The writer is in Australia.
There seems to be an almost obtuse wilful blindness amongst the preponderance of those in our traditional, established political parties and their confreres (‘collaborators’ seems too harsh, just) in the legacy media. ‘Why, oh why, are the Trumps, Farages, Hansons, and a host of insurgent parties and politicians in Europe doing so well right now?’ That’s what they keep asking and generally whatever answers they offer involve a heaping helping of Hilary Clintonesque condescension in the form of suggesting that these deplorable voters simply don’t know what’s good for themselves. Not like the longstanding opinion writers in the legacy media think they know what’s good for them. Not like the upper echelons of the legacy political parties think they do too.
Well, let me make it simple for these people. In the last decade or two there have been three massive issues that have mattered. In no particular order these were 1) the Covid tyranny, 2) the Net Zero climate doomsterism, and 3) extreme mass inwards immigration, illegal and legal. Notice that on all three of those issues Donald Trump scores vastly better than any British Tory or Labour politician. And that he scores vastly better than any Canadian politician. And that he scores vastly better than any Australian Coalition or Labor politician. In fact, they’re not even in the same solar system, maybe galaxy. Trump made stopping mass inwards immigration his key pledge and boy has he delivered, completely shutting the border. The US now has net negative migration. He’s also been outspoken about the stupidities of the Net Zero pseudo-religion since day one and so pulled out of Paris and ‘drilled baby drilled’. And as for the thuggish, illiberal, heavy-handed lockdown lunacies, Trump did fall down compared to Sweden and Ron DeSantis in Florida. But at the same time Trump looked like a paragon of sanity and freedom-loving good sense compared to Boris, anyone at all in UK’s Labour or Australia’s Labor parties, and galaxies better than Scott Morrison or any of the pusillanimous members of his Coalition Cabinet, not one of whom resigned on principle. (And boy oh boy if you didn’t consider the biggest inroads on all of our civil liberties in the last 300 years something worth resigning over, whatever the short-term personal political costs, then let’s be honest you will never resign over anything.)
In the light of Trump’s being far more right on those than any Democrat politician and any other supposed mainstream conservative politician in the Anglosphere, I and millions of other voters don’t care that at times the man can be egotistical, boorish and mean. Plus, on top of all that, Trump has actually set out to do what he promised before the election regardless of later media hysteria or progressives in his own party. This is basically unique amongst established conservative parties in the rest of the anglosphere. Any claimed other sins are just so comparatively trifling if you got immigration, Net Zero and Covid lockdowns right.
Now if you didn’t get those right you have to point elsewhere. Britain’s Tories got all three catastrophically wrong. Boris oversaw steroidal immigration. He bought in to the Net Zero religion with all the zeal of a new convert. And though he was far better than any Australian Lib on Covid, and knew what he was doing was a mistake, Boris was a coward on that front. As for here in Australia, Morrison promised one thing on Net Zero and then post-election did another. His and the Coalition’s record on lockdowns is a disgrace and worse than Boris’s. And on immigration the Coalition has been better than the UK Tories but still bad.
So as I said, they need to point elsewhere. And that means pointing to how they’ll be better on the economy. Better financial managers. More grown up than the populists. You know the sales pitch. Alas, during Covid these same supposed conservatives spent like drunken sailors, the only difference being the sailors were spending their own money. And when they talk about adult, fully-costed plans it’s hard not to laugh and point to Turnbull’s Snowy hydro fiasco, now so far over budget it makes one lie back and think of Dan Andrew’s Victoria.
Go back to Trump. All sorts of elite, established economists have consistently warned his policies will drive the US’s economy into the ground. And they’ve been consistently wrong. Trump since 2024 has added over one million private sector jobs while axing some 325,000 public sector jobs and all while pushing about three million illegals out. You do the maths on how great that will be. Last month, for August, the US gained 162,000 new jobs (no net public service ones) while Canada lost 41,700 jobs (somewhat masked by public sector hiring). From 2014 to 2024, so before Trump 2.0, Canada’s GDP per person went from 83% of the US’s down to 71.5%. That’s a catastrophic decline and in a big part due to Canada’s Net Zero full embrace, lockdown thuggery and wide open doors to big scale immigration. Australia is nearly as bad as Canada over that same period on all three, with near similar bad results. (We here must remember always to raise a glass daily to my native Canada because without it we would be down at the bottom of recent performances.)
