Bigger, better and more powerful than ever before! Now with added oomph! No, it’s not a new detergent or vacuum cleaner, although it performs a similarly wholesome and purifying task  –it’s Cpac Australia 2025, busily cleaning up our culture and hoovering up conservative hearts and minds. This magazine and its editor have been proudly involved with Cpac Australia since its inaugural conference in Sydney in August 2019. That, of course, was the event that Labor’s Senator Kristina Keneally attempted to derail but instead turned into a raging success, earning her the Craig Kelly Cpac Marketing Award. Nigel Farage and Donald Trump’s right-hand man at the time, Mark Meadows, were in attendance. Ms Keneally’s genius was to defame Mr Farage (likely to be Britain’s next prime minister) by accusing him of spreading ‘hate speech’ and trying to get him banned from coming into the country. As Matthew Kelly points out in this week’s magazine, ‘hate speech’ is the left’s favourite weapon with which to demonise and silence anyone who holds an opinion different to their own. ‘Hate speech’ is sadly back in the news again this week following the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, a man whose common sense and compassionate advocacy the left felt could only be silenced with a bullet. Mr Kelly also draws parallels with the Liberal party’s foolish silencing of Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price for simply raising a matter worthy of debate – that of mass immigration – a topic which will no doubt be discussed at length at this weekend’s Cpac in Brisbane.

One of the key messages at Cpac will be the need for more common-sense and concerned conservatives to actually get involved with political parties. Ultimately, our democratic system only works if there is a genuine choice for voters. Ours is an adversarial system of politics, which relies on a constant and all-encompassing battle of ideas. Once we begin to see large areas of consensus between the major parties, regardless of what those issues might be, our system of government starts to crumble. We saw this during Covid, with disastrous results for individuals, communities, businesses and society as a whole, and we are currently seeing it on the critical issue of ‘climate change’.

Despite what the Labor party, the Greens, the Teals and the bedwetters amongst the Coalition would have us believe, there is a vast constituency in this country – almost certainly a majority – who, if presented the arguments against emissions targets as efficiently and pragmatically as they were presented the arguments against the Voice would similarly say ‘No to Net Zero’. Other issues that demand conservative representation from the Coalition are the stifling of free speech with the imminent introduction of onerous internet verification laws, immigration, and the pandering to the indigenous activism industry.

This week the Labor government released a comical report about the imagined horrors that await this country if we do not adopt Chris Bowen’s ludicrous emissions reduction targets. Horror heatwaves! Rising sea levels sweeping away all our coastal cities and towns! Devastating droughts! Cataclysmic cyclones! All that was missing was Godzilla storming over the Melbourne skyline or King Kong atop the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The fact that the Coalition struggled to expose this nonsense for the doomsday-mongering it clearly is should be of grave concern to all conservative voters, and more importantly, to the farmers, families and small business people whose lives are being destroyed not by fanciful apocalyptic climate events but by the rapacious renewables industry and the lack of cheap and reliable energy. With much of the rest of the industrialised world either abandoning or questioning their emissions reduction targets, it is depressing and dangerous that in Australia voters are not being given a decent choice by the major parties.

As the amazing work and extraordinary outpouring of grief following the assassination of Charlie Kirk demonstrates, there is a hunger for conservative debate and political engagement that is going unfulfilled. It is up to the centre-right parties in Australia to encourage people to join their parties knowing that their voices will be heard and their concerns taken on board.

The era of the focus groups and lobby groups needs to come to an end. Real people, not PowerPoint presentations, are critical for the survival of a healthy Australian polity.

This year’s Cpac is the biggest and best yet. Australian conservatism is the only credible path this country has to a future of opportunity, prosperity and freedom. Let’s all put our shoulder to the wheel and fight to – what was that phrase again? oh, yes  – make Australia great again.