A federal election in Australia is imminent. Those of us on the non-establishment right, therefore, have to decide what to do. Do we vote for the Liberals as the lesser of two evils in what is still effectively a binary choice? Or do we lodge a protest with a minor party in the hope that one day the Coalition will get the message?
It’s a dilemma. Yet as things stand, the Liberals are on track to win. As per a recent Resolve poll, Labor are “on course for defeat”. The ALP trails the Coalition 45-55 in two-party preferred, with Liberal leader Peter Dutton set be our next PM.
Yet this does not mean we’ll get an actually conservative leader or government. As Tim Matheson and others have argued, the only way we may get any genuinely conservative governance – a la Donald Trump in America – is for the Liberal Party to die.
This is a view with which I agree. As on any number of fronts, the Liberals seem incapable of introspection or reform. All they appear to offer is more managed decline; more low-IQ economism; and more of the same cosmopolitan liberalism that brought us to this position in the first place.
The Liberals, remember, have given us some of our greatest recent political failures. They are the ones that gave us gay marriage. They are the ones that ended our car industry. And they are the ones that doubled our immigration intake under “conservative hero” John Howard.
And as the party in office for most of the post-war period – holding power for around 50 of the last 75 years – they bear most responsibility for the abysmal state we find ourselves in.
Let’s have a quick look at their record.
To begin, they have failed on fertility and family formation. Our median age of marriage is at historic highs, with the average age of marriage now over 30 for men and almost 30 for women. As a consequence, the median age of mothers is up and the number of children is down.
For fifty years now we have had a below-replacement fertility rate and nothing has been done about it. The Howard Government did briefly improve matters with their Baby Bonus, but things soon returned to normal under Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison.
Indeed, after almost a decade of Liberal rule and the last three years of Labor, we find ourselves with our lowest fertility rate on record, at just 1.5 births per woman. Not only is this an indictment of our political class and nation as a whole, it is also the main driver behind our insane reliance on immigration, with 75% of our future growth to come from mass migration.
The Liberals have also failed on affordable housing. Our capital cities are among the least affordable markets on earth, with five Australian cities in the top 20 most expensive on the planet. To further illustrate, 25 years ago the average house could be bought with nine years of the average household income. Today, over 16 years of income is needed to buy the same house. Our housing market becomes even more absurd when you recall that only three times the average salary was needed to buy the average Aussie house in the 1980s.
This has obviously affected home ownership. A solid middle class, filled with home owners, has been seen since Aristotle as a pillar of social stability and was highlighted Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies.
Yet what Menzies described as the “backbone of the middle class” is now as brittle as what remains of his Australia. Home-ownership rates have plummeted, with the number of Australians who own their home outright declining from over 40% in the 1990s to under 30% today.
At the same time, the average age of first-home buyers has increased. The median is now age 35, with this figure rising a decade since the 1970s. So bad is it, Australians are now having to wait until their forties to buy a home, with the number of first-time buyers aged 40-49 growing by 63%.
Our housing failures have obviously bled in to other areas. Crucially, they have helped fuel our fall in fertility. As a 2022 article in The Australian citing US and British studies noted, the relation between house prices and fertility was stronger than factors like unemployment: “A 10% increase in home prices correlated with a 1.3% decrease in birth rates.”
This further confirms the farcical cycle we now find ourselves in: high house prices lead to low birth rates; low birth rates lead to an ageing population; an ageing population requires immigration; immigration raises house prices and leads to low birth rates. The cycle begins anew.
Not only does it do all that, Harvard’s Robert Putnam observed that the diversity mass migration brings destroys social cohesion. Putnam famously found that “the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects”.
“In the most diverse communities, neighbours trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings … virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.”
As this is a universal, it obviously occurs in Australia. Indeed, the massive increase in immigration initiated by Howard has helped bring us to our current impasse. We are now a country riven with social tensions, split in two around the status of our national day, and held hostage by leftist activists who destroy our monuments and denigrate our history.
Our decline is further reflected in the loss of faith in our political class and their growing lack of legitimacy. This is seen in the rapid rise of minor parties, a massively expanded crossbench, and the shrinkage in votes for the duopoly that has governed us for the last 80 years. As proof of this, since 1980 the share of the vote going to the two major parties has dropped from over 90% to under 70%, with one in three Australians now opting for a minor party.
Another area where the Liberals and our establishment have failed is crime. As we have seen for a while now, and especially since October 2023, our once-peaceful cities are now home to severe social conflict and violence. Aside from the weekly protest marches, once-unknown events like home invasions, “tobacco wars”, and machete attacks have become common occurrences.
Australia even has major terror events. In fact, many of our worst attacks have occurred recently, and many have occurred under Coalition governments. In Sydney, the Lindt Café Siege occurred when Tony Abbott was in office in 2014. In Melbourne, there have been that many car-ramming attacks in the last decade or so that “diversity bollards” have become a permanent part of the city.
To take the most famous examples, in January 2017 six people were killed and 27 injured when James Gargasoulas drove his car into the crowds along Bourke Street. In December the same year, one person was killed and 18 injured when Saeed Noori ploughed into pedestrians on Elizabeth Street.
