Not a day goes by without hearing … if the Liberal Party moves ‘to the right’ it will lose votes.

So assured is the Australian media, polling groups, and the PR fraternity of Australia’s collective aversion to conservatism that for the Coalition to countenance policies that veer off from the so-called ‘centre’, electoral oblivion is all but assured.

The problem with this assumption is that at best it’s a misinterpretation of the electorate – and at worst, it’s a lie.

First of all, the ‘centre’ mark of politics has clearly shifted Left in recent decades. This is not thanks to spontaneous grassroots evolution, but to the infiltration of far-left-thinking which has dispersed from their incubational institutions into the corporate and media world over the last 30 years.

To illustrate this fact, think of the centrism of the Hawke, Keating, and Howard years: even the language used in that time would now be considered ‘Right’ in today’s fragile landscape.

And it’s important we register this fact: because the political pendulum which swings across the Left/Right spectrum has been off-kilter for a while. Its centre of gravity is currently well off-balance.

‘Everyone I Don’t Like Is Hitler’

Somebody put it very succinctly the other day, summarising: ‘Anything remotely like a traditional or Christian belief – the foundations that built this country and Western Civilisation – is now considered “Far Right”.’

That person was spot on: our largely left-leaning commentary-class (and their puzzlingly blind-adherent acolytes in the corporate sector) have decided there is only one appropriate ideological lens which should be allowed to amplify thought and policy.

With now-normative histrionic headlines casting instant aspersions on calm and measured statements from conservative thinkers and speakers, it really doesn’t matter how you even attempt communicate ideas anymore: it’s the topics themselves that will determine how you’re engaged with by our national conversation.

And they wonder why less-patient people snap at yet another ‘gotcha’ question?

As a result, what we really have is an ideological oligarchy where all the actual meanings for political persuasions have been transformed and remodelled to frame anybody challenging the Woke/politically correct/socially-left-wing establishment as ‘far-right’, ‘hard-right’, ‘extreme right’ etc.

These are utterly meaningless terms deployed to divert attention from the issues at hand.

Interestingly though, as somebody else quite prominent once said, it’s funny how we never get talk about when the Left goes too far. Progressivism has apparently no limits and definitely no internal police force. That’s why it’s an abomination that they get to control the linguistic territory: that is, decide upon the very language we can use to discuss life.

And, in case you thought I’d forgotten, if you’re not called ‘hard-right’ or ‘far-right’ for having an opinion, you’re definitely a racist, sexist, uneducated – or some other slur designed simply to shut you up and sit you down.

The Backlash to Andrew Hastie

Cue this week when one of the Liberal party’s most promising MPs, Member for Canning Andrew Hastie, finally put his head above the parapet and spoke openly and honesty regarding three key policy areas: immigration, manufacturing and energy.

The commentariat on the Left instantly mocked his love for Australian-built automobiles, that’s despite the working class being traditionally economically left-wing, with manufacturing and building things an intrinsic part of what it was to be a ‘working person’.

Yet even in the so-called ‘right-wing press’ and corporate suck-ups quickly thrashed his regard for national self-sufficiency and waffled on about how we should just continue to be a mindless consumerist society that doesn’t make anything complex or meaningful anymore because, simply, ‘it costs more here’.

As if money is the only reason you do things?

When Hastie dared mentioned the word ‘beautiful’ in reference to creating something, that would have really riled the activists, bureaucrats, and bean counters alike – as well as anyone who thinks a Tesla looks good.

As the days went on, Hastie was accused of being ‘Trumpian’.

‘There’s been too much focus on the culture wars and not enough focus on the bread-and-butter issues that impact Australians. You will not find … votes out on the extreme right. It doesn’t exist.’

What the is the ‘Extreme Right’? How have we gotten to a point where wanting a sensibly low immigration policy, and strategic investment and incentivisation in a sovereign manufacturing capability equates to extreme anything?

What could be more ‘bread-and-butter’ than the average house price nudging 12-14 times an average annual income in many of Australia’s major cities? An appreciation largely driven by mass immigration (albeit with other crucial secondary factors).

What could be more ‘bread-and-butter’ than drawing national attention to the fact Australia is now reliant on the outside world for 5,000 categories of goods?

How is it ‘culture wars’ to want to preserve Australia’s national identity? A national identity that attracted non-Anglo Celtics to want to come here in the first place and partake in the fruits of Western Civilisation and British society? A policy-position so important (the scale and makeup of immigration) and yet one that’s never actually been put to the people for their permission?

We can make all the excuses under the sun about higher wages, pesky unions etc – but the fact of the matter is our corporate and political class decided long ago it wanted to change our country from a society of largely homogenous creators, to consumers dependent on the outside world. We were now to partake in a service-based economy that ran on immigration to deliver growth, not productivity and innovation, and we were now firmly at the whim of global markets and trends.

Much of the public knows we’re all in a big scam – tiny pieces on a chessboard we aren’t able to move ourselves. Where any savings in the bank at 4.5 per cent PA are worth circa 14.5 per cent PA less in actual purchasing power next year… Most would get the picture.

