Okay, who hasn’t been a bit surprised by the extent of One Nation’s rise in the polls… Various polls now have One Nation leading on first preferences in both New South Wales and Victoria. Yes, even in the home of the Labor thugs who imposed – with not a single word of criticism from then Prime Minister Scott Morrison – the world’s most thuggish, illiberal, and economy-destroying Covid lockdowns. And after doing all that the voters in Victoria nevertheless opted to reward them with another post-lockdown term. Well, that was largely because the Victorian Libs were completely anodyne, devoid of principles and wholly useless. They offered no competing visions; they opposed nothing in the way that Tony Abbott had back in 2010 and 2013.

But now, today, we see One Nation breaking with the Labor-Liberal consensus. This insurgent party is against big immigration and it is totally believable when it stakes out that position. This party wants to fight the culture wars. Again, voters believe them. And One Nation has no time at all for the entire renewables-subsidies-fuelled climate alarmism. None of the hesitation and hedging we see from the Libs. One Nation will take us out of Paris and blow up all traces of the Net Zero impoverishing edifice.

So why this short article? Because I think these polls showing One Nation’s spectacular rise make plain that all of us who advised Peter Dutton before last year’s election to go hard on immigration and cheap power were right. Had Dutton rejected the pusillanimous advice of his inner-city advisers and decided to be brave, rather than follow the insipid nothings of the latest focus group outcomes, he would have won. The public was waiting to be convinced that big immigration was changing the character of this country. That it was the main cause of high rents and woeful GDP per capita results – and never, ever let the Keynesians use GDP alone as any sort of a useful measure. GDP counts government spending as a supposed driver of a better economy. That’s why 83 per cent of recent jobs are paid for by the taxpayer, to boost this useless measure (while productivity tanks and living standards fall). And GDP alone, virtually by definition, goes up if you let in myriad people. But all the while how each of us is doing individually is going down or barely moving. In fact, Australia has suffered declining GDP per capita declines in what, eight of the last twelve quarters? If Dutton had apologised for past Coalition government’s errors and said he was coming out hard against big immigration and Australia’s world’s highest per capita immigration the polling today shows there was fertile soil to win the last election. Albanese would have hated fighting an election on the issue of immigration.

Then add in Net Zero. How must Dutton have felt after chickening out on that issue only to see, post his election loss, that his party announced (even under Sussan Ley for heaven’s sake) that it was abandoning this folly? It was all there for you Peter. It only required bravery and a willingness to lead the public based on your own values and principles. Of course, that requires a) bravery and b) the sort of values and principles that in fact believed that our country’s commitment to Net Zero was stupid. And a willingness to blast Scott Morrison for signing us up to up the Paris Accord idiocy despite promising not to do so. Heck, Peter Dutton could have hit the trifecta by adding a third pledge, namely, to fight the culture wars. That’s something else that One Nation is promising at the moment – that it will fight the culture wars and get rid of all the DEI insanity and anti-merit wokery that infests our schools and universities.

Those were the three issues many of us advised the Libs to make central before the last election. I believed and wrote back then, before the last election, that Dutton had only to run on just these three issues. Heck, just electricity prices and immigration alone would have won him the prize. But he was a coward. Too afraid of his ‘moderate’, lefty-Labor-lite colleagues. And too afraid of his inner-city advisors. So, he ran on nothing at all. It was a Seinfeld affair, a campaign about nothing.

And today we see in the polls what making these issues central can do. Meantime the State Liberals have gone for the lefty, moderate, inner-city female leaders who convince no one they stand for anything remotely conservative. Decimation awaits in South Australia, mimicking Western Australia. And the Libs are in third place in the NSW and Victoria polls. Once you abandon your principles, it becomes exceptionally hard to convince voters you’ve got them back.

All in all a nicer person than I would almost feel sorry for Peter Dutton. But he got just what Shakespeare predicted in one of my favourite plays, Julius Caesar.

‘There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.’