So a big lesson from the US election is that, like Trump, conservatives can ignore the advisor class, and win.  They can take chances and stand for something more than ‘we’re not them’, and win. They can run to have a mandate to make real change, and win. And they can be confident that just about everything the legacy media claims about how to win as a conservative, claims of the sort heard even in the Wall Street Journal, repeatedly in the Australian and on much of Australia’s Sky TV, is wrong.  The same goes for the political advisor caste which seems inevitably to opt for the ‘park yourself a centimetre to the right of the main lefty party and as they move ever further left make sure you go with them’ strategy. We saw exactly that risk-averse-on-steroids strategy on full display in the recent Queensland election. A bankruptingly stupid Labor gambit on basically free train travel?  Tick. We’re on board. Won’t touch Queensland’s uber-bloated public service? Tick. No mention of repealing any of the activist-generated legislation put in place by Labor, even something like the state’s terrible statutory bill of rights that hadn’t even been taken to an election by them? Tick. And so the new LNP government has a big mandate for what? Nada. Zippo. Zero.

Compare Mr Trump who has a mandate for one of the biggest overhauls of the Washington D.C. bureaucracy you’ve ever seen.  And he’s proceeding to deliver on his promises. Yeah yeah, all sorts of talking heads are disparaging Trump’s cabinet picks. Know what? All these same people, including most legacy media conservative columnists, were disparaging Trump’s pick of J.D. Vance back when he made it. Go back and you’ll see near on all of them were wanting Nikki Haley or Marco Rubio and were dismissive (at best) of Vance. Of course, it turned out that Vance was an inspired choice and basically delivered a succession plan that avoided the RINO candidates. And if you have run explicitly on a pledge to clean out the Washington D.C. insider class then you can hardly appoint D.C. insiders or house-trained Republicans, can you? You also have to move quickly and decisively to make it clear you mean business. I like 90 per cent of Trump’s picks and any time you agree with any politician’s picks that often you’re very lucky indeed. (Next week I’m going to talk about two terrible court decisions, the Pauline Hanson defamation case and the High Court ankle bracelets and curfews one. Here I just point out for the millionth time that these were largely Coalition appointed judges who did this – go and read the ceremonial sitting page for Justice Stewart, a Christian Porter appointee who heard the Hanson case, and his reflections on being ‘born into privilege’ and you’ll be ready for next week’s column.) The point here, though, is that Trump is taking appointments very seriously indeed. Conservative governments in the rest of the Anglosphere do not. Nor will they appoint actual conservatives to anything. Worst of all, they often have a worse track record appointing judges than those appointed by the left – by which I mean Labor’s judicial appointments right now are on the whole preferable to interpretive conservatives who don’t want activist judges, like me, than the former nine years of Coalition appointees are. How is that remotely possible? How did Tony Abbott and his chief of staff Peta Credlin let George Brandis appoint the wife of the retiring High Court Justice to replace him in a world first for any country, ever? And you can guess how interpretively conservative she’s been in these big illegal migration cases or in the woeful Love case from a few years back.

But back to the softly-softly-softly, ‘do nothing, say nothing’ approach to elections.  Yes, of course that will win you the odd election. Every three or four elections the voters will throw Labor out even if it’s to move to an anodyne, enervated Coalition option.  It sometimes seems to me, especially at the state level, that conservative politicians are so afraid of being labelled ‘populists’ that they prefer to just accept the wider Labor worldview and total defeat in the culture wars for a few crumbs of praise on the ABC.  This is stupidity on steroids. No one on the left can even define what they mean by ‘populist’. For them it’s just a rhetorical term of abuse. But if you want a rough definition then take ‘populist’ to indicate those voters and politicians who have a significant dissatisfaction with the existing policy frameworks and settings, with the main established political parties who have delivered us to where we are, and hence have a very big distrust of the expert class. Now having lived through the Covid lockdowns I have exactly those views so I’m happy to wear the label ‘populist’ with pride. Remember the words of the great Stanford University epidemiologist Professor Jay Bhattacharya who said, and still asserts, that the biggest source of misinformation and disinformation during those two lockdown years came from governments and the public health caste, obviously echoed and amplified by a fear-mongering legacy media. (By the way, that alone tells you how insidious and evil this Albanese Misinformation Bill is.) If what they did to us didn’t make you wholly distrustful of the expert class what would? And by the way, as I write this column the Washington Post is reporting that the leading candidate to be appointed head of America’s National Institutes of Health (think the top US health research body full of the expert types who were leading pushers of lockdowns, school closures, masking, made-up social distancing rules, and the rest) will be none other than the aforementioned Professor Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of The Great Barrington Declaration. That would be roughly comparable to an incoming Peter Dutton appointing Andrew Bolt to be the new managing director of the ABC. Or John Roskam to replace our woeful eSafety Commissioner. Trump this time is clearly prepared to make these type of appointments. Others aren’t. Which is why Trump is a ‘love him or hate him’ guy who gets results. He ran against virtually the entirety of the expert class while shunning completely the sort of ‘small target’ Queensland Crisafulli approach. And Trump delivered the biggest Republican win since Reagan, taking the Presidency, Senate, House and popular vote (as I predicted he would on this page). Oh, and he did so while obtaining a mandate for real change.

You know who else has figured out this ‘go big and stand for something’ approach?  It’s Canada’s Conservative party opposition leader Pierre Poilievre. In the most recent poll last week Poilievre is still 20 points up with Justin Trudeau looking at electoral annihilation. (Trudeau’s Liberal party now would not even be the official opposition according to last week’s poll. It’s that bad for him.) Poilievre has thrown out the softly-softly playbook. He’s promised to cut the English Canada CBC TV budget in half. He’s mooted turning Canada’s equivalent of the national broadcaster’s headquarters (think Ultimo) into social housing. He’s saying what he’s going to repeal. He is actively seeking out a fight on the culture wars. And he’s 20 points up. In the far more left-leaning country of Canada.

Take a leaf out of this, Mr Dutton, and you win big.  Heck, fight on the mass immigration front alone and you win big. Do not pay attention to the siren song coming from the insider, establishment class that Mr Trump wholly ignored to such good effect.