would have won, and mightily annoyed the ABC crowd as a side benefit.
Meanwhile Trump continues to work through the list of his myriad campaign promises. No small target strategy there and plenty for conservatives to love. Nigel Farage and Reform have upended the two-party British establishment and by fighting tooth and nail on values and principles have conservative voters gleeful while seriously threatening the continued existence of the world’s oldest political party, the British Tories. Even in Canada there is plenty of hope for conservatives as Poilievre took the Tory vote to a 40 year high and kept Mark Carney to an unstable minority government. Only here in Australia do things look truly bleak for us conservatives. The ‘broad church’ Liberal Party is obviously too broad and hence devoid of any core principles and visible values. Be honest. We know it’s been broken since the day Abbott was defenestrated.
Is there any remedy? Yes. The party power brokers and faction chiefs all have to be destroyed. And that can happen by copying Canada and taking the decision of who will be leader away from the MPs and giving it to the paid-up members. Almost a million Tory members picked Poilievre. Here, it’s a few dozen scheming, self-interested MPs who do the picking. Things aren’t good Down Under.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.
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