The Electoral Truth

Now here’s where it gets interesting and we see the electoral argument for not touching these subjects disintegrate very quickly.

In 2025’s May Federal Election, let’s look at what the Coalition and Labor primary vote was:

Labor: 5,354,138

Liberal/National: 4,929,402

Closer than you might have thought given the two-party preferred figures. Then we had:

Greens: 1,889,997

Independents: 1,126,051

Now let’s look at the so-called ‘Far Right’ minor parties. The parties many in our corporate elite and lefty activist corps would herald as being on the road to fascism:

One Nation: 991,814

Trumped of Patriots: 296,076

Libertarian: 83,474

Family First: 273,681

People First: 71,892

Australian Christians: 31,365

Shooters, Fishers, Farmers: 26,968

In total, that’s more than 1,775,270 – more than population of Adelaide – who are smeared as ‘far or extreme right’ or worse by people inside the Liberal Party, let alone its numerous detractors outside.

That’s almost 12 per cent of the people who voted at the last election. Right now, One Nation is polling 11 per cent of the country, when its figures above represented just 6.5 per cent of voters.

If we take the current performance of the Liberal Party as emblematic of their desire to capture these voters, then we’d have to conclude the party doesn’t want them.

It would gladly set aside a clear route to Kirribilli in two years’ time in favour of trying to win back the richest suburbs in every capital city from the Teals by emulating them (Pro Net Zero, Pro Big Business).

But these 1.8 million people above aren’t ‘fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists’ as UK Prime Minister David Cameron once said of a budding Nigel Farage’s political movement (UKIP) back in 2006. UKIP morphed into the Brexit Party and then was phoenixed into the Reform Party – an outfit now leading the polls in the UK on over 35 per cent. That’s more than the incumbent Labour government won at last year’s general election, which gave them a majority of roughly 150 seats. Just let that sink in.

This stuff isn’t going away, and the tide really is on their side.

Increasingly, modern Australians get their political coverage from social media and Youtube – from across the English-speaking world – forming their views via long-form podcasts where they can get to know people and form an opinion of their character based on a three-hour segment, not a three-second soundbite handpicked to shine them in the wrong light.

The Recalibration of the Right

The Liberal Party will not win voters to its banner by opting for policy positions like, ‘We’ll reduce emissions by 55 per cent compared to Labor’s 70 per cent by 2050.’

Sorry Libs, that’s why you’re losing ground in the polls – and, crucially, losing young men as well as young women.

It won’t win voters either by offering them a measly ‘25 cents off a litre of petrol for 6 months’. That’s not even ‘Bread and Circuses’ (I wont even go into the last elections charisma bypass, policy desert, and marketing fails – there’s not the space nor the patience).

It will win votes though, through tapping into the following 30 concerns shared by the vast majority of the country, albeit often articulated in different ways:

