There seems to be an almost obtuse wilful blindness amongst the preponderance of those in our traditional, established political parties and their confrères (‘collaborators’ seems too harsh, just) in the legacy media. ‘Why, oh why, are the Trumps, Farages, Hansons, and a host of insurgent parties and politicians in Europe doing so well right now?’ That’s what they keep asking and generally whatever answers they offer involve a heaping helping of Hillary Clintonesque condescension in the form of suggesting that these deplorable voters simply don’t know what’s good for themselves. Not like the long-standing opinion writers in the legacy media think they know what’s good for them. Not like the upper echelons of the legacy political parties think they do too.

Well, let me make it simple for these people. In the last decade or two there have been three massive issues that have mattered. In no particular order these were 1) the Covid tyranny; 2) the net zero climate doomsterism; and 3) extreme mass immigration, illegal and legal. Notice that on all three of those issues Donald Trump scores vastly better than any British Tory or Labour politician. And that he scores vastly better than any Canadian politician. And that he scores vastly better than any Australian Coalition or Labor politician. In fact, they’re not even in the same solar system, maybe galaxy. Trump made stopping mass immigration his key pledge and boy has he delivered, also completely shutting the border. He’s also been outspoken about the stupidities of the net zero pseudo-religion since day one and so pulled out of Paris and ‘drilled baby drilled’. And as for the thuggish, illiberal, heavy-handed lockdown lunacies, Trump did fall down compared to Sweden and to Ron DeSantis in Florida. But at the same time Trump looked like a paragon of sanity and freedom-loving good sense compared to Boris, or anyone at all in UK’s Labour or Australia’s Labor parties, and galaxies better than ScoMo or any of the pusillanimous members of his Coalition cabinet, not a one of whom resigned on principle. (And, boy, oh boy, if you didn’t consider the biggest inroads against all of our civil liberties in the last three hundred years something worth resigning over, whatever the short-term personal political costs, then let’s be honest you will never resign over anything.)

In the light of Trump’s being far more right on those than any Democrat politician and any other supposed mainstream conservative politician in the Anglosphere, I and millions of other voters don’t care that at times the man can be egotistical, boorish and mean. Plus, on top of all that, Trump has actually set out to do what he promised before the election regardless of later media hysteria or progressives in his own party.  This is basically unique amongst established conservative parties in the rest of the Anglosphere. Any claimed other sins are just so comparatively trifling if you got immigration, net zero and Covid lockdowns right.

Now if you didn’t get those right you have to point elsewhere. Britain’s Tories got all three catastrophically wrong. Boris oversaw steroidal immigration. He bought in to the net zero religion with all the zeal of a new convert. And though he was far better than any Australian Lib on Covid, and knew what he was doing was a mistake, Boris was a coward on that front. As for here in Australia, Morrison promised one thing on net zero and then post-election did another. His and the Coalition’s record on lockdowns is a disgrace and worse than Boris’s. And on immigration the Coalition has been better than the UK Tories but still bad.

So as I said they need to point elsewhere.  And that means pointing to how they’ll be better on the economy. Better financial managers. More grown-up than the populists. You know the sales pitch. Alas, during Covid these same supposed conservatives spent like drunken sailors, the only difference being the sailors were spending their own money. And when they talk about adult, fully costed plans it’s hard not to laugh and point to Turnbull’s Snowy Hydro fiasco, now so far over budget it makes one lie back and think of Dan Andrew’s Victoria. Or how they never repealed the NBN or the NDIS, just said they’d manage them better. (Does anyone believe those sort of claims ever?)

Go back to Trump. All sorts of elite, established economists have consistently warned his policies will drive the US economy into the ground. And they’ve been consistently wrong. Trump since 2024 has added over one million private sector jobs while axing some 325,000 public sector jobs and all while pushing about three million illegals out. You do the math on how great that will be. Last month, for August, the US gained 162,000 new jobs (no net public service ones) while Canada lost 41,700 jobs (somewhat masked by public sector hiring). From 2014 to 2024, so before Trump 2.0, Canada’s GDP per person went from 83 per cent of the US’s down to 71.5 per cent.  That’s a catastrophic decline and in a big part due to Canada’s net zero full embrace, lockdown thuggery and wide-open doors to big scale immigration. Australia is nearly as bad as Canada over that same period on all three, with similar bad results. (We here must remember always to raise a glass daily to my native Canada because without them we would be down at the bottom of recent performances.)

Or, if you prefer, you can see it through this related lens. Both the main, established political parties in Canada, Britain and Australia, as well as the Democrats in the US, seem to have sold out the white working class. According to CNN, the white working-class favourability of the Democrat party in the US was net negative two points in 2012 and today, only fourteen years later, it is net negative 36 points. They vote for Trump. And they are in bigger and bigger batches voting for Reform in Britain and for One Nation here in Australia.

Look at those three key issues again and realise that Hanson and One Nation were the most sceptical of lockdowns. They were always against net zero. And they have been the biggest opponents of large-scale mass immigration.

For all the opinionistas in the Fairfax press, at the Australian and on the ABC, that is why they now seem to have a solid, unshakeable share of the first-preference vote – a share that rivals or surpasses Labor’s. Albo says one thing before elections and another after. Albo is presiding over the worst per capita GDP recession or depression maybe since the war. Yes, he has the ABC and the other lefty legacy media running protection for him. Yes, he throws around the labels ‘populists’ and ‘far right’ with unrestrained abandon. But he and Labor are in big trouble and they know it.

It would help if Taylor made a sincere apology for getting immigration, net zero and lockdowns badly wrong. And then gave us specific – very specific – policy pledges that he will never abandon. Because that’s what you have to do to have any hope of winning back the trust of those who for good reason have weighed you in the balances and rightly found you wanting.