Much will be written on this topic in the coming days, and behind the scenes the Liberal Party will be tearing itself apart trying to figure out what went wrong.
The rift will be between those who think the party needs to move to the left, and those who think it needs to become more right-wing, and the former will win out because cuckservatives are cowards and spiritual weaklings – they’d rather be noble losers than win – and they will fade further into electoral irrelevance.
But the Liberals didn’t lose because they weren’t Labor enough, they lost because they rigged the demographics against themselves, failed to inspire, were guided by wrong-headed Australian political cliches, and selected one of the ugliest men in the world as their figurehead.
Immigration
It wasn’t the 1.5 million immigrants Anthony Albanese brought in during the past three years who voted against the Liberals, it was the millions of immigrants they brought in themselves while they were in power.
We don’t have detailed breakdowns yet, but there were large swings to Labor in migrant-dominated suburbs. The Liberals failed to win back the Chinese vote, the Indians voted Labor as they always do and always will, and even the Muslims did the same despite efforts within their community to get voters to punish the PM for not being pro-Palestine enough. Probably because the Liberals spent way too much time talking about 0.4% of the population.
More on this later, but compulsory voting means that most of your ballots are going to come from low IQ, midwit and/or low-information voters. To these people, Labor (red team) = left = pro-migrant, and Liberal (blue team) = right = racist.
No amount of Chinese restaurant and Hindu temple visits are going to change this.
The Liberals have been indulging in wishful thinking and trying to win over immigrant voters while bringing in more immigrants, but the reality is they are stacking the deck against themselves, and alienating White Australians in the process.
The best time to stop mass immigration was 30 years ago. The second best time is now.
Fighting for the centre
Australian elections are won in the centre, according to accepted political wisdom. But the wise men who believe this also believe it in Britain, where the conservatives are getting wiped out by Reform.
This is a debilitating and self-fulfilling political cliché with many flaws, the most glaring and fatal of which no one in the Liberal Party seems able to grasp – the centre is not fixed. You don’t have to move to the centre, you can move the centre towards you.
The left understand this, and have been doing it for decades, but rather than try to move the centre to the right, the Liberals insist of moving the party to the centre.
This strategy is doomed to fail, partly because in doing so you’re handing over your left flank to the enemy, but mainly because you betray your own voter base and no one likes to be betrayed. It’s a capitulation that makes you look weak and prevents you from activating your supporters.
This is also the reason for our current small target politics, where both uniparty leaders try to be as inoffensive and indistinguishable from one another as possible in order not to lose votes from an imaginary centre mass.
That’s why we got an unpopular nuclear energy policy along with weak opposition to Labor’s extremist renewables agenda from the Liberals instead of a robust alternative to blackout madness.
The whole country of Spain lost power for days because of “net zero” climate cultism at the perfect time, but Peter Dutton refused to campaign on it because he was afraid Labor voters wouldn’t vote for him. Madness.
Weakness
People want to be led, and they respect power. They don’t respect backflips, backdowns, flip-flopping and weakness.
Yet the latter was a feature of Dutton’s campaign – there was almost nothing he wasn’t prepared to backflip on, from work from home bans to welcome to countries, an instructive example.
First he condemned people booing them, even though his own voters overwhelming hate the ceremonies, then he waffled, and then finally he came out and said he was against them at Anzac day ceremonies after it was clear most Australians want them gone for good.
But the average person isn’t plugged into the news cycle, they don’t follow every story to its conclusion. Many of the people he lost would not be aware of the backflip, and those who were would have lost respect for him.
What he needed to do, long before Anzac Day, was take a clear position on the issue so when the boos erupted and public opinion polarised along pro- and anti-welcome to country lines the average Australian already knew where he stood.
Then he could have used the incident to his advantage.
But instead fewer than half of the 68% of people who want to get rid of welcome to countries voted for him, and Anthony Albanese was able to come out and do a land acknowledgment in his victory speech, claiming that Labor’s win was an endorsement of anti-Australian aboriginal separatism.
The Liberals tried to be “anti-woke” because they saw it work for Trump, but they did it so poorly that left-wing commentators can now argue that Australians are not against wokeness at all, when polls show the opposite.
Lack of inspiration
This stems from the insidious “elections are won in the centre” idea, and polls showed that the vast majority of Australians found the election campaign uninspiring and are pessimistic about the future.
Seven million early voters is also telling – most people just wanted to get voting over with, they cared more about skipping the polling day queue than following the campaigns until election day.
If the Liberals ever want to win again they need to throw out accepted wisdom about fighting for the centre and energise voters.
The aforementioned low IQ, midwit and/or low-information masses cannot be convinced to vote for you with facts and logic, they can only be inspired to follow you into battle.
Ugliness
Humans are simple creatures. We want powerful God-like leaders.
In our evolutionary past our tribal leaders rose to the top by force of will, force of arms, and force of personality, and the desire for a strong leader is imprinted deep within our psyches.
Health and beauty are correlated, which is why beautiful people tend to be happier, richer and more successful. You may not like it, but that’s the way of the world.
And Peter Dutton was too ugly, too bald, too weak and too uninspiring to lead a country.
His opponent was not much better, so if the Liberals want to win next time they can go a long way be choosing someone handsome and healthy who is shining with strength and vitality.
Propaganda
It’s not worth wasting too many words on this, but you can’t win an election campaign with muppet memes.
Where were the attack ads?
Where were the powerful graphics and funny videos?
In an age where we’ve seen outsiders succeed across the world with cheap and effective social media campaigns, where were the TikToks?
Where to next?
Most likely the Liberal Party is going to slowly commit suicide over the next couple of election cycles, so this is probably a futile exercise, but this is what the Liberals need to do to get back on track:
- End mass immigration. Yes, you will get called racist, but they will call you racist anyway. Yes, you will lose the X ethnic vote, but they aren’t voting for you anyway. And if you don’t Labor will only increase their share of the electorate.
- Move the centre to the right by taking more right-wing positions on social issues, stop cancelling your own side, and stop trying to appease the enemy
- Don’t show weakness. No backflipping. No disavowing. No cancelling. No backing down. And if you are strong you’ll even win some of those immigrant votes.
- Inspire. Come up with a positive vision for Australia that is powerful enough to energise the masses. You have the money, you have the tools, you have the machine, you have the media, you just have to do it.
- Choose a strong and handsome leader. No ugly nerds. They can be ministers, or wield power behind the scenes, but the leader needs to be a level above.
- Fire the consultants and marketing firms involved in this year’s campaign and hire a bunch of video editors to make TikToks and other viral content
