Our incredibly depressing election takes place well after the final deadline for this week’s copy. So I don’t know the outcome as I write this. But here’s the paradox. On the one hand, the Liberals’ campaign has been cowardly. It has run away from nearly all the big-ticket, values-based issues – explaining to voters why net zero has to go and why our huge drop in living standards is a direct result of this near-religious mania; why a gargantuan cut in immigration is necessary; why Labor’s attempts to divide us by race are insidious and aren’t likely to be ditched; why working from home really is a productivity-zapping indulgence that has to be phased out pronto because it makes all of us poorer, meaning someone in the public service’s new-found ability to pick up the kids from school or learn a new recipe for sourdough bread isn’t a good argument in favour of working from home; why free speech matters (and yes, I know, it’s laughable to imagine Mr Dutton or anyone else in the current shadow cabinet being able to articulate the free speech case but, heck, you’d think they could at least see why supporting the current e-Safety Commissioner – whom they appointed, never forget – is losing them a lot of first preferences from those of us with a passing concern for freedom); why voters want conservatives to fight the culture wars and be able to state clearly that a man who wants to be a woman doesn’t thereby magically transmogrify into one via some sort of woke, transcendental alchemy, a dress and some cutting-edge surgery. Sure, Team Dutton has come out well on national defence, though why they waited till a tenth of the country had already voted to get this solid policy out there is a puzzler. Anyway, that’s the one hand. On the other, the Libs and Coalition with all their faults are nevertheless miles better than Team Albo, which may be an even worse government than Whitlam’s. That’s the paradox in a nutshell.  Dutton doesn’t deserve to win but, paradoxically, we’ll all be better off if he does.

That being the state of democratic play in this country let me leave my pre-election comments to those few and now indulge in random observations about the common law world’s judges.  If Alexander Hamilton could see them in operation today, he would most certainly never have described them, as he did over two centuries ago, as ‘the least dangerous branch’. Joe Biden and the Democrats opted, in effect, to let into the US some 10 to 15 million illegal aliens in just four years.  And now the left-wing lawyerly caste and judiciary are arguing that each one should be given the full panoply of procedural protections before being forced out of the US. So you knowingly breach a country’s rules to get in and now you demand their protection to stay in? Calculations have been done and if every eligible judge in the US heard nothing at all but two deportation cases a day, every day, then it would take somewhere between forty and fifty years to remove just those illegals whom the Biden administration let in.

Do you see why non-lawyers dislike lawyers so much? It’s all form, no substance.  On this sort of judicially constructed pettifoggery playing field it is plain that open-borders lefties can just open the country’s doors when they’re in power and then their buddies in the lawyerly caste (which in today’s world leans left big time) will make it near impossible to do anything about it when the other side gets in. ‘Just giving them due process, old chap. We must make pre-eminent society’s respect for civil liberties.  Fiat justitia ruat caelum (‘Let justice be done though the heavens fall’) and all that.’ Of course, the heavens never fall on the judges themselves, do they? The dangerous, murderous chaps no longer able to be deported are never housed next door to a top judge.  It’s the working class that gets shafted.

Worse, how many readers want to barf when they are lectured to in this way by a lawyerly caste that didn’t lift a solitary finger for civil liberties during the years of Covid-lockdown thuggery?  Two and a half years of a weaponised police, incoherent rules plucked out of thin air, lies, mandates, more lies, masks that did nothing, more lies, schools shut down, the complete abandonment of informed consent, churches shut down, the list goes on and in all that time – as I predicted at the start – you can’t find a single common law jurisdiction where a bill of rights was used to uphold our civil liberties.  Not one case, thereby proving my long-stated belief that buying a bill of rights is no more and no less than buying the social policy druthers of unelected judges. It just so happened that across the democratic world the unelected judges’ druthers – the ones whose pettifoggery makes deportations so tough – were at least as in thrall to the Covid fearmongers as the politicians. The judges sure didn’t make ‘upholding our civil liberties’ a consideration that counted for anything during Covid, did they? Go and read the Palmer v. Western Australia s.92 case if you want to read our own High Court embarrassing itself with insipid, flabby, self-serving reasoning (though that in no way excuses Scott Morrison’s government for its disgraceful conduct in facilitating the result).

Here’s another example, this time from Canada. The elected conservative Premier of Ontario said he was going to get rid of bicycle lanes. A judge issued an injunction to stop him, which is more frequent in Canada than the US. But on what basis can the judge intervene to save bike lanes? The Charter of Rights has a ‘right to life’ provision, old boy, and that might be infringed. It is, I’m afraid, that laughable and risible a basis for over-riding the democratic branches. And the left-wing Liberal party in Canada said it will, if re-elected, expand an already big ‘charter challenge’ fund that uses taxpayer monies to fund bill of rights challenges to government laws. Remember, the left in Canada has appointed virtually all the unelected judges. Then they fund lawyer-driven challenges to strike down laws. It’s a neat trick. Over time, the lawyers and judges effectively do the legislative work for your side of politics.  Paid for by taxpayers. They strike down or get rid of the laws that are too hard to remove democratically. And they get to pretend it wasn’t them doing it but that of the ‘impartial judiciary’. (As an aside, go and look at which laws our top judges have invalidated using the judicially made-up ‘implied freedoms’ device – almost all Liberal-enacted laws, not Labor’s.)

Take it from me. The evidence is plain.  In Canada, Britain, the US, less potently here, the old-fashioned notion of the ‘rule of law’ is being transmogrified into ‘rule by judges and lawyers’. Today they’re way too big for their democratically illegitimate boots. Except, of course, when it’s the biggest inroads on our civil liberties in two hundred years. Then, well, we all must defer to the government and its expert advisors old boy. Forget about letting justice be done.