Or, if you prefer, you can see it through this related lens. Both the main established political parties in Canada, Britain and Australia, as well as the Democrats in the US, seem to have sold out the white working class. According to CNN the white working class favourability of the Democrat party in the US was net negative two points in 2012 and today, only 14 years later, it is net negative 36 points. They vote for Trump. And they are in bigger and bigger batches voting for Reform in Britain and for One Nation here in Australia.
Look at those three key issues again and realise that Hanson and One Nation were the most sceptical of lockdowns. They were always against Net Zero. And they have been the biggest opponents of large-scale mass immigration.
For all the opinionistas in the Fairfax press, at the Australian and on the ABC, that is why they now seem to have a solid, unshakeable share of the first preference vote – a share that rivals or surpasses Labor’s. Albo says one thing before elections and another after. Albo is presiding over the worst per capita GDP recession or depression maybe since the war. Yes, he has the ABC and the other Lefty legacy media running protection for him. Yes, he throws around the labels ‘populists’ and ‘far Right’ with unrestrained abandon. But he and Labor are in big trouble and they know it.
It would help if Taylor made a sincere apology for getting immigration, Net Zero and lockdowns badly wrong. And then gave us specific – very specific – policy pledges that he will never abandon. Because that’s what you have to do to have any hope of winning back the trust of those who for good reason have weighed you in the balances and rightly found you wanting.
Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.
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Well we all know why the legacy politicians don’t get it, they don’t want to face up to the fact that they are living on borrowed time. More of interest to me is why the legacy media don’t get it. Main papers this weekend trying a hatchet job on Farage because of the large donations, generally just saying ‘populism’ is a bad thing and so on. Why?
So as AfD just fell a couple of seats short of a majority in Sachsen-Anhalt – possibly due to postal vote rigging – the simpering Merz could only mewl that it was not the message that people rejected but how it was delivered. Hands up who has heard that from the Far Left repeatedly? Jeremy Corbyn actually won the election against the Lying Oaf Johnson other than receiving more votes because his was the right message. And given that the Far Left are generally terminally thick they are never going to understand why they are wrong on everything and not loved. And not just in the UK but elsewhere such as Australia, the voters have been presented with just left wing parties at elections but now the changes are coming but it takes time to convince enough voters to trust the newcomers. In the UK we often here that Reform lacks the experience to govern the country to which I reply, ‘just how well are the experienced ones actually doing then as our borrowing costs hit record levels?’.
For me, the MAJOR difference between Trump and (almost all) the rest of Western leaders is this.
Trump deals with the world as IT IS
The others – top ranking, the fucking Labour Party – deal with the world as they THINK IT SHOULD BE. Hello Miliband Minor.
Utopians. Political Utopias usually result in epic bloodshed.
Good observation
At last. A daily sceptic writer who spells it out quite clearly and honestly. Thank you.
I doubt if the trust can be won back by any of the authoritarian western parties which deliberately betrayed their voter-base and destroyed their economies with the Covid Tyranny, Net Zero scam and mass immigration.
Trust takes seconds to break and a lifetime to repair. They will not recover until all the guilty men/women have “moved on” and there is a completely new cohort of politicians who have clean hands and have learned the lesson. And even then, they may not recover.
The Treacherous Tories are down to their core voter-base, which is mostly very elderly and relies on the BBC for “news.” And they’re dying off (literally) very quickly now.
This exact question started my shift away from the organised Left. The difference is that I was genuinely interested in understanding people’s actual motivations; for the media and most people I know from that past life, it’s just a rhetorical exclamation of distress.
Socialists can never be wrong because their ideals and their goals are never wrong. If there is a gap between reality and what they preach, it’s because of everyone else’s moral failings and their reluctance to get with the programme.
I agree.
One of the reasons why I will never vote again for the “conservative” party is because they repeatedly made promises that they didn’t have the slightest intention of keeping.
Not just that they made mistakes, couldn’t accomplish their aims or circumstances prevented them from doing so.
No.
They never had the intention of reducing migration, stopping the boats, protecting the borders, freedom of speech, eliminating wokery.
In other words, they lied.
Frequently AND repeatedly
That’s all they’ve ever done. All my life. All of them.
Mrs Thatcher is the only exception, and even she didn’t always tell the whole truth.
