In the recent US midterms (and the just-held Wisconsin Supreme Court vacancy election), the Democrats massively outspent the Republicans, in some races by as much as six times more than the Republicans spent. Add in the indirect expenditures and the Democrat spending advantage may have been larger. I’ve been saying it in these pages for some time but the simple truth is that (in general terms) wealthy people now vote left.  This is true in the US, in Britain, in Canada and here. Moreover, in the US the richest of the rich give huge money to the Democrats. Let’s be honest; Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cooke, Mark Zuckerberg, Jamie Dimon, yes Warren Buffet and a host of non-celebrity capitalists are functional Democrats. (I leave to one side the pernicious effect Bill Gates had in pushing lockdown authoritarianism and other woeful aspects of the pandemic years.) Put differently, George Soros has lots of company on the political left.

Or ask yourself whether you think Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Entertainment, Big Law, Big Energy and Finance align more with the political Right or the political Left these days. It’s not even close, is it? Every fad originating with the hard left of the Democrat party seems eventually to make its way into the corporate boardroom, first in the US and then around the rest of the anglosphere. Certainly all these Bigs seem to have quietly signed on with Biden. You can bet they’ll be going all in to stop the Republicans from winning in 2024.

But let’s just consider Australia. Already some of the big corporates are coming out for a Yes as regards the Voice. Take Coles. Even now they have a poster up in Cairns taking the Yes side. Isn’t that incredibly virtuous of this company, using shareholders’ money (not the board members’ personal money or the CEO’s but shareholders’) to push for a Yes vote on an issue that is party political and that will be a close run thing, at best, for the affirmative case? Can you even imagine a big corporation 50 or 60 years ago taking a side in a constitutional referendum that split the political parties? Yet today this is apparently perfectly fine, certainly no different to, say, Zuckerberg aligning with the Biden administration on, well, near on everything. Or Disney spending shareholders’ money to attack Ron DeSantis over legislation that forbade sex education for children aged six to eight. Disney jumped in bed with the hard Left that called this law the ‘Don’t Say Gay Bill’ though there is no distinction at all about the sort of sex education being disallowed; it was all banned. (DeSantis, at least, pushed back against these woke corporates and took away the special Disney legal exemptions from normal zoning and tax laws which hurt enough that the new Disney CEO Bob Iger last week called them anti-business. Gee Bob, if you’re going to take explicit sides on political issues then being anti-your-political-opponents means being anti-business, doesn’t it?)

Those of us who are conservatives need to realise that the winning conservative coalition today is very different to what it was 50 years ago. We are now the party not just of small business but of the lower-middle and working classes. (Good! For one thing they don’t wallow in insufferable, unendurable virtue-signalling.) We conservatives are now the party of the suburbs. Just as Boris did in 2019 and Trump did in 2016, we can put together winning coalitions of voters who want cheap energy, some backbone on culture issues, protected borders, lower mass immigration and some Thatcher-like husbandry when it comes to the budget (the last of these clearly being more honoured in the breach than the observance, or in the manifesto more than in the execution).

But designing Liberal party policies for the Teal seats is a sure loser. Do that and you lose big chunks of the rest of your conservative coalition in the many more seats that matter. And then you lose big time in WA, SA, Victoria, NSW, nationally.

So ignore the Teal seats. If the economy implodes – a far from implausible possibility with this current Labor team at the helm – then the rich folk in the Teal seats will come back to Team Libs regardless of the non-woke, non-Green policies the party has adopted because these virtue-signalling Teal voters draw the line at losing too much of the moolah, dough, swag, green stuff. If that happens, fine. But making policies explicitly to save Josh Frydenberg’s old seat was plain stupid.

Here’s what follows. For one thing, I like what US Republican Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri said to a big corporate type who was complaining about some Biden administration regulations that were taking money out of the pockets of the corporate class. I paraphrase, but Hawley’s response amounted to this: ‘You’re against us Republicans on all the crucially important culture stuff and protecting the borders and non-activist judges and on free speech issues but now you want us to help you on economic stuff. I agree with you, by the way, on your free market economic positions but why would I lift a finger to help you? You’ve made your bed. Go and lie in it.’

That is exactly my view. If Labor stupidly starts raiding the superannuation accounts and nest eggs of these big corporate types who are spending shareholder monies to push a Yes on this incredibly divisive and horrible-for-Australia Voice referendum, I cannot think of a single digit on either of my hands that I would lift to help them. Stupidly bad policy to attack super? You bet it is. Worth helping these corporates who basically hate our social and cultural and pro-democracy views? Nope. I’m with Senator Hawley.

Meantime here in Australia there is something all of us voters can do who think that this Voice proposal deals in malicious group rights (based on race or whatever you wish to call it), will undermine democratic decision-making, will lead to rent-seeking, will deliver the exact opposite of reconciliation (just look at the name calling galore from the Yes camp already), the list goes on.

We can inconvenience ourselves enough to avoid the corporates who are taking sides in this debate. Coles is out for me. If Woolworths goes down the same road then it’s IGA. You have to put your money where your mouth is a little, readers. And get ready for all sorts of charities to come out in favour of the Voice (since it’s more virtue-signalling that’s cheap and easy for the people who run them).

Well, they ultimately need charitable donations. Don’t give them a penny of your money. And if any university comes out in favour, write to the vice-chancellor and say that you are stopping all donations to your alma mater.

Remember, for the virtue-signalling lefty elites money still talks. DeSantis has the right idea. We only have our tiny spending but we can choose where it goes.