Who You Gonna Trust?

The writer is in Australia.

If you were asked to boil down today’s Australian and British Right-of-Centre politics to one short question, this would be it. Who you gonna trust, baby? And it is that issue that is making life for both Angus Taylor and Kemi Badenoch so diabolically difficult. They can repeatedly announce good, or even world’s best, policies till they’re blue in the face. They first have to overcome the threshold issue of whether their core voters – or rather the voters who used to be their base and core supporters, but have now moved off to One Nation and to Reform – trust them to do what they now say they will do. And for many, many of these formerly loyal voters the brutal answer is “No, whatever you now promise I’ve wised up after what you did to us for so many years.” These apostate voters don’t trust them on immigration, on winding back and repealing any of the progressive-Left statutory idiocies, on fighting the desperately-needs-to-be-fought culture wars, on taking on the massively biased legacy media and universities, on moving back to sane energy policies that are prepared to ignore the entire transnational renewables elites, on civil liberties, on not being big spending, big taxing Labour-lite clones, etc.

As the Bard famously wrote, “The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation – that away, men are but gilded loam, or painted clay.” And both Badenoch and Taylor were senior Cabinet ministers in these supposedly Right-of-Centre governments. What type of governments? Well, ones that didn’t look remotely conservative, small government or low-taxing, while being thuggish and overseeing the biggest attacks on our civil liberties in 200 years.

And here I can’t resist a digression for those who think any sort of bill of rights is anything other than a vehicle to transfer power to a judicial elite that patently leans two standard deviations to the Left of the median voter. There is not a single, solitary example across the entire democratic world of a judge anywhere who used his or her country’s bill of rights to invalidate, enervate or just denounce in some sort of declaration any of the made-up out of thin air and massively heavy-handed Covid regulations. Not a single one, despite the proliferation of senseless diktats for some – not others – to close their businesses, keep kids home from school, stay out of the park or off the golf course, don’t go to church, wear a mask (sometimes, not when eating), social distance at some made-up distance away – the unsupported by any convincing evidence edicts going off into the horizon, and all while they spent and taxed worse than Lefty governments. Put differently, we had a real-world experiment on the worth of bills of rights and it proved old Jymbo has been right for the last 25 years. Buy a bill of rights and you simply buy the moral and political preferences of a judicial elite. They’ll use a bill of rights immediately should someone claim refugee status. But indulge in the most authoritarian attacks on our civil liberties in centuries – attacks that didn’t really hit the judges themselves – and it’s “Nothing to do with us guys.”

But digression aside, both Badenoch and Taylor were senior Cabinet ministers in these governments that sold out their core voters. Neither resigned from Cabinet on principle. (Yes, yes, we all know the tired refrain that “I can do more good staying inside the tent and trying to ameliorate things,” but a lot of voters simply don’t buy that ex post facto rationalisation.) The entire Tory and Coalition teams seemed happy to abandon any sense of fight against the Left and basically to look very much like Labour-lite clones. You simply can’t deny that.

And hence, in my humble opinion, the most pressing, crucial issue for Taylor, Badenoch, the Libs and Tories, is nothing more nor less than “How do we win back trust?”. Every statement, every announcement, every press release should be aimed solely at that goal. Because Shakespeare was right. Reputation matters. Lose it and you have the credibility of painted clay. So Angus can announce he’ll cut immigration. But lots of former Lib voters look at who he’s put in the Shadow Cabinet, they look at what’s happening with the broken delegate system and they flat out do not believe he will be able to make any meaningful cuts, whatever he says. The same goes for ditching Net Zero. Is Taylor infinitely better qualified to make the nuanced changes that will help us escape from the climate doomsterist, self-sacrificing idiocies? Yes. But voters first need to believe that he will and, more importantly, that he can get the changes through a party room that since Turnbull has looked incredibly, well, Turnbullesque. (How else does one explain the MPs’ vote for Sussan Ley after Dutton opted to try to win ‘Coward of the Century’ and run a Seinfeldian campaign about nothing?)

Badenoch, finally, seems to be grasping this brutal reality. She has announced that no Tory candidates can win preselection who do not openly agree to leave the European Convention of Human Rights and to ditch Net Zero. Good. Of course even here there is ambiguity, as it’s not clear whether it applies to current high-profile Tory MPs. But it’s plain Taylor needs to do something similar.

And staying in Australia, once you realise you’re in the game of trying to win back trust the first thing that would help is an open, frank apology that lists what the party did that you now accept was wrong. Not vague generalities about getting a few things wrong. Specifics. And in this attempt to win back trust, tell me why anyone would promise to wind back Net Zero but not be willing to leave the Paris Accords? It’s political malpractice. I have heard lawyers say it would call into question our commitment to international agreements. So? It was Morrison’s bogus genuflections at the feet of transnational bodies and international financiers’ supposed pressures – a pathetic excuse from this man who gives Turnbull a close run for being the worst Liberal Prime Minister ever – that partly got us into the plight we’re in now. When One Nation says, plainly and simply, we’ll leave Paris on day one, that wins an awful lot of votes. Because voters trust that will happen (and for non-lawyers it’s an executive power that the Senate, where the Greens will have the last word, could not block). And they trust Hanson actually to cut immigration. Were I Taylor, I would immediately name a maximum number of yearly immigrants for the first two years, not higher than 100,000, and combine that with an explicit promise that he and his entire Cabinet will resign from Parliament if that’s not met. Worry about linking immigration to housing after that.

You simply cannot win back anywhere near enough trust by focusing on economic details and attacking One Nation for dealing in values and big-picture policies. They are the party conservative voters trust. You are not. It’s asymmetrical. So everything you do should be to win back trust, a Herculean task.

Right now it’s not clear that the Libs even see that this is their core task. Let’s be blunt. They don’t have a spotless reputation. So act as though you knew that and were trying to fix it.

Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.