Same here. None of it was “a mistake” or the result of incompetence.
They “promised” one thing and deliberately did the complete opposite – thinking we had no alternative right of centre party to vote for.
I will never forget and never forgive them.
When Trump took over as president (Jan 2925j theAmerican national debt was $36.2 trillion. He made his “first priority” to bring it down. It is now just over $40 trillion with an annual interest payment of $1 trillion. And yet we are told that the American economy under Trump is flourishing. This is what the simple minded me cannot comprehend. Perhaps, the professor might be able to throw some light (alternatively, I’ll ask President Xi).
Democracy = when the demos votes for what the ruling mob wants.
Populism = when the demos votes for what it wants.
For the political cartel and media to “get it” they would have to admit they are wrong, very and consistently wrong, and destructive. This would require self-examination, admission, remorse.
But worse (for them) it would be the end of their power and control to which they believe they have an absolute Right.
Less populist, more just plain popular.
From your description it seems Taylor and his Liberals are akin to Badenock and the Tories. Because they have not tried it, my assessment that the Tories cannot and will not admit their faults.
The Tories embraced the policies of Blair so their faults go back nearly 30 years not just the 14 when they were in office. Their failure to oppose facilitated many of our problems today. For example, only five MPs opposed the Labour Climate Change Act.
To apologise or to denounce their own past is a big problem. Many in the Tory party now we’re in Parliament when these bad things were done or delivered and a lot of them still believe in globalisation, immigration, net zero and have said so in the recent past.
All this raises the question of how a political party so badly damaged by their past should address its future. Attacking insurgent parties like Reform has not worked. It is doubtful that the cross party multi agency attacks on Farage personally or Reform’s finance will work either.
We need to look at British politics as an oligopoly. None of the old participants wants to upset the order. We… Read more »
“The Tories embraced the policies of Blair so their faults go back nearly 30 years…”
That is true, but they also embraced the policies of Attlee 1945 to 1951 which turned UK into a quasi-Communist State – so their faults go back beyond Blair, 80 years.
Socialism/Communism = the collective via the State own the means of production (that includes the labour) and collects wealth to the centre for redistribution.
That was post-war Britain when nearly the entire economy was nationalised and State-run, with consequently most of the workforce employed by the State. The Tories came back to power 1951 but did nothing to reverse it, just accepted it as the new status quo.
Thatcher reversed most of the State-ownership of business – a lot of which was on its last legs anyway – but not other elements like the ghastly NHS, public services and welfare (which used to be the purview of voluntary/charity sector) and government growing like a cancer.
The last 30 years has seen increasing State direction by intervention (regulation, tax, subsidy) in the economy, mandating how businesses must be run, how what they produce must be produced. This is the legacy of entanglement with EEC/EU.… Read more »
I realised recently I have li ed all my life here under socialism and apart from the Thatcher years it has been intensifying all the time. Just think of the freedom and prosperity we could have if we had not carried that weight.
The only reason socialist policies became embedded and grew is because the Tories accepted or supported them. Even while claiming to support free enterprise they retained or introduced price controls and restrictions of all kinds.
It been a very well executed con, hasn’t it? The belief we were in a free, democratic capitalist society when actually we were under the heel of Socialism. Socialism preaches equality, but how is equality arranged except by force? The most productive must have to have their property taken from them to give to the least productive so both are “equal”.
Socialism is the greed-creed. It indoctrinates people to believe it is right to want other people’s money to be used for their purposes – that’s greed.
It has been successful. Most people don’t think they should pay for their own health care, pensions, looking after their own children, etc – others should have to pay, particularly if they are rich.
The Tories joined in with the free stuff paid for by others because it was a vote-winner… but that’s no excuse.
Cameron even announced he was “The heir to Blair” .
Very few politicians will admit to being wrong. At best they will apologise years or decades later.
We can’t afford to wait that long.
Indeed
The only two genuine cases I can think of are Bridgen and De Santis
And Danielle Smith, Alberta’s premier who personally apologised for how badly the unvaccinated were treated. She’s made mistakes, but in this case in isolation, she had my respect.
Thanks for that information – good to know.
Wasn’t Danielle Smith the politician persecuting Dr. Makis?
Or centuries, on behalf of a different government who were all already dead when said politician was born so there’s no real personal connection to the event at all.