Okay readers, give me two generalisations about the democratic world over the last fifty years. Well, first off, we can sum up the constitutional law trends in five words: the triumph of American constitutionalism. Bring in a list of moral entitlements in the language of rights. Call it a bill of rights. Realise these things in no way interpret themselves. Hence, hand over huge dollops of social policy-making power to the unelected top judges as they draw highly debatable and contested social policy lines that otherwise would be drawn by the elected legislatures. And we can all see this trend over the last few decades of the biggest-ever increase in judicial power as the judges ever more greatly gainsay the elected branches and usurp democratic power. Of course there’s a gloss on this. Sure, near-on every democratic country has moved at least a bit down this road. (Australia is a partial recalcitrant with no national bill of rights.  Good for us! That said, our top judges have responded by simply making up an enervated, laughably named ‘implied’ version out of thin air and the shattered judicial desires for one of their own.) But what no other country has is American judges and their particularly eighteenth-century version of a bill of rights. That means no ‘originalist’ interpretation that looks for what those with the legitimate lawmaking power (namely, the legislators and constitution-makers) intended these instruments to mean. The US Supreme Court has a majority, sort of, of originalists on it. An originalist interpretive approach limits judicial power. Around the rest of the bill of rights world the courts, ours included, adopt to some extent a ‘living constitution’ approach. That’s a euphemism for the top judges announcing (however laughably and implausibly) that they have their judicial fingers on the pulse of changing social values (almost always left-leaning, progressive ones in their view) and so updating the Constitution in their own image. This simply increases judicial power. I love a lot of what One Nation is doing and how they’re driving the agenda. But if One Nation’s bigwigs think any sort of bill of rights is a good idea they’re just bonkers. It won’t be Clarence Thomas and Alito interpreting it. Nope, it will be the Aussie top judges who’ll be interpreting it – the ones who went wholly off the rails and decided the Love case (making up bizarre special rights for non-citizen Aborigines re deportation) and who over-ruled Al-Kateb (making deterring illegals far more difficult). Both were terrible calls in my view and wrong on any constrained view of our Constitution which has sprinkled throughout it the phrase ‘until Parliament otherwise provides’ as our drafters were strong democrats. Worse, all the empirical evidence is that today’s lawyerly caste leans leftwards of the median voter at least a standard deviation, probably two. Think back to how almost the entire lawyerly caste who spoke publicly came out in favour of the Voice. And with today’s law schools training tomorrow’s judges I can assure you, as someone who sees it daily, that it’s gonna get even worse. Don’t do this, Pauline. Instead, fight judicial activism!

The second big trend we can generalise about is the transmogrification of virtually all the developed world’s left-of-centre political parties. Out has gone the sort of Dennis Healey redistribution of wealth concerns and in has come a sort of human rights barrister-type focus. Today’s left-leaning political parties are virtually terminally woke and progressive. They’ve become the parties of a) the welfare benefits caste; b) the Islamists; and c) the chardonnay-sipping, inner-city types who work for the public sector and the universities and the NGOs, with a topping of the exceedingly rich. This describes Australia’s Labor party, the Democrats in the US, Mark Carney, Andy Burnham’s UK Labour.  Worse, it describes many of the MPs of the long-time, established, right-leaning parties – in Oz, in Canada, in Britain, the Rinos in the US.

This means the outer-suburbs working-class people and small business types no longer have a home. Sure, left-leaning parties (and those on the right, too) use nostalgia to try to keep these votes. But the evidence of the effects of net zero lunacies, mass immigration’s horrible social and economic effects and the abandonment of any strong belief in free speech is clear to all. And so we have the rise of parties who represent these voters. The elites are baffled and bewildered about what to do and so resort to ludicrous name-calling – ‘populists’, they shout. And then ‘far right’. Well, other than being popular the label ‘populists’ just amounts to a claim that these parties are representing abandoned voters with positions the established parties refuse to adopt. And the ‘far right’ claim is downright laughable. These populist parties are without exception the ones most committed to free speech and against inroads into what citizens can say.  (Compare all parties’ lockdown positions.) That’s not true of the progressive left nor, to a lesser extent, of the mainstream right parties. And these insurgent parties also want much lower immigration – of the sort that, for instance, dominated US policy settings for well over half a century from the Depression onwards. When giving talks I often point out that I’ve been called ‘far right’ and yet you cannot slide a piece of paper between John F Kennedy’s views (low tax, strong defence, huge free speech scope, and big limits on immigration) and mine. Seriously. Well, he’d allow more hookers into the White House than I would. But if I and Farage and Hanson are far right, then so was JFK.

And now you can see how these two trends of the last half-century are intertwined and feed off each other. You get lawfare as seen in the US (the use of the courts against Mr Trump is massive and unprecedented) and Britain. (The two UK Supreme Court Brexit cases involved all Remainer top judges overturning centuries of understanding as regards the prerogative power and proroguing parliament to make Brexit as hard as possible for the Brexiteers). You get the explosion of DEI attacks on the merit principle. You get the woke mind-virus infecting people and institutions that should know better but instead can’t say what a woman is. Or consider this. It was pointed out to me by a good buddy, Ramesh Thakur. If you navigate your way around the website of the Australian you’ll find a blanket sort of written ‘acknowledgement of country’ covering ‘all the states and territories on which we work and report’.  Does News Corp know its core audience?  Has some thirty-year-old HR woman with her first-class sociology degree inserted this patronising and condescending genuflection to current woke orthodoxies without, you know, reading over half her paper’s own columnists?

These are mysteries that surpass all human understanding. Well, not really. John O’Sullivan’s law gives the game away: ‘All organisations that are not actually and openly right-wing will over time become left-wing.’ The judges. The mainstream right parties. The vast preponderance of the press itself. And so the voters respond in the way democracy allows. Maybe we’re witnessing of late the beginning phases of the third trend.