Firstly, let me remind readers we have some big elections looming in the Anglosphere. Everyone will know about the US midterm elections at the start of November. But before that is the 19 October ‘do you want there to be a binding referendum to leave Canada’ referendum in the province of Alberta. It’s a half-arsed, compromise sort of question to the province’s voters asking if they want the Premier to hold a real, actual and binding referendum to leave and separate from Canada – Alberta being a province, by the way, that by itself has the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves. It’s also the province in which almost every single constituency votes Conservative every election while being outvoted by Ontario and Quebec. That includes the last four Canadian elections, the lefty wins by Trudeau Jr in 2015, 2019 and 2021 plus Mark Carney’s win in 2025. Alberta (and its neighbour Saskatchewan, also very conservative) have basically zero say on the country’s direction.  I don’t think this referendum-to-hold-a-referendum will pass, but I think it could hit the high 30s or low 40s, better than most all of the Toronto-based pundits are predicting.

Then there is the upcoming early-November general election in New Zealand. I have disliked their copied-from-Germany, highly proportional MMP voting system since moving to New Zealand for a decade back in 1993. It makes all the key bargaining and big-tent building happen not before, but after the election and so away from any voter input. And it makes small parties the king-makers. Add to that the fact that the established right-of-centre party over there is Turnbullesque (yep, that’s meant to be a biting criticism), with the same sort of noblesse oblige leader, and also throw in the possibility of the left’s gaming the MMP ‘overhang’ rule (look it up) and you have a toss-up election. Yes, it should be a romp in the park for the right side of politics after the horrors of NZ Labour’s Covid and DEI-infused decision-making. But it’s not.

And returning to home here in Australia there’s the final big vote, the one in Victoria in late November. It truly beggars belief that the party of Dan Andrews and Jacinta Allan could even have an outside chance of winning, such has been the destruction Victoria Labor has wrought on that state. I’m going to be blunt here. I do not want an outright Coalition majority win. I would much prefer Jess Wilson and her Liberal team to depend upon One Nation to govern. Why? To keep them honest. I just don’t remotely trust Wilson’s instincts. She came out for the Voice. And then later – we can only speculate why – she recanted. She began her parliamentary career extolling the climate doomsterism follies. And then she later half-recanted – we can only speculate why. But when one’s first instincts consistently line up with the woke, progressive-left worldview we damn well do want some sort of check on those first instincts. So let’s hope One Nation in Victoria holds the balance of power, post-election. (And readers will realise for themselves that Victoria is pretty clearly the state least sympathetic to ON. So if it does pretty well there then odds are good it will do better elsewhere in the country.)

But speaking of all things woke and politically correct, I think reports of their looming death have been greatly exaggerated. In part this is because of such realities as that here in Australia the government gives billions of dollars to lobby groups whose sole purpose is to advocate for changes to policy and law. And every single one of those groups and NGOs pushes a left-leaning agenda and progressive left-leaning changes. Or so says the wonderful Institute of Public Affairs in a recent report titled Stacking the Deck which examined 100 NGOs across five policy areas from 2021 to 2025. Combined taxpayer funding of these? Over $2.2 billion. This isn’t putting an Albo thumb on the scales. It’s more like putting a few truckloads of Albo melons on the scales. When Trump was re-elected in 2024 he learnt from his first term and brought in the Doge people to see where the money was going. That led to the defunding, for instance, of USAid – all of whose monies seemed to be going to progressive left causes. Will a future Coalition or One Nation government have the cojones to end these billions going to lefty lobby groups? Because let me say it again, no funding (not a penny of taxpayers’ monies) goes to groups on the right, those who opposed the Voice or backed immigration enforcement and reductions or defended sane biological views of sex and what is a woman, etc. Not a penny.

So that sort of helps the world of woke and political correctness keep going, no?

Then there’s our legacy media, the ones who brought you the fear-mongering thuggery of the lockdown years and saw their already-much-diminished public trust simply crater. Well, recent studies show the legacy media uses the label ‘far right’ up to 14 times more often than the term ‘far left’. (Any readers able to remember ever hearing ‘far left’ thrown around on the ABC or in the Fairfax Press? Anyone?) And when you drill down to see what garners a political party this ‘far right’ characterisation from our legacy media, almost always it involves its being opposed to mass immigration. And its being patriotic and proud about western civilisation. Of course these two views are precisely what is winning these parties huge new-found voter support. So they’re winning votes and elections, otherwise known as succeeding at democracy, while being called fascists and far right by the media and the established parties. But the established parties (mostly, but not exclusively, of the left, with some occasional support from the mainstream, established right parties) are the ones censoring, banning and trying to prosecute their opponents. That, by the way, is exactly how I would characterise Labor’s proposed Digital Duty of Care Bill. It’s a huge inroad on free speech and especially is a directed attack against the most free speech-enhancing vehicle that exists today, namely Elon Musk’s X. Thankfully we have seen the Coalition and Angus Taylor come out hard against this monstrosity of a bill. Good for them. I would like to see, in addition, a pledge to repeal it should it get up and indeed to go to a double dissolution to do so if necessary.  And I mean a rock-solid promise – the sort of thing that escapes the understanding of ‘we’ve changed our position after 51 explicit promises, but so what?’ Mr Albanese.