1. Government over-reach into the individual’s life and the family home.
2. Not being able to find anything Made in Australia anymore.
3. The dire state of our military preparedness (and many more would be concerned if they all but knew the extent).
4. The far-left thinking masquerading as common decency, infiltrating schools and brainwashing teachers and children (and HR officers) alike.
5. The extremes of Wokery suggesting that schools and the state should be able to pick a child under 18’s gender, not their parents.
6. Being on over $100,000 a year and still not being able to afford a house: and as a result, either stay at home to past 30 years of age or rent out a shoebox, paying off somebody else’s mortgage, further limiting your capacity to enter the housing market.
7. The declining Australian birthrate now hitting 1.5 babies per couple. The worst result ever. The replacement rate is 2.2. The average age of marriage now hovering around 33 years of age largely due to economic factors.
8. The declining fertility rates across Australia – in men and women – and their obscure toxicological causes from what we ingest in our food to what we put on our bodies.
9. The corporate piss-taking in almost every industry and the tiny penalties for getting caught (the offshoring too). All the while if people play by the rules their whole life – work, pay your taxes, try and put some money away – they increasingly have nothing to show for it, forced to work well into their 70s before ill-health consumes their every waking hour.
10. The fake CPI and inflation figures making governments and departments look good, while the reality out on the ground feels like a 20 per cent increase every year. Minimum. Yet the ‘basket’ doesn’t reflect this.
11. The unconscionable advent of a state effectively ostracising anyone who throws caution at an almost-enforced experimental vaccine which didn’t even stop the spread of a respiratory virus.
12. The unconscionable practice of calling someone a Vaccine-Sceptic because they question the contents of certain vaccines and their knock-on effects and allude to outlier scientific studies. Why not debate the science openly?
13. The strain that mass immigration and a lack of targeted investment is having on hospitals – look at the ambulance ramping figures, the wait times for elective surgery – even the wait times for simple radiology. What about the dire state of the maintenance of the hospital systems across the states?
14. The religious-like obsession with lowering Australia’s carbon emissions at the detriment of our capacity to provide affordable electricity for industry to operate – while any of our reduction achievements are nullified globally by the developing world’s growing emissions. Where’s the common sense?
15. How anyone who’s against Net Zero is a ‘denier’ and how apparently you can’t care about the environment and be a conservative (you can and it’s in fact a very conservative idea at heart to nurture and protect the natural world).
16. The dire need for a renaissance of kids getting apprenticeships or a trade, rather than be conveyer-belted off to university to do a degree that’s in a white or pink collar occupation. We’re now saturated with human resource officers, lawyers, marketers, communications officers, business undergrads, accountants, and IT practitioners pitching you the latest software program to add to the 17 programs you’re already running.
17. The unchallenged assault upon public, and even private, Christianity: the moral, ethical force that provides the basis of fairness and decency in this country and around the world.
18. That business really is all about risk: it’s risky to start a business and you should be rewarded for taking that leap, not held back or penalised by banks or taxes.
19. The growing unfairness of our taxation system for individuals and corporates.
20. That the dole – or unemployment benefits – are largely a reserve for society’s down and outs, rather than working people, as should they ever lose their job they can barely access the measly $700 a fortnight (currently if you have savings or assets it’s easier to get a loan than a dole payment if you lose your job despite having paid taxes for decades – basically you can’t access what you’ve put into the system and you are effectively penalised for having savings).
21. That women are encouraged to spend more time at work away from their families and children only to pay for the childcare fees with half their wage and the government with the other. Shouldn’t we be championing and honouring motherhood to arrest the decline in birth rates?
22. That the banking industry needs a jolly good shakeup and that the very notion of debt needs a 21st Century quiz (alongside all our monetary policy – an area largely left to its own oft-nefarious devices due to perceived complexity).
23. That conservatives need to start investing in the Arts – the standard bearers of culture: turning it back to a beacon of truth and beauty, away from its current status as a citadel of the far-left which ostracises anyone with a remotely centrist/traditional worldview.
24. The relentless push to change Australia, ignore its virtues and rewrite its history.
25. That still, kids are being taught to be ashamed of their Settler heritage as they are never told any stories of all the good that happened alongside the cherry-picked examples of the bad instances (that every country has).
26. The fact we can’t build a submarine for 25 years or maintain a credible defence of our own island should a serious attack every occur.
27. That the one-sided, black armband view of history persists and retrospective Treaties.
28. The persistent denigration of the flag, the anthem, the monarchy, the day, the accent, the culture, the egalitarianism, rugged individualism, etc. The persistent downgrading of the successful mainstream culture. Was it once called Cultural Cringe? The false assertion that we’ve always been ‘multicultural’ and that apparently our ‘strength’ as a nation comes from this.
29. A perception that too many are coming here not to join us, but to change us. Should it not be them that change? What happened to ‘When in Rome’?
30. A perception that the cost of living, the cost of running a small or medium sized business etc is increasingly hampered by overcooked regulations and compliance culture, creating a paperwork economy where productivity is further stifled.

These are not the concerns of the ‘extreme’, ‘hard’ or ‘far’ right.  They are not ‘divisive’.

They’re concerns from ordinary people who don’t even mostly consider themselves on a political spectrum at all.

They’re just Australians.

They might have had grandfathers that fought in both world wars for Australia or Britain. Or they might be recent migrants whose conception of Australia differs from that of the Greens.

Indeed, there is still an Australian-ness that transcends artificial political divides. It’s a curious blend of egalitarianism – a sense of universal fairness – with that underlying spirit of self-sufficiency and self-determination. Of what’s right.

They love their country. They know how good we’ve got it, and they don’t want it to slip away further. They even love the environment and want to end needless pollution while protecting our natural world.

It’s not anti-business – but it’s not anti-worker either.

It wants strong national institutions and an empathetic heart for those who are doing it tough or maimed by illness or accident. Or else why have taxes?

It sees the family as the focal point of life and the foundation of a successful society – and it wants the state to keep out of it and devise policies that strengthen it.

It’s a society that secretly still believes in God while being outwardly sceptical of religion – it realises we’re all more than just mere economic entities. Yes, we have souls.

Indeed, Australians are increasingly a people that wholeheartedly agree that all people are created in the image of God – and deserve equal dignity and respect. But they don’t believe all cultures are created equal and that the two concepts are very different things.

And it’s leadership the Australian people want – not pink-collar managerialism, corporate cowardice or the ‘linkedinification’ of debate.

So let the Liberal party build a new consensus through open, robust debate. There’s no better time than in the early months of Opposition. Show the country it’s an ideas powerhouse where freedom reigns not just in its name, but in daily practice.

Outflank your opponents on their own turf. Put forward an alternative vision for the country that rewards aspiration, advanced national self-sufficiency and preserves a unique national identity – and regard for our family of nations beyond the seas.

Drop the big end of town if they want to continue to play in the creche of wokery – or persist in common greed. Re-adopt everyday working people and protect their rights.

Politics after all, is the daily practice of an effervescent gladiatorial contest of ideas. Pull the national conversation out of the creche and into the colosseum.

Then watch as all demographics flock back to a reinvigorated, exciting and proud movement. Watch as it strides back into relevance and, with growing confidence, back into government.