Go back forty years and the one thing you could say about the Anglosphere is that conservative parties knew what they stood for and were prepared to fight for those values. Think Margaret Thatcher. Think Ronald Reagan. In terms of economic reform think New Zealand (with much help from the left and Labour as it happened). Okay, not so much my native Canada whose political centre of gravity is way to the left of Australia’s. Ditto here as from the early 1980s till Mr Howard, Labor ran Australia, though it was an economically literate and assuredly non-woke Labor, unlike today’s iteration. Still, broadly speaking conservative parties in the Anglosphere back then more or less knew what they believed and they fought for those beliefs. It was in continental Europe that conservative parties, comparatively speaking, seemed to lack a potent and guiding ideological rudder.

Well, today the tables have turned. Look around and you’ll see the exact opposite. Today it’s in the Anglosphere that conservative political parties appear moribund, rudderless and operating without much conviction about anything or any beliefs that seem more important to their flagbearer politicians than making sure they can, individually, stay on the taxpayer gravy train for as long as possible. Meanwhile we look to Europe and see one of its most popular politicians is Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. She has beliefs and values and she makes those clear. Heck – and this will be a revelation to John Pesutto in Victoria – Ms Meloni even knows what a woman is and is prepared to fight for obvious biological reality over succumbing to woke nonsense and the elevation of feelings and subjective sensibilities over imposed realities from the external causal world.

The same core convictions are clear in Hungary (and to pre-empt the legacy media line it’s patent nonsense to call Prime Minister Orbán fascist or hard-right for views near-on everyone held in the 1980s). Those convictions have helped Mr Orbán win election after election (and with far less one-sided, adoring and Pravda-like press support than Mr Biden receives over Mr Trump or that Mr Trudeau receives). In France and Germany, meanwhile, it’s the left-leaning politicians who have low approval ratings and are floundering.

So what to do, what to do, here in the Anglosphere? One thing that is now obvious to any sentient being is that the Mark Textor ‘let’s just move one inch to the right of the lefties because our core voters have nowhere else to go’ is a complete failure of a strategy. It has led to the Libs being destroyed at the state level and to internecine party room machinations at the national level. So I wonder if last week’s election in the Canadian province of Alberta might offer us any lessons?

By way of background, Alberta is Canada’s most politically conservative province, though you might get an argument from Saskatchewan. At the national level, in the election but one ago, Mr Trudeau did not win a single seat in the entire province (same with Saskatchewan). And in the most recent 2021 election Trudeau’s party won just two seats in Alberta (with another left-wing party taking two itself, out of the province’s 34 total seats). So by Canadian standards, Alberta leans noticeably right (though to give you context, a median-voting Albertan who came to Queensland would most definitely be left-of-centre). Anyway, in the 2019 Alberta provincial election Jason Kenney led the UCP conservative party to a sweeping victory. Kenney had returned to Albertan politics after serving in the national cabinet of prime minister Stephen Harper. Kenney was a John Howard-type conservative. We conservatives would walk over glass in any Australian state to have him lead the Libs here.  But Kenney was destroyed by the pandemic. He did not stand up to the lockdownistas. He bought much of the fear-mongering sold by a legacy press that never did its core job of being sceptical and questioning rather than sanctimonious and preaching fear. And because in Canada the conservative political parties make the party membership the deciders of who the leader will be enough signatures were obtained to have a vote on the leader. Kenney won, but with only 51 per cent of the votes. He was in practice finished and he stepped down. In the vote to replace him the firebrand Danielle Smith won. She had earlier led the more conservative party that had come together with another to form the party led by Kenney. She had been outspoken about the thuggishness of the lockdowns and of the mandates. Before being picked as the new leader she’d had a talkback radio show and been a sort of female (ask what that is Mr Pesutto) version of Alan Jones. Anyway, the legacy press loathed Smith. The opposition NDP party, also led by a woman, was much more sympathetic to Mr Trudeau and threw everything Smith had said as a radio host back at her.

So Smith opted to play to her base, not to try to move as close to the lefties as she could. By the standards of a present-day Australian state Liberal leader she was Campbell Newman, maybe on steroids. Last week’s Alberta election result? Smith won 49-38 (a big drop from Kenny’s majority but he had lost the base and probably would have lost the election). She and the conservatives did not win a single seat in the Albertan capital city of Edmonton.

In Aussie terms Smith gave up on the ‘Teals’ because pandering to them kills you with your core voters. But Danielle Smith and her conservative party did win virtually all the rural, small-town, outer-suburbs seats and a big chunk of them in the oil town of Calgary. More to the point, the seats Smith won are solid. It is hard to see the left-leaning NDP making much of an inroad on them.  If you don’t become all deranged at the mere mention of his Voldemort-like name then think of this as the Trump strategy – get out the base and win the deplorables’ vote because there are more of those votes out there than there are voters who subscribe to what you might think of as the ‘ABC worldview’. But to win these votes you have to offer them policies they want (did I hear ‘cheap energy’ anyone, because Smith will fight the net-zero idiocies). And stand up for sane values (and no one would accuse Ms Smith of being remotely woke or PC).

This strategy, by the way, is the one that is seeing Meloni win in Italy. And Orbán in Hungary. And getting wins in Poland. Even in Sweden. Now it’s working in a major Canadian province.

I know, I know, Australia’s preferential voting system (‘a protection racket for the two main parties’) makes this harder. But not impossible. We just need Liberal politicians with a few beliefs and values and a willingness to fight, even to lose on their feet standing up for things rather than on their knees hoping to keep the chauffeur-driven limo and mighty nice pension (of the sort Mr Albanese could tell us about if the ABC ever asked him).