Right now I doubt there are many people who think the Liberal party brand in Australia is in fine shape. Obliterated in WA. Managing the seemingly impossible and losing decisively in Victoria to the man who imposed the democratic world’s most brutal and despotic lockdowns while running up a state debt that’s worse than that of the three other big states put together.  Meanwhile, the Liberals are in thrall in NSW to Matt Green, sorry Kean, and his band of woke Teals on steroids. Next year, just before April Fools’ Day, oddsmakers would favour the fools to be out of office and Labor in. Queensland’s Libs are probably the best of the state lot, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. Only Tasmania will be left in the Liberal column and Lord knows the party down there operates as a tealish, ultra-‘progressive’ Labor clone elected under a bafflingly complex voting system (and I say that as one whose first degree was in mathematics). In short, I don’t go too far out on a limb to say that the Liberal brand stinks right now. There is some hope federally that Peter Dutton can mount a rescue operation.  But that requires that he escape from witness protection custody, rediscover those things known as ‘principles’, and stop doing focus group polling to help him decide such perplexing imponderables as whether the Voice is wrong on principle because it gives some Australians an extra say based solely on characteristics they’re born with, as well as adding jet fuel to judicial activism. (In other words, Mr Dutton, this is not perplexing at all because the clear answers are ‘yes’ and ‘yes’. Liberal values tell you that without the need for focus groups, no?)

At any rate, to help conservatively inclined politicians escape from their slough of despond, here are Jim’s top three suggestions for repairing the Liberal brand. First off, admit you got the lockdown response wrong and apologise for it. Scott Morrison should never have been censured by Parliament. It smacked of the sort of stunts you see in Third World states or what happened in the early Roman Empire when you blame everything on your predecessor. Morrison did nothing illegal. So all remedies then lie with the voters. They voted him out (rightfully so in my view). End of story. This censure motion was playing Joe Biden-style gangster politics. That said, I detested the Morrison attempted exculpatory speech in parliament with all the ‘we had a world’s best response to the pandemic’ pleadings. No, we did not! The Liberal party in this country, with all the advantages of being an island in the southern hemisphere, copied the response imposed by a communist dictatorship. In terms solely of lives saved it failed.  We in this country have more cumulative excess deaths per capita (the one ungameable criterion) than Sweden, and Sweden is not an island but contiguous to, you know, Europe. The Swede’s liberal, pro-freedom response delivered fewer excess deaths and the gap with us is going to get bigger and bigger because the Morrison lockdown approach has led to masses of deaths caused by lockdowns themselves. One of the supposed ‘experts’ in Britain who pushed for lockdowns has now admitted Britain will see sustained excess deaths for years, maybe decades, caused by the lockdowns.

If the Liberal party keeps saying it handled the pandemic well it will be eons before it gets back into government.  Its response, turning away from just focusing on deaths, destroyed much of the productive small business sector (one of its core constituencies) while ballooning out the public sector, led to massive money printing that saw asset inflation explode (taking wealth from the young to the old and from the poor to the rich), destroyed its credentials for sound fiscal management (while funding the likes of Dan Andrews so that, see above, he’d get re-elected), got people used to being rewarded for not working and not going to work, helped to weaponise the police, created a profound distrust of the expert class (including by me), ruined two years of schooling and university for the young that is unfixable for many and the list goes on. Admit you erred. Apologise. Stop with the bogus Morrisonian self-justification and implicit self-praise. Then the Liberal base will move on.

The second needed course correction is this. The Libs need to regain their reputation for sound fiscal management. This will not be easy. Even before Covid, mssrs Frydenberg, Morrison and Turnbull were handing out nearly half-a-billion dollars to some Barrier Reef outfit more or less over lunch. The Libs have been in thrall to the über-Keynesians in Treasury for ages now. Spend to stimulate demand? Tick. Explode government spending up to almost 50 per cent of GDP (by the Libs remember)? Tick. Have government debt go from under 40 per cent of GDP when Tony Abbott came in to 77 per cent in 2019 (pre-pandemic spendathon) to 92.6 per cent in 2020 (and we know way higher still when the Libs lost)? Tick. With economic credentials like those why would any voter worry about Labor profligacy? I mean, so far Labor seems more fiscally responsible (an incredibly low bar I admit). Heck, not even the bumpf about a low unemployment rate in this country is believable. Remember, this rate only measures people looking for work.  Not those on our very generous state benefits or NDIS. And it misses Australia’s woeful productivity growth. And it also misses the extent to which we have one of the most regulated labour relations regimes in the democratic world. Strike that. Make it the most regulated and centralised and plain-out stupid. I mean France has a more liberalised labour relations regime than we do.

Remember, all the talk of increasing wages is in the context of Australia having pretty much the democratic world’s highest electricity costs (which were the lowest when I got here in 2005), highest minimum wage and most centralised labour relations scheme. So maybe the Libs could admit they erred in spending like drunken sailors. Apologise. And promise to put away the Keynesian magic money theories moving forward. That would help.

Last one. It’s sort of related to number two. We have too much immigration. It’s one of the highest per capita rates in the world. What this does is allow third-rate politicians (I’m being kind) to say to fourth-rate journalists (even more kind) that our GDP has gone up. That’s because GDP just measures economic activity. Let in loads and it has to go up. Meanwhile our GDP per capita (how individuals are faring) has barely moved and done no better than no-immigration Japan’s. Plus, and this is deliciously ironic, all these new people pour in while we measure carbon dioxide output by the country. Add five million people every once in a while and what do you think will happen to our CO2 output?  More burdens on the individual, right? I think the whole climate change obsession is near on deranged when you look at the data.  But if you are a true believer, how do you justify all the myriad people you’re letting in? So given the net-zero cowardice at least cut back our massive net immigration. That, by the way, will do more to increase wages than all the Labor idiocies.

You Libs couldn’t do any worse so why not take Jimbo’s advice?