Maggie Thatcher once reacted to a journalist’s claim that she might be a tad reactionary by pointing out, ‘Well, there’s a lot to react against!’ The great British prime minister also once famously said, ‘Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.’

It might have been profitable if the geniuses who ran Mr. Dutton’s campaign had been aware of that particular Thatcherite pearl of wisdom. Because boy, oh boy, did they try their hardest to run a ‘middle of the road’ campaign – making only token moves to cut immigration, refusing to jettison the net zero religion while making promises about peripheral ways to cut power prices (that would do nothing remotely like what Mr Trump’s policies are doing to reduce energy costs), being unwilling to cut taxes, having no willingness to fight the cultural battles over transgenderism idiocies, free speech, the greatness of Western civilisation or, really, anything.

As a result, the Liberals were run over by the voters. No, the voters ran over them. Stopped. Backed up over them. And then ran over them again. And boy did they deserve it. As I was saying long before the election, every single Dutton advisor should have been fired months before the election.

It is always better in politics to die on your feet, fighting for values and principles you believe in, rather than on your knees pretending to embrace those of the other side. Of course, that requires a party room with a broad-based basket of shared values, something today’s Liberal party pretty clearly lacks.

I think that in part, this desire to compromise and negotiate and give-a-little-to-take-a little made sense fifty, or even forty, years ago. Back then, both the main parties shared an awful lot of foundational values. They could both tell you what a woman is. They both agreed that not all cultures were equal, and that Western civilisation (and, arguably, especially the Anglosphere) had delivered the best countries in which to live in the history of the planet, especially for women. They both believed in merit and the importance of hard work and effort. They both highly valued democratic decision-making and both (but especially the left side of politics, believe it or not today) were very suspicious of unelected judges getting too big for their unelected boots. They were both patriotic. Perhaps not equally so as regards the military but differences were peripheral not foundational. Neither would ever have dreamt of tearing down statues of past greats because their personal lives did not in every way meet the new exacting standards of today’s world. Neither thought being white was a presumptive marker of moral deficiency. And both sides of politics back then valued free speech and the free-flowing competition of ideas, again, especially the left side of politics.

You see, back then you got most of your political disagreements around how to structure the economy. Do we want a big or small role for unions? Do we want comparative free trade or a more protected, autarkic set-up? What sort of tax rates work best? Or labour relations regimes? Sure, these sort of debates depended on the comparative importance one put on freedom vis-à-vis equality, or wealth creation versus wealth distribution. But in a democratic world, where each election left the winner free to reshape things if they had the legislative numbers, both sides could live with compromise. Turning around the policies of the other side might be hard after losing a few elections, but you weren’t dealing in moral absolutes that made reversing course some sort of crime against the respecting of rights.

But today? Go back and look at the above list. The two main sides of politics, here in Australia, but also across the Anglosphere and, I think, the rest of the democratic world, are torn apart over foundational issues. How do you compromise over DEI versus merit-based hiring and places in universities? Give in a little to the DEI mob (as our vacillating Libs have done) and you too are in that camp, you’re just not as far along the spectrum. Or how do you negotiate over taking down statues of past greats? Do you say, ‘Take these four down, but no more’? Because that is the height of naivety. Any sentient being knows that the haters of Western civilisation will never be satisfied with the first tranche, they will always want more. And the only workable reply is to give them nothing, ever, and fight on principle. The same goes for inroads into free speech. And fights over unelected judges having ever greater powers over social policy-making – whether given to them by Tony Blair-like constitutional reforms from parliament or, as in Australia, given by judges to themselves via made-up constitutional interpretation innovations that deliver ‘implied freedoms’. (On the latter, does anyone honestly believe that if Australians had been asked in a referendum ‘Do you want unelected judges to have the power to invalidate statutes based on what they, the judges, happen to think is suitable, reasonable, least rights-infringing, and making big use of ‘structured proportionality analyses’?’ that it would have achieved even 20 percent approval?)

Put more bluntly, today’s political battles do not lend themselves to the sort of compromise that was possible in the battles of half a century ago. The fights are more foundational. Think about what you need to believe to make the claim that ‘a trans woman is a woman’ remotely defensible. At the very least you have to think that there is some essential ‘you’ that is independent of the trillions of XX or XY chromosomes in your body, that your body is not the ‘real you’, that feelings trump imposed facts about the external, causal world, that self-identifying on sex (or gender) is somehow okay – and should even be mandated – but it’s not okay as regards race or age. (As in, a 34-year-old can’t sign up to play 13-year-olds’ sports, and win, because he identifies as that age. Or a white, progressive activist doesn’t magically become black because that’s how she feels inside and sees herself but this does happen with sex and gender.) That you can ‘know’ this as a mere teenager and have brutal surgery performed to facilitate it. Now if the question were a ‘live and let live’ one about those over eighteen living however they wished, you could get compromise – I personally don’t care how others choose to live. But force other people to pretend you actually are a woman and I baulk. Ditto if you insist on playing female sports or serving your sentence in a female prison. There simply is no place for compromise on these and so many of today’s political debates.

That, in my opinion, is why bravery is the most important attribute in any conservative leader and why, TDS sufferers be damned, Donald Trump’s first 150 days in office have been the best of any president’s in my life. Look at his five-month record. Not perfect, but by far the best of my life. There’s none of this getting run over in the middle-of-the-road guff.