I confess that as an out and proud conservative working in the incredibly left-leaning university sector, and someone with a high tolerance for risk, I have burned my fair share of bridges over the years. My basic view is that you say what you think and what you believe to be right and let the chips fall where they may – as many of us in The Speccie Australia did all through the pandemic, being right on just about everything lockdown-related as it turned out. This week I may be burning a few more bridges as I take issue with advice recently given to the Liberal party.

But first let me recount a true story. Back right after I arrived in Brisbane some eighteen years or so ago I had to attend a high-level university meeting for something or other. As we waited for it to start the senior university administrators present were all criticising, denouncing and mocking the then Australian prime minister. I later realised that these university higher-ups would all have just assumed – on very good statistical probability reasoning to be fair – that this new guy, me, was yet another lefty, progressive whose political home was somewhere between the left and the more-left on the political spectrum. As I wasn’t, however, I loudly asked the room what it was they didn’t like about John Howard because I thought he was a pretty exceptional prime minister. No one in the room said anything and politics never came up again.

I mention that because I’ve always thought John Howard was a very good PM for us right-of-centre types. Not perfect, of course, because no one can be. Just think about the folly of using majorities in both houses to bring in Work Choices legislation which (with the aid of our always centralising High Court) blasted away at core federalism principles and which I and others predicted at the time would open the door for the Labor party in Canberra to one day use to take labour relations in this country to a far worse place than it had been pre-Work Choices. And Labor did. And we’re still paying the price for that centralising rashness. But no politician delivers everything one wants and I was a big John Howard fan during his time as PM.

I hope that admiration for this political giant is clear because I sure don’t agree with what I saw attributed to him in the Australian newspaper recently. You see I nearly choked on my breakfast reading Troy Bramston’s account of his interview with Mr Howard with the headline ‘Resist calls to shift further to the Right’. What on earth, I wondered, could our former PM be talking about? Well, according to the Bramston telling it was our Liberal party that needed to resist this, the one Mr Howard so successfully led for so long. There were phrases indicating Mr Howard’s advice to the party ‘not to lurch to the right’ and all the usual bumpf about the Liberal party being a broad church. So let me stop right here and ask readers whether I have inadvertently fallen asleep, Rip van Winkle-style, for two decades all while the Liberal party in this country has actually done something, anything at all in fact, that might be classed as ‘right-wing’. Seriously. Because from the day Mr Abbott was defenestrated and so through seven years of Turnbull/Morrison leadership I cannot think of a single ‘right-wing’ thing we conservatives got from seven-plus years of Coalition governments. Not one. Superannuation was undermined. Electricity prices went through the roof. Each and every one of those years our universities got more woke and less rigorous and had a smaller percentage of conservative academics. During Covid the Morrison government was thuggish, enabled brutality at the state level, countenanced a pseudo vaccine mandate and spent more money per capita than Justin Trudeau! A lot more in fact, making me doubt Mr Howard’s claims that both wings of the Liberal party can unite over ‘lower spending’ when nine years of Coalition government couldn’t deliver a single year of surplus and government spending exploded exponentially since his days as PM. After Mr Abbott killed off the carbon tax and stopped the boats I seriously cannot think of anything, not one thing, that could plausibly be classified as ‘a move to the right’. And so how does a party ‘lurch further to the right’ when it never lurched anywhere right to start with? And how can anyone look at today’s Liberal party at the state level and say these manifestations constitute a ‘broad church’? It is wall-to-wall Photiosesque and Labor-lite, though for marketing reasons they prefer the highly misleading label ‘moderates’.

Not wholly surprisingly, a few days later in the Oz Peter van Onselen counselled the same things as Mr Howard – my favourite PVO laugh-inducing clanger was his assertion that the ‘moderate wing [of the Libs] for too long has capitulated to the conservative wing’. Frailty (in failing to point to a single plausible instance of such capitulation) thy name is Onselen! But with PVO we can at least assume a far different political centre of gravity, one where opposing the Voice and being sceptical of net zero constitutes, well, some sort of deplorably right-wing embrace of hard-right political attitudes.

But not so Mr Howard who sensibly has opposed the Voice and done so in part on the core, foundational premise that liberal societies do not constitutionalise unequal citizenship. And that’s correct. And it is no right-wing or conservative position either. If anything the demand for equal citizenship lies in the J.S. Mill, classical liberal end of the spectrum. So too with a scepticism of net zero, a scepticism that Mr. Howard also seems to share. That’s not the preserve of right-wing zealots, not unless you count as such Bjorn Lomborg, the Green party of Germany and myriad others who wouldn’t be caught dead in a conservative political party.

So I ask again, where are the examples of any – and I mean any – instances of today’s Australian Liberal party lurching to the right on anything? Was it when the party knifed Mr Abbott who’d delivered a huge majority in favour of the man who has latterly brought the Guardian newspaper to this country and never misses a chance to slag off his successors? Was it when Mr Morrison threw away what had won two elections on the trot and opted to join up with the net-zero crusading zealots? Does refusing to fight on any culture-related issues at all, zero, constitute ‘shifting further to the right’? (Leave aside that fighting on just those issues is winning right-of-centre parties elections all over continental Europe.)

Lastly, don’t tell me that Menzies would have agreed with the claim that the Liberal party needs to shape its policies to the Teal constituency voters because that is flat-out laughable – these uber-wealthy Australians are the group most in favour of the Voice according to a poll last week and are the Australians most insouciant about the heavy costs of renewables madness. Cater to them and you lose. The new Conservative party leader in Canada sees that and has in fact given up on just those sort of seats. He is ten points up in the polls as I write.

All this needs saying, bridges be damned!