I was tempted this week to write about the incredible jobs numbers in the US.  The May jobs numbers there showed an increase of 265,000 jobs. And that includes the further loss of 2,600 federal bureaucracy jobs (from what the Trump administration had already achieved which was the smallest federal government workforce, in absolute numbers, since the days of John F. Kennedy). It’s an incredible achievement in terms of bolstering the private sector and upping productivity and makes one almost sick when comparing this to Australia where virtually all job increases are in the public sector or in the NDIS-type ‘paid for by taxpayers’ sector and which is a big cause of our woeful productivity numbers. And note, too, that in the US, Trump’s team is totally committed to removing illegal aliens, having already overseen the departure of nearing three million of them since his second term inauguration. This shows what crap the Keynesian economic orthodoxy is, what with a big decline in the public sector workforce and a bigger decline in the overall workforce (due to removing illegals) and yet huge job increases. This is a big reason why Trump is largely loved by the working class, this and his full-on fighting of the woke agenda and his ditching of Paris and net zero. Had a Democrat administration produced these job numbers the staggeringly biased legacy media would be crowing about it from dawn to dusk. Yet as it was done by Trump, well, they try not to mention it at all – which is a good opportunity to thank Elon Musk whose purchase of Twitter (now X) looks to me to be the single greatest act supporting free speech probably in world history. A ‘non-curated’ (aka uncensored or ‘not managed nor purified by the elites’) X makes hushing up good job numbers or suppressing brutal British police misconduct impossible.

That, as I said, was the topic that tempted me for this week’s column. But I have heroically managed to resist that temptation.  Instead, I want to travel back in time almost exactly ten years to that year’s 2nd of July Australian general election. Remember it?  A year or so earlier in 2015 Malcolm Turnbull had defenestrated Tony Abbott with the help of George Brandis, James McGrath, Christopher Pyne, Scott Morrison and all the other Labor-lite, self-styled moderates (or, as with ScoMo, pure opportunists) who were clearly a majority in the partyroom. And as readers will know Giant Ego Man Malcolm nearly threw away the massive Abbott majority. Malcolm barely squeaked over the 2016 line, doing so poorly in his double dissolution called election that a joint sitting was off the table.

Now as a few readers will recall, back at the time I called for all right-of-centre types to preference Labor over the Coalition in order to punish the moderates and Turnbull who had knifed Abbott. I argued that in the long-term this would produce better consequences than holding one’s nose and voting for Turnbull. Remember? (Yes, we do – ed.) Indeed, in that 2016 election I did preference Labor putting them third last, the Libs second last, and of course the Greens at the bottom.

And so ten years on what do readers think? We all know that not enough regular Liberal voters were prepared to preference Labor to deliver Mr. Shorten a win. With our woeful preferential voting system that is the only way ‘to not vote Liberal’. If you put the Libs fifth and Labor sixth, that means you voted for the Libs. And the moderate cuckoos who had taken over the partyroom knew that. You had to bite the bullet and put the other side higher up.

In reality, though, we got a limp, left-leaning, renewables and climate doomsterist obsessed Turnbull government. It was so unpopular that Malcolm got rolled. Then the opportunist Morrison took over and looked promising for a bit. Well, before without notice he signed us up to net zero and then opted to ape the Chinese Communist Politburo and facilitate the worst inroads on our civil liberties in centuries. Then ScoMo got smoked by Albo. Peter Dutton looked promising in opposition until he decided to genuflect to the advisor caste and take a Seinfeld approach to the election – namely, leading a party about nothing that believed in nothing.  Then it was the woke, lefty numerologist until, finally, Angus Taylor got the hospital pass. And all this while membership numbers in the Liberal party tanked. While many former party stalwarts were driven away by the thuggish lockdowns the Libs condoned.  The embrace of net zero and Paris infuriated the rank and file. You all know the downward spiral leading to today.

But just for a second go back and imagine that enough of us had voted for Shorten over Turnbull and that the Coalition had lost in 2016. The ramifications would have been immediate, especially for the moderate turn-bull-coat MPs who had voted to knife Abbott. Yes, we’d have had a Labor PM in Shorten. But does anyone honestly believe Shorten would have been worse than Albo and Chalmers? Let’s assume Shorten squeaks back in three years later, in 2019.  So now we have Labor running the pandemic response. I honestly do not believe they could have screwed it up worse than ScoMo and Frydenberg et al, not least because there’d have been a sane right-of-centre opposition with (I presume) some commitment to freedom, small business and the like. The Coalition would have romped home in 2022. It would win big time again in 2025.

In this counter-factual universe would the national debt be lower than it is today?  Would the economy be better? Would the Libs and National have been able to contain the surge of the One Nation? Would the immigration intake be hugely lower – in raw numbers per year as we sit here now as well as cumulatively since 2016? Would we be out of Paris right now as well as having jettisoned net zero?  It’s pretty likely the answers would be yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Giving Turnbull his ever-so-narrow win a decade ago was a disaster for the country. It has not only led to dire consequences for the country, it has put the Liberal party (and its National party cousins) in such a dire situation that continued major party status and relevance is in now in big time doubt.

I know that this amounts to marking my own homework, but I think the last decade has proven my argument back then to have been right. Sometimes in politics you get better long-term consequences when you shun the short-term and vote for your side to lose an election if it’s really screwed up. There was never a situation when this was more likely than after Turnbull knifed Abbott and set in motion the disastrous trajectory we – and the Liberal party – are on.

So go and buy any Turnbull ‘moderate’ voters you know a nice ten-year anniversary present. I think it’s supposed to be tin, so something for their ears. And then tell them you wish Malcolm had lost in 2016 rather than squeaking over the line.