Other similar examples in Melbourne abound. There was the fatal 2018 stabbing of beloved restauranteur Sisto Malaspina by Hasan Shire Ali. Or the 2023 car-ramming attack by alleged attacker Zain Khan that cost 76-year-old Victorian man John Haasz his life.
But it gets worse for our so-called conservatives. The Liberals can no longer even bring themselves to defend women and children. Indeed, they can’t even hold the line at biology itself. To take one recent example, the federal Liberals couldn’t even follow their Queensland counterparts in unambiguously opposing “gender affirming treatments” for children.
Indeed, instead of uniting his party behind this most moral of all issues, Peter Dutton offered a conscience vote in response to Pauline Hanson’s push for an inquiry into the “human cost of experimental child gender treatments”. Ms Hanson sought an immediate ban on all “gender-affirming procedures”, rather than waiting a year and a half for the current Labor review.
As the One Nation Senator said, “the safety of our kids should not be put on hold for 18 months. The safety of our kids should be the priority”.
“Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, irreversible surgeries – this is child abuse, plain and simple.”
But the Liberals couldn’t even back this initiative. The motion failed 26 votes to 31.
Yet this is just the latest Liberal capitulation to radical LGBT ideology. In Victoria, ex-Liberal Leader John Pesutto tried to smear Moira Deeming as a Nazi and boot her from the party for attending a women’s rights rally. In NSW, the Libs have largely remained silent while women like Sall Grover are taken to court by so-called “trans” people and forced to pay them thousands of dollars in compensation.
This all stands in contrast to actually conservative regimes. In America, one of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders since regaining office involved “defending women from gender ideology extremism” and “restoring biological truth”. Trump also signed an order “protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation”. Even the UK banned puberty blockers for children.
Our putative conservative party, however, have done none of the above. They have also done nothing about the health and fitness of Australians. To take the most obvious example, over the last few decades our obesity rates have skyrocketed. As per Australian government data, only a third of us are at a healthy weight, with a further third overweight and the final third obese.
Australia is now in the top 10 OECD countries in terms of the proportion of its population that is overweight or obese. Even a quarter of our children are overweight or obese. This “fattening” then cascades into related increases in cardiovascular disease, certain cancers and diabetes.
This is not to mention the associated aesthetic decline that decades of free-market liberalism have wrought. The once-common archetype of an Australian as akin to Crocodile Dundee or a bronzed Aussie surfer is no more. The average Australian is now more likely to be represented as an insufferable 100kg leftist who lives in Newtown, eats lentils and has blue hair.
This, again, is in direct contrast to an actually conservative administration. To return to America, President Trump has chosen Robert F Kennedy Jr as his “fitness czar” to help get his countrymen into shape. The nephew of JFK has been installed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services and tasked with making “American healthy again”. If only we had such a person here.
The Liberals have also done nothing about our decline in education. Our secondary schools have gone backwards for a generation with levels of classroom disorder and disruption that are “among the worst in the developed world”. Our PISA test rankings have fallen outside the top 10. And if that is not bad enough, our schools are now home to students chanting “Allahu Akbar”.
Our tertiary sector is even more of a joke. Australia’s universities have become little more than visa-mills for international students, and a means to economic growth and addressing labour shortages thanks to the technocratic reforms of, you guessed it, John Howard and the Liberal Party.
Instead of admitting any of this, the Liberals have joined forces with the ALP to install some of the most draconian legislation yet seen with their hate speech laws. Not only is the Australian public heavily restricted in their ability to factually report on evidently poor decisions by our political class, they face up to seven years in jail for doing so.
As former Liberal staffer John Macgowan noted of these laws and the overall incoherence of the Liberals, the party won’t even be able to campaign for standard conservative positions like removing men from women’s sport as they would be contravening the hate speech laws that they themselves supported.
As Macgowan tweeted of Peter Dutton’s plan to take men out of women’s sport: “He just enthusiastically supported a law that makes campaigning on this hate speech.”
These are laws, remember, that make questioning the biologically fictitious category of “intersex status” illegal.
The brute fact is the Liberals are not in any way conservative, nor have they been for a long time. The so-called “big tent” that once housed traditionalist Burkean conservatives and Hayekian free-market liberals is no longer – the Burkeans have long been booted out and various versions of Liberals have been invited in.
All the Liberal Party now offers is variants of laissez-faire cosmopolitanism and economism. If you have any doubt this will change, just look at the party’s recent actions. Consider, for instance, recent remarks by Peter Dutton on immigration. It was only a few weeks ago, remember, when Dutton bragged about the number of migrants he brought in on his watch.
As he said: “As immigration Minister, I brought in a record number of people through different visa programs and…did it in a responsible way.”
Dutton also pledged to bring back the so-called “golden ticket” visa at a Lunar New Year festival in the Melbourne suburb of Box Hill.
This seems to be all we can expect from the Liberals. They seem determined to ignore the current reorientation on the global Right away from the failing liberal status quo. This is obviously seen in the re-emergence of Donald Trump, but it is also in his Vice President, J D Vance, especially in his Munich speech, and by European figures such as Viktor Orban and Nigel Farage.
If our own ostensible conservative party is unable to follow this lead, I see no reason why we should vote for them. If the Liberal Party and the people within it won’t actually do anything conservative, a “Zero Seats” campaign may be our best bet until they are replaced by